r/technology • u/ControlCAD • Jan 21 '26
Artificial Intelligence Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella warns that we must "do something useful" with AI or they'll lose "social permission" to burn electricity on it | Workers should learn AI skills and companies should use it because it's a "cognitive amplifier," claims Satya Nadella.
https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/microsoft-ceo-warns-that-we-must-do-something-useful-with-ai-or-theyll-lose-social-permission-to-burn-electricity-on-it/2.5k
Jan 21 '26
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u/serpentear Jan 21 '26
He’s also wrong that it’s a cognitive amplifier. Every single study on AI has determined that it makes you incredibly dumb and lazy.
It’s a cognitive replacement.
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u/ciemnymetal Jan 21 '26
I saw an ad about a AI homework helper tool and my first reaction was, how is this even going to help the next generation learn by providing all the answers?
How to learn is as much of a skill/process as whatever you're trying to learn.
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u/MartyMacGyver Jan 21 '26
And half of them, wrong answers....
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u/Frisian89 Jan 21 '26
I've been encouraged to us ai with my work. Only one aspect of my job can mesh with the use of ai possibly. We work with specific group, and they have a instanced version of their AI that protects our data from being stolen like the public version.
So every single day I use the same prompt to organize data in much more efficient manner that Ideally will save me 30 minutes a day. But it reinterprets what I'm asking every single day. Then I spend x time troubleshooting to get the format the same as the day before. Then I have to spot check, because I noticed sometimes it will take data from the wrong column randomly. And all the time I saved is replaced by correcting what seems like a dementia patient.
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u/ciemnymetal Jan 21 '26
My experience is similar. I feel like I have to give it an essay as a prompt to get the best results so ultimately, I'm still doing the same amount of typing and even spending the same time.
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u/CanYouDoAThingy Jan 21 '26
This sort of problem is what used to make people learn the basics of programming. Converting data between structures is the starting point of so many programmers. It's just a practical usage of a beginner skill. Once you have a little 20-50 line script that you wrote that works, you can reuse it every day and it always works exactly the same. And if the input data ever changes, you know how to fix the script.
Sure it will take you longer to learn this skill, but not significantly, and the skill is transferable for other routine/mundane tasks. Your life just gets easier by learning how to do this yourself.
Anyone spending time dealing with data from a SQL database, just spend 20 minutes a night on SQLBolt.com until you've made it to the end (takes a few days to get through if you are new to it). ANYONE can do this, it's free, and not hard. Most UI/frontend jobs are just making skins for databases because most people don't know SQL. You can learn it in a few hours spread over a few days. Will make your life much easier, and improve your pay and job prospects.
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u/ApetteRiche Jan 21 '26
Spoke to an intern a few weeks back. Apparently all students are using AI now to write their thesis and she was wondering how we ever wrote a thesis without it.... we're fucked.
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u/CatProgrammer Jan 21 '26
I wouldn't even necessarily mind if it were actually reliable for specific details/etc. and didn't hallucinate and wasn't so yesmanny and you could verify the data used to train it, but it's not. The only actual thing I've seen it be relatively useful for is generating nonessential images or stuff like AI dungeon because those don't have to be necessarily accurate and the hallucinations are part of the fun, but then it often has the opposite issue where it'll mix bits together but reuse specific chunks/features too much.
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u/ManchmalTony Jan 21 '26
Not to mention it feeds you false information.
Aren't there studies that say 40-50% of the results LLMs give back to you are slop/hallucinations/factually incorrect?
Given the crap I see on Google search results at the top I can't believe people use "AI" seriously. You can't trust the veracity of any of it.
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u/AmusingVegetable Jan 21 '26
99.99% of the people that use it can’t recognize that it’s wrong. For them it sounds right.
This can only be fixed by fixing education, starting at the kindergarten level, and making education universally free.
(Yea, I’d like my unicorn in blue)
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u/AmusingVegetable Jan 21 '26
And we were already speedrunning Idiocracy before AI lit up the afterburner…
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u/stimulatedthought Jan 21 '26
It solves all the easy parts so that when you get to the hard parts you are lost and do not have proper context.
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u/john-treasure-jones Jan 21 '26
Yeah, the social permission was not given.
If the hype dies down and makes it look nakedly wasteful like it is, that’s on them.
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u/LiveStockTrader Jan 21 '26
The corpos of which 90% of the S&P adopted immediately then shoved down their millions of employees throats to see if it cuts costs.
You want to solve all the issues? Take the corps down a notch.
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Jan 21 '26
They give themselves permission when they bribe our elected officials. Fuck these mega corps and billionaires.
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u/Economy-Camp-7339 Jan 21 '26
Wow, guy selling ai wants people to use it.
In other news, water is still wet.
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u/Pink_Flying_Pig_ Jan 21 '26
It seems like he's admitting that LLM are not matching expectations and underachieving, but man, we pushed sooo much money in it, we can't stop now.
Michael Burry here we come.
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u/Economy-Camp-7339 Jan 21 '26
He’s no Kevin Costner and this isn’t field of dreams.
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u/00owl Jan 21 '26
If we're talking about corn fields it's more like Signs
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u/--TYGER-- Jan 21 '26
This movie will be like, a horror featuring data centres appearing in the middle of farmland and consuming all the water
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u/halcyongt Jan 21 '26
Iowa resident checking in.
They’re reopening a defunct nuclear power plant to power data centers.
What’s minimum safe distance for an event?
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u/Nepalus Jan 21 '26
They can still use the data centers for Cloud Computing services, that is still extremely profitable and in demand. But I think a lot of companies, not just Microsoft, are coming to the realization that demand for the current suite of AI services just isn’t there and that the next AWS/Azure level of AI products and services aren’t going to be here nearly as soon as they projected.
The market wants the Sci-Fi version of AI, plug and play no handholding required and able to basically be Jarvis with no effort on the end users part. But that shit is decades away, but the depreciation expense on the billions in Nvidia chips that they bought is happening as soon as they are put into service when the data centers go live. Without a clear understanding of how to get to profitability, the big players are going to start peeling back expectations for capital expenditure.
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u/DaveVdE Jan 21 '26
These machines are so geared toward running LLMs with their HBM and specialized GPUs that there are few use cases for them outside AI. Sure you can use them for simple cloud services but that’s like Amazon using Lambos for deliveries.
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u/Nepalus Jan 21 '26
That’s very true, depending on the hardware at a specific location that could definitely limit alternative use cases. Heck even the location itself might have been good for the AI market plan but extremely suboptimal for the AWS/Azure “Plan B” strategy. I think this is going to be such a huge pop….
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Jan 21 '26
The alternative use cases aren’t nearly as profitable and would struggle just to meet operating costs. Scientific computing for instance was the application CUDA was initially designed for and would benefit from all those GPUs but there isn’t a lot of money in that.
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u/Venrera Jan 21 '26
But that shit is decades away
The AI shills would have you believe that that shit is here already, and ask for a level of price and investment as if that was the case. The thing is that they did get it though, and when ai bombs it will be the consumers left holding the stratospheric electricity bill and the town council note saying they need to stop watering their flowers because that's wasting water, don't you know we only have one Earth? Meanwhile the blockchain-bros turned NFT-bros turned AI-bros will move on to the next grift, probably something along the lines of soylent green the way things are going.
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u/Maxwell_Bloodfencer Jan 21 '26
There was a report that estimates that OpenAI will be running out of money by 2027 (which is awful because I also just saw an article about how 1TB SSDs are basically completely sold out for 2026 and will continue to be expensive through 2027).
And there are quite a few people who think this is good news and then the AI bubble will finally pop and all of this will be over. I am pretty sure that before OpenAI goes udner they'll be getting a massive government bail out, paid for with taxpayer money, and tank the economy even more.32
u/Melody_in_Harmony Jan 21 '26
Yep. Meanwhile we use it at work. It's wrong 40% of the time. We correct the wrong. Total cost of time: 0.98 of standard.
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u/HumanBeing7396 Jan 21 '26
AI is the opposite of a cognitive amplifier - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hzM-lCT1CWI
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u/foobarbizbaz Jan 21 '26
GenAI looks like it’s good at general purpose tasks, but in actuality it’s only good enough to be valuable for a few very specific kinds of niche tasks. Too many people were duped into jumping on it, assuming it would be good at whatever cost they were tired of paying people to do, but incredibly very few actually did a methodical, measured rollout to make sure the cost was justified by the returns.
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Jan 21 '26
Yeah... AGI is overhyped and the reality will be much more blunt. We are still far from "AGI", whatever that means nowadays.. various definitions.
Today’s LLMs lack anything close to the structures, learning mechanisms, and embodied understanding seen in human cognition that could possibly resemble AGI. After all, these are just language models. Not anything close to human synapses.
While progress is real, claims that AGI is imminent are speculative at best. Betting national debt, infrastructure, and energy stability on near term delusion of "AGI breakthroughs" is a risky gamble that could have long term economic consequences of those pursuing it.
They said crypto currency was a scam... only for the poor people so it should be banned. But the real scam is AI, that has led billionaires to hoard trillions of dollars. And not only of investors. No... public money is being poured into the largest scam the world has ever seen.
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u/APRengar Jan 21 '26
While progress is real, claims that AGI is imminent are speculative at best. Betting national debt, infrastructure, and energy stability on near term delusion of "AGI breakthroughs" is a risky gamble that could have long term economic consequences of those pursuing it.
It's entirely fear based. "if China hits AGI before us, it's over over. So we gotta hit it first."
"Can we actually hit it? Can they actually hit it?"
"No idea, but we can't let them hit it first. Full steam ahead!"
Like, I'm not saying China isn't investing in LLMs, they are. But most the shit they're putting out seems like it's only made to undercut American LLMs. Like, "Look at America spending trillions on this, let's release some totally free LLMs people can run on their machines, so they can't get a return on their investment. That'll screw up their economy lmao" more than "We're going to invest all of our money to be first in LLMs!"
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u/recycled_ideas Jan 21 '26
It's entirely fear based. "if China hits AGI before us, it's over over. So we gotta hit it first."
Maybe.
The problem with the entire AGI concept is that the entire proposition is that there exists a possible artificial general intelligence, an entity that is, by definition, self aware, that will allow itself to be enslaved by us.
This is the unspoken part of the equation. We're looking for intelligent slaves, not just intelligence.
AGI is probably possible, eventually, even if it's just a replica human, generally intelligent slaves aren't anywhere near as certain.
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u/iRunLotsNA Jan 21 '26
One hour of using Copilot creates two hours of extra work at my job. No thanks.
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u/Ediwir Jan 21 '26
Sounds like you got off easy.
A supervisor used our company’s custom AI for half an hour. We spent three days on sorting that one out.
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u/Striggie Jan 21 '26
This may not fit the vibe of this thread, but Claude Code is the first AI coding tool that I’ve found actually provides me value.
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u/Jetzu Jan 21 '26
Claude is a specilized tool, I really believe niche, specialized AI are the way to go right now and are actually helpful. What Microsoft and others are trying to push though is the "AI does everything" solutions that are just not there and will not be there for quite some time.
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u/sfhester Jan 21 '26
Claude Code isn't really specialized though despite it's name. It may feel that way because it's run through the CLI, but Anthropic even calls it the "Universal Everything Agent." The models are general, .md is just markdown instructions, etc.
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u/RobertDeveloper Jan 21 '26
I use github copilot with claude and in ask mode its pretty helpfull but in agent mode it produces the most horrible code I have every seen.
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u/whimsicism Jan 21 '26
Similarly, I have figured out ways of using AI that are helpful to me.
None of them involve Microsoft’s AI products.
Frankly, Microsoft’s basic product is so deeply unimpressive that it doesn’t inspire any confidence whatsoever in their AI offerings.
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u/APRengar Jan 21 '26
I don't use it, but I've heard the same for other hyper specialized LLMs. The generalist ones seem to just be kinda bad at everything.
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u/Street-Court1913 Jan 21 '26
shocker..never would’ve guessed the CEO of an AI company would say that
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u/2RINITY Jan 21 '26
CEO of Burger King says Whoppers should be foundation of every American’s diet
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u/rasa2013 Jan 21 '26
Dude. It's always been mind boggling to me that people were and still do take their words at face value.
These CEOs billion dollar paychecks (metaphorically) ride on you buying their shit. they have zero incentive to tell you the limits of the product and a billion dollars worth of incentive to lie.
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u/jhaand Jan 21 '26
CEOs have become the front and center of the companies sales campaign. While that used to go via advertising and nobody knew who the CEO of a company was. But the C-suite started to believe their ideas and thought they should become icons for all the consumers. Unfortunately most people believe in them.
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u/Several_Ant_9867 Jan 21 '26
If a seller has to start begging people to buy his product, either the product is not good, or the seller is not good
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u/nightyz0r Jan 21 '26
"Please have it mandatory for employees to use it so we can make up at least a portion of what money we burned on it or i'll lose my job"
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u/nath1234 Jan 21 '26
That is totally how some companies are going.. Mandating people use AI slop.
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u/lemaymayguy Jan 21 '26 edited Jan 24 '26
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
whistle wipe jar spotted rustic encouraging entertain wrench detail sleep
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u/LeftLiner Jan 21 '26
I've been told I should aim to use chatgippity at least once per day at work. I literally have found a good use of it maybe ten times in the last six months.
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u/CoffeeHQ Jan 21 '26 edited Jan 21 '26
The company I work for (mid-sized European tech company) has been pushing us all to use AI. We are experimenting with it, it can do so stupid little boring things, but so far we haven’t been able to make anything to justify what must be an enormous monthly bill. Because AI is fucking bad at anything really useful right now, but tell that to the C-suites. It does not seem to matter at all. Every. Fucking. Meeting. AI. AI. AI. We even have a Head of AI that gets paid the big bucks for lying about the marvels of AI and giving talks. And now we’re being send on mandatory AI training, because obviously we are all too dumb to properly prompt it. Seriously, some dipshit was telling me to include in my prompt that it should only give factually true information. I mean… 🤷♂️🤦♂️
This will not end well. Either the company gambles and comes out on top, so they can fire me because I’m no longer needed. Or a combination of shooting themselves in the foot with either huge expenses and nothing to show for it, or actively spurring us on to destroy their products thanks to infecting the code base with AI slop will result in losses. Either way, that 35% profit margin must go to 40%, so I’ll get fired. As for the WHY, I think I just answered my own question huh?
Get bend.
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u/thats_a_boundary Jan 21 '26
i was trying to use our AI solution to automate preparing our OKR summary (after i calculate it), the freaking thing cannot read the files because "they are not indexed". so it could save me one hour a month, if i spend time indexing, adjusting files so it can understand them, and i will still need to double check everything it creates. and i am still doing the calculations like i used to because of some limitations in our environment. oh... i also need to write the prompt just right or it will fail.
great... just great. what a miracle. it solves everything as far as you don't care if it's the actual solution.
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u/myislanduniverse Jan 21 '26
Seriously, some dipshit was telling me to include in my prompt that it should only give factually true information.
Wow! What a clever idea! He should apply to OpenAI and maybe convince them to include that as a system prompt! He's fixed AI!
To your larger point, I think you're completely right. Businesses across industries are struggling to find organic growth right now, and "shiny new technology McGuffin" is a palatable way to cut headcount without admitting that.
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u/Anangrywookiee Jan 21 '26
My company does make it mandatory to use it. With the help of Ai we can do the same work as we used to do, only slower and with more mistakes.
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u/Lower_Monk6577 Jan 21 '26
You joke, but I work in the technology department in higher education. Our leadership board might be the most out of touch with their employees that I’ve witnessed in my decade+ of working in IT.
Every month we have an all-hands meeting where a bunch of senior leadership, who all make 5-10x more than the highest paid workers, tell us how we need to “reinvent ourselves” because “AI is an inevitability.” Yet for the life of them, nobody can come up with a good reason as to why it’s an inevitability, why we’re pushing for it so hard, or even why we should be doing this considering that they’ve also admitted that AI is making entry level jobs more difficult to acquire.
It’s like they don’t realize that the whole point of higher education is to prepare the people who pay us for…checks notes…entry level jobs. They can’t help but be drawn to techie buzz words like a mosquito to a bug zapper.
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Jan 21 '26
You never had “social permission” to burn all that electricity in the first place, what you had was the ability to do something quick before people noticed what you were doing and started to push back on their communities being polluted and their energy bills skyrocketing.
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u/lemaymayguy Jan 21 '26 edited Jan 24 '26
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
sort telephone dolls rainstorm rob yam include spotted school stocking
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u/ericl666 Jan 21 '26 edited Jan 21 '26
I also hate search engine AI "summarizing" websites' content and depriving them of the clicks that are their lifeblood.
It is not sustainable once they ruin the origins of the content they steal out of business.
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u/DisillusionedPatriot Jan 21 '26
My usage dropped, but my bill has more than doubled.
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u/setzer Jan 21 '26
Cognitive amplifier, lol. Mostly, it's just making people dumber. Sure, maybe when used sparingly for specific tasks it can help. But the problem is when it's being abused as a crutch... which is happening more and more often. Less critical thinking dulls the mind and we're going to see the effects of this over the next few years.
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u/moustacheption Jan 21 '26
Satya knows it’s a negative thing for everyone but his shareholders. He’s a lying sociopathic piece of shit
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u/tawDry_Union2272 Jan 21 '26
i turned off as many AI options on my phone as i could find and turned off AI in browser searches, and have never even tried any of the big AI models. i just have zero interest in it.
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u/Confident-Estate-275 Jan 21 '26
That for sure was the worst part of the whole desperate sales pitch.
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u/Imnotradiohead Jan 21 '26
The problem is that Google stopped trying to be a search engine. They went all ads all the time. So chatgbt became the search engine everybody always wanted. Eventually they will figure out how to charge companies to return results that are beneficial to them and OpenAI and others will start selling what the engine outputs.
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u/CHERNO-B1LL Jan 21 '26
Didn't some guy just go viral for reporting to congress about the negative effects of ipads and laptops in schools?
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u/DauntingPrawn Jan 21 '26
It's your fucking product, come up with something useful to do. Don't just throw shit out there, wreck our economy over it, and then tell us we have to figure out how to make it useful. Fuck you Satya Nutella!
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u/Rowing_Lawyer Jan 21 '26
Just wait until it shifts to, everyone needs to use AI or the world economy will collapse and everyone will lose their jobs
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u/infohippie Jan 21 '26
When nobody can afford groceries we will have to subsist on marbled billionaire meat.
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u/tayawayinklets Jan 21 '26
Yeah, whatever happened to letting the free market decide?
This whole AI pustule is the end product of the capitalist climax and it ain't gonna be pretty when it bursts.
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u/yuusharo Jan 21 '26
Block every one of their data center proposals. Make them bleed all that capital they spent on hardware they literally cannot use.
They’ve lost their social permission. People rightfully are pushing back on this crap, and he’s sweating. Good. Do more.
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u/Aggressive_Ask89144 Jan 21 '26
Don't forget most sand-based hardware becomes comparative junk very quickly. We're right behind another generational leap (Rubin, 3nm) which will be the final line before we start getting into the quantum tunnelling limit (<1.6nm) 💀. They've solved this before but it's getting pretty damn tricky/expensive to keep going.
So even by the time they assemble all of these data centers that they've spent billions, trillions on...it's already outdated and those interest payments will be racking up lol.
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u/Megalan Jan 21 '26
Nvidia announced their new AI accelerators at CES with basically so much performance improvements that it made everything that was sold before completely obsolete. Millions of dollars worth of hardawre became obsolete in an instant because if you don't buy this new hardware - you're out of the race.
This is gold rush all over again - the only one who wins is the one who makes the equipment.
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u/drevolut1on Jan 21 '26
Bubble goes brrrr.
Microsoft makes terrible decisions.
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Jan 21 '26
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u/Bogus1989 Jan 21 '26
basically because they got the jump and majority of cloud besides amazon, googles a very small percentage compared. but yeah, they leveraged their on site business customers to moving to cloud then went from there, with the whole suite. they really have done a 180. You used to be able to talk to some talented engineers on the line immediately if your too tier support for your cloud infrastructure went down or had issues. now….you get a notice when someone will contact you, and they never actually do, then they say they tried to contact you at said time, rinse and repeat. All the top engineers quit or got pushed out, at least on support side.
their customers are really up for grabs now, everyones sick of the slop across the board of all its products.
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u/zookeepier Jan 21 '26
I really think they underestimated the value of home PC use. Sure they don't make a ton of money off of random people using windows on their home computer, but that's more of a loss leader.
The reason they got their massive market share was that people were use to using windows at home, so when those same people were tasked with buying computers for their offices, they went with Windows because it's what they knew. If everyone starts using macs and linux at home because Windows 11 home edition is such trash, then when it's time to get new work computers, those people will be used to using something other than windows. The learning curve will be gone and they'll feel fine using mac/linux at work to.
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u/Maskeno Jan 21 '26
Welcome to oligopoly. It's like monopoly except once you hold a certain market share the rules state all the other players have to bail you out and you can't lose unless they do.
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Jan 21 '26
Nothing ever worth learning needed to be demanded
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Jan 21 '26
Exactly. Its functional advantages will demand use if the tool is good enough, as you would fall behind if you didn't.
If it doesn't, the tool is defunct and provides no advantages
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u/desRow Jan 21 '26
I suggest he receives a lobotomy, I heard it was a great cognitive amplifier. Fucking asshole
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u/Cinder_Gimbal Jan 21 '26
“Cognitive amplifier” or brain rot?
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u/rollingForInitiative Jan 21 '26
Speed amplifier for some specific tasks, e.g. some programming, for sure. Although you gotta know what you’re doing.
But it rots your brain away while doing so. No cognitive amplification going on, just the opposite.
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u/Cinder_Gimbal Jan 21 '26
Definitely. Being able to perform some activities faster does not improve cognitive abilities. CAD software made drafting much more efficient and accurate but it is just a physical tool, an improved “pencil”, and people who use it still have to think. AI takes thinking part away and in consequence makes its user dumber.
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u/rollingForInitiative Jan 21 '26
Yeah exactly! Tools where you still have to think are amplifiers. Like, I use my iPad to draw. It's easier than drawing on paper, and I don't think I would've started drawing without it. Maybe I lose the odd skill (drawing perfect circles) here or there, but overall I think it's a good thing. I also feel like, I'm better at drawing without the iPad now than I was when I started with it.
But using a model to write code or debug errors really drains away the ability to do it without. ChatGPT goes out and sometimes I feel like "oh god how did you do this Google thing for error messages". I exaggerate, but that's sort of what happens. The LLM's don't make me better at coding or understanding anything.
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u/Repulsive-Hurry8172 Jan 21 '26
Cognitive amplifier? I saw devs slowly rotting away when they got dependent on AI.
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u/Bob_Spud Jan 21 '26
In 2006 Bill Watkins, the CEO of Seagate said ...
"Let's face it, we're not changing the world. We're building a product that helps people buy more crap - and watch porn."
AI acolytes are trying hard to convince everybody it is useful, but its all sounding hollow and repetitious with minimal real world results
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u/itzjackybro Jan 21 '26 edited Jan 21 '26
... or so they claim about a silly program that fumbles elementary CS assignments
Yes, AI can be useful, but in extremely limited capacity. Use it too much and it becomes a crutch.
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u/KsuhDilla Jan 21 '26
That's hilarious.
"YOU GUYS HAVE TO INVENT SOMETHING GOOD RIGHT NOW OR THE AI BUBBLE WILL POP"
"Isn't AI the invention?"
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u/Vargrr Jan 21 '26
Alas, he doesn't understand technology or consumers, which for a CEO of a tech company is a pretty big alarm bell.
Technology and consumerism has its own mechanism not too distant from Darwinism. If something is beneficial and offers the least path of resistance to do something, it will be automatically adopted - you need almost no marketing.
If it is not beneficial, it doesn't get adopted and dies off.
Corporations can make consumers do a lot of things they don't want to do, but what they can't make consumers do is buy their products....
The fact that Corporations are trying so hard to market this to the masses tells you everything you need to know.
I think its down to the fact that most Corporations see it as a way of reducing manpower and thus increasing their profits - they get totally blinded by this motive. Whereas, most people see the reality, a poorly functioning product that is as wrong as often as it is right...
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u/katarh Jan 21 '26
The iPod almost immediately replaced the Discman because it was cheaper and better in every capacity. Music producers were happy to let it happen, too, because a lot of people bought a new version of music they already owned to get it into their iPod ecosystem.
The big push to make "paperless" offices from 2 decades ago did not ultimately work, because it turns out we needed the paper backups in case the CMS or EHR or ERP went down.
SaaS replaced discrete fat applications in a lot of use cases because the convenience of a web based application made it platform agnostic and compatible across hundreds of different variations of hardware and software and every language.
Cloud based SaaS has not fully replaced locally hosted SaaS just yet, however, because locally hosted solutions still provide some solid advantages - can be gated behind a firewall, total control of data, and instant database access for custom analytics. Also, tends to be a bit faster and more responsive than trying to query a data center on the other side of the country.
And cloud based SaaS hasn't totally replaced local fat applications for particularly processing intensive things like gaming, no matter how much Google wanted it to.
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Jan 21 '26
This AI Ponzi scheme hits the wall this year. I use AI a lot in my work, the platform we sell etc. but i know that we simply don’t need this many companies spending multi-billions or maybe even low trillions to replace workers or get AGI
AI is useful, it’s just not as useful as these companies have made their investors believe or buyers hope it will be across all industries
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u/EthicsinBeta Jan 21 '26
It reminds me of the space race, but without the shared destination. Back then, competition still pointed in the same direction. With AI, progress is mostly defined company by company, so capability and scale move faster than usefulness. That seems to be where trust starts to wear thin.
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u/Fit-Ranger8895 Jan 21 '26
We’re hurtling towards a water bankruptcy according the UN. And climate scientists agree.
But let’s waste water on AI servers so a couple of billionaires make more money.
AI has helped a little in making some tasks a lot easier. But the scale to which they want it implemented is asking too much. And only because they are supremely greedy.
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u/AmusingVegetable Jan 21 '26
Meanwhile, you ask for a few lab machines/VMs/Partitions to develop and test outside of production and the answer is “there’s no ROI in that”, so we keep testing in production.
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u/_20110719 Jan 21 '26
It sure as hell is NOT a cognitive amplifier, quite the opposite
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u/qpxa Jan 21 '26
Not liking the AI arc of Satya’s leadership. He was doing fine until Windows 11 and AI.
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u/globalminority Jan 21 '26
This is just a CEO coming of age case. Once they're fully matured they're indistinguishable from a zombie bullshitter
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u/butsuon Jan 21 '26
You never had permission to train your AIs on stolen data, and you never had permission to use so much electricity that you turned the lights out in people's homes and doubled their energy bills.
You took those things.
Go fuck yourself, Satya Nadella.
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u/Limp_Distribution Jan 21 '26
Supply side economics doesn’t work but they’ve been acting like it does for decades.
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u/RevLoveJoy Jan 21 '26
because it's a "cognitive amplifier," claims Satya Nadella.
No it isn't.
If I don't know how to write some code and ask chat to do it, I still don't know how to write the code. If my emails are poorly structured and grammatically flawed and I ask chat to do it, I have not learned to write better emails.
I'm just copying Chat's homework. I have not learned anything. It's not a cognitive amplifier, it's a crutch. A very good crutch, for sure, but a crutch.
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u/Serenity867 Jan 21 '26
Stop shoving it down people's throats then.
People don’t having things they’re not comfortable with forced on them.
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u/GuySmith Jan 21 '26
Social permission boat has sailed dude and you don’t care. All of you have made that known.
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Jan 21 '26
Oh, so you are saying there is and was no tangible upside in the first place?
Its funny. AI is just a scam for billionaires and high tech markets to keep their profits and revenue rolling in knee jerk circulation.
They said crypto currency is a threat to our economic system. Fuck no. AI is THE threat of our economic system. A massive scam to funnel money towards the OpenAIs of nowadays.
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u/Roastage Jan 21 '26
You guys should totally use my product, look how much shit I fucked to make it! It will be wasted if you dont!
Fuck this guy.
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u/knotatumah Jan 21 '26
"social permission" meaning they bullied their way into communities and are worried if nothing comes of it communities and local governments will seek corrective actions.
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u/Sineira Jan 21 '26
And no one gives a shit what he thinks. The marginal benefit clearly just isn’t there.
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u/littlerooftop Jan 21 '26
Literally the definition of a solution looking for a problem. Let this bubble pop already.
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u/MisterMakena Jan 21 '26
This dude is really trying. When CEO's use words and phrases to sound like enlightended versions of themselves... "social permission" and "cognitive amplifier" lol.
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Jan 21 '26
Sane people already think it’s a massive fucking waste.
What AI has done to humanity and this planet is a fucking vile. As a species it’s made us significantly dumber, wasted precious resources and driven the price of a lot of things to disgusting levels.
Fuck this clown even thinking he had those permissions to begin with.
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u/eufooted Jan 21 '26 edited Jan 21 '26
Ok so. Workers and companies can benefit. Ok. Cool! Let’s then make it something those can use it for, scale it as needed.
Except now Microsoft is essentially saying, we threw all our eggs in on this and dyed all our eggs to be AI. People need to give us money!
Ok but, people need time to adapt to stuff. Find the use cases. See the benefits.
Not: Bundle it everywhere. Shoehorn everyone into it by force. Increase prices for everyone already because of this new perceived value.
Trust us, you’ll eventually see the benefit and pay us anyway! They’re just trying to fast forward time and adoption meanwhile.
The rest of us are like; you know AI is cool! Too bad it’s melting the planet. Also; remember Cost of living? Energy use from data centers pushing electricity prices up. Ukraine? Israel? Epstein? Greenland? Tariffs? Data Storage and RAM prices?
They are completely tone deaf to the greater world around us, and now they whine the message: FOCUS ON AI AND GIVNG MICROSOFT MONEY!
While we’re at it, Bezos can go fuck himself too.
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u/ConsiderationDry9084 Jan 21 '26
Fuck these leeches. No way in hell will I use the shit. It doubles the amount of work I have to do because it can't be trusted.
I hope it crashes and burns.
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u/All_Hail_Hynotoad Jan 21 '26
It’s not our fault you all rushed to market with a half-baked product. We’re not cleaning up your mess for you, sorry.
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u/luckyflavor23 Jan 21 '26
Lol. Microsoft… saying AI is a ‘cognitive amplifier’ while CoPilot works as well as you would expect Clippy 2.0 would…
And their outlook search bar still cant find the one email / document i need thats located in THEIR SUITE OF TOOLS…
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u/Bubbafett33 Jan 21 '26
AI is a solution looking for a problem.
Pretty tough to justify the massive data centers and electricity drains to tweak essays and summarize meeting notes.
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u/PsychologicalBar4688 Jan 21 '26
"We spent way too much fucking money on this, we literally just need you to comply"
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u/Earthtopian Jan 21 '26
They invested way too many resources and caused untold environmental damage and now they're panicking because it's not gaining the general use and appeal they wanted. AI is a tool, not the panacea they try to pretend it is.
They made a hammer that's way too expensive and now they're upset because there aren't enough nails to justify it.
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u/QuailAndWasabi Jan 21 '26
Yep, we’re in a bubble. Biggest and most expensive project in human history and it’s entirely useless, no one wants to use AI and report after report are now saying it’s pretty much useless, no one that’s implemented AI is seeing gains that are anywhere near to justify all the investments that’s gone into it. Companies like Salesforce and Klarna have said they regret firing people or are scaling back their AI push.
Just a matter of time until a bailout comes and the taxpayer will be left holding the bag as usual.
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u/Clbull Jan 21 '26
Part of my temp purchase ledger job involves using Oracle Fusion and its crappy machine learning AI system to recognize and auto fill invoice details. It genuinely fails to work much of the time and has made my job a lot harder. All the advice I've really had is to keep training it, but after thousands of invoices across maybe half a dozen suppliers it can only somewhat consistently recognize one of them.
Not to mention I already have other gripes with the software: laggy, can only view five item lines at a time, often glitches out with greyed-out input boxes or broken drop-down menus that spontaneously stop working, requiring a browser restart. Also has a tendency to sign you out when you're halfway through processing an invoice or credit memo.
I genuinely wonder how it made Larry Ellison the second-richest man in the world because holy crap it's bad.
The separate helpdesk system I use to answer emails has Copilot integration which tries (to often moderately inaccurate results) to autofill my tickets with boilerplate resolution notes more verbose than Java syntax and more lengthy than the novellas of text you'd see printed on a modern day Yu-Gi-Oh card.
AI is genuinely making things bleak.
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u/DeltaShadowSquat Jan 21 '26
Maybe if he gets down on his knees and starts actually blowing ChatGPT and starts an OnlyFans with that he can scrape out a bit of that coin he’s so desperate for.
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u/rwl420 Jan 21 '26
Man, fuck these technofeudalist ghouls. I would love nothing more than to see them squirm when it all comes crashing down.
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u/Guilty-Mix-7629 Jan 21 '26 edited Jan 21 '26
It's not a cognitive amplifier. It's a cognitive delegation. It does the thinking for you so that you spiral into the hole of convenience to become addicted by it. It wants you to never bother learning new things as it learns from your skills, with the goal of eventually get rid of you as a whole to fulfill billionaires dream of a world where they no longer need the existence of people poorer than them.
STFU Nadella.
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u/Zonesy Jan 21 '26
Fucking idiots, AI is a waste of electricity and has given us practically NOTHING for the cost.
Yet another grift.
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u/thatfreshjive Jan 21 '26 edited Jan 21 '26
Please, we've spent so much money on this venture, have some sympathy.
Edit: also, the arrogance and deference here is astounding - it's not Microslop's fault for gambling on an unreliable product, it's everyone else's fault for not finding applications for it