[tony-vlcek]

> We will quickly lose even the social permission to take something like energy [...]

A way to drum up sense of urgency without mentioning that it's the patience of the investors (and _not_ the public) that will be the limiting factor here?

[marcyb5st]

Similar to my thoughts. If we are still scrambling to find stuff the average Joe finds useful, the 100s of Billions poured into this gold rush are wasted (IMHO).

[danudey]

Nadella's vibe lately (here and in his 2025 retrospective) seems to be "AI can be amazing and transformative and life-changing, and it's up to end users to figure out how to make that happen and they're not doing it and it's not our fault."

It's not even a solution in search of a problem, it's a tool in search of a reason to use it as a solution to a problem on such a scale that it justifies the billions of dollars of money we've poured into it while driving up the cost of fresh water, electricity, RAM, storage, data centre space, and so on.

[2sk21]

This reminds me of the early 1980s, when home PCs were still very new, the main use cases that vendors used to promote were managing household accounts and recipes. These use cases were extremely unimpressive for most ordinary people. It took a long time for PCs to become ubiquitous in homes - until gaming and the web became common.

[rchaud]

The web was an academic project funded by modest research grants, requiring nowhere near the level of capital and electricity AI requires. The output of that research emphasized open source and decentralized implementation, which is antithetical to corporate AI models that are predicated on vendor lock-in.

Consumer adoption also happened organically over time, catalyzed mostly by email and instant messaging, which were huge technological leaps over fax and snail mail. IBM and DEC didn't have to jam "Internet" buttons all over their operating systems to juice usage (although AOL certainly contributed to filling landfills with their free trial disks).

[goalieca]

Well, LLM is mainly aiming to “Improve” what we can already do. It’s not really opening up new use cases the way the personal computer, the smart phone, or the Internet did.

[3vidence]

Thank you for putting this so succinctly, this is what I'm observing as well.

Feels like this combination (usually) creates a race to the bottom instead of expansion of new ideas.

LLMs kind of feel somewhere in the middle

[fuzzfactor]

Ideally, zillions of consumers have been languishing for years and when the time is right they're all collectively chomping at the bit when a new highly-affordable technology comes along that they just can't get enough of.

This isn't one of those times.

[Spooky23]

People said the same thing 30 years ago about the internet.

I’m spending $400/mo on AI subscriptions at this point. Probably the best money I spend.

[malfist]

And the people who bought a lot of shovels during the gold rush thought they were making the smartest money move

[red-iron-pine]

some of them did make it big, and towns and building are named after them

but lots of folks were broke as hell and miserable

[m4rtink]

or dead

[Spooky23]

Dude, I'm getting a shovel factory for practically nothing. I'm easily realizing 5x value on that investment.

I'd say for an estate that I am the executor of, it probably saved me $50k in legal fees and other expenses because it helped me analyze a novel problem and organize it ask the right questions of counsel.

Another scenario i had to deal with i needed a mobile app to do something very specific for a few weeks. I specced out a very narrowly useful iphone application, built it out on the train from DC to NYC, and had it working to my satisfaction the next day. Is it production code ready for primetime? Absolutely not. But I got capability to do what I needed super quickly that my skill level is no longer up to the task to accomplish!

IMO, these things let you make power tools, but your ability to get value is capped by your ability to ask the right questions. In the enterprise, they are going to kill lots of stupid legacy software that doesn't add alot of value, but adds alot of cost.

[keyringlight]

I'd wonder how much that scales up though for the benefit of the companies that are each investing hundreds of billions and hope to see a net return. How many developers like you (presumably less of you seeing as each is more productive) or enterprises you work for paying fees (along with slimming down legacy costs paid to someone) does it take to get up in the 12 digit range?

[Spooky23]

No idea, and not my problem. I’m surprised I’ve been downvoted so much in these comments. I’m not saying OpenAI et al is a good company or good financial scenario, or good investment.

The technology is amazingly powerful. Full stop.

The constraint that drives cost is technical — semiconductor prices. Semiconductors are manufactured commodities over time, those costs will drop over time. The Sun workstation I bought for $40k in 1999 would get smoked by a raspberry pi for $40.

Even if everyone put their pencils down and stopped working on this stuff, you’d get a lot of value from the open source(-ish) models available today.

Worst case scenario, LLMs are like Excel. Little computer programs will be available to anyone to do what they need done. Excel alone changed the world in many ways.

[foobarchu]

The owner of the metaphorical shovel factory is the company you pay for access to a model. You have a steady supply of shovels.

[blibble]

that $400/month is essentially the introductory price, subsided in an attempt to grab market share

that $400 will go up by at least a factor of 10 once the bubble pops

would you be prepared to pay $4000/month?

[Spooky23]

Nah, I'll move much of it locally when it becomes cost justified to do so.

I doubt that the exponential cost explosion day is coming. When the bubble pops, the bankruptcies of many of the players will push the costs down. US policy has provided a powerful incentive for Chinese players to do what Google has done and have a lower cost delivery model anyway.

[blibble]

it's not exponential, it's linear

> the bankruptcies of many of the players will push the costs down

the running costs don't disappear because people go broke

[Spooky23]

Your words bro. 10x isn’t linear.

The cost iceberg with this stuff isn’t electricity, it’s the capital.

Other than Google and Facebook, the big hype players can’t produce the growth required to support the valuations. That’s why the OpenAI people started fishing for .gov backstops.

The play is get the government to pay and switch out whatever Nvidia stuff they have now with something more efficient in a few years.

[brewdad]

It's the dot com bubble all over again. When you are losing money on every transaction you can't make it up on volume.

[whazor]

This looks more like an attempt of gaining scarce electricity.

If a country/state has to choice of giving power to data center A or B, it makes sense for Satya to make statements about how only Microsoft provides the most AI value

[tony-vlcek]

Well, even though electricity is a commodity it still needs to be bought. My point is that people funding this will run out of patience paying for the electricity long before the public/regulators will need to step in a decided how much of it you can buy.

I guess you could always just use a fraction of the billions in investments and whip up a few new power plants. [1]

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx25v2d7zexo

[throwthrowuknow]

They don’t need to choose, just let them build their own power generation capacity.

What the hell is going on in this type of argument anyways? Utilities are normally private businesses so what does the state have to do with it?

[malfist]

Also note that he's not saying Microsoft must find a use for AI, but that customers should.

He's blaming customers that his product isn't hitting the valuation he wants.

[thisislife2]

Ai and the energy required to power it does partly explain why Trump is so keen to setup American data centres in Saudi Arabia, and why he is so obsessed about Venezuelan oil.