The immediate catalyst, it seems, is an intensifying focus on capex, or capital expenditures. Microsoft revealed that its spending surged 66% to $37.5 billion in the latest quarter, even as growth in its Azure cloud business cooled slightly. Even more concerning to analysts, however, was a new disclosure that approximately 45% of the company’s $625 billion in remaining performance obligations (RPO)—a key measure of future cloud contracts—is tied directly to OpenAI, the company revealed after reporting earnings Wednesday afternoon. (Microsoft is both a major investor in and a provider of cloud-computing services to OpenAI.)
Products and services have been dropping in quality well before ai slop
You overestimate the quality of acceptable work in many industries. AI and a little human editing and oversight is perfectly capable of producing legitimate work product.
The real problem is capitalism driving everything to shit and that really has nothing to do with ai influenced workflows
I went from Windows laptop and Netflix and Hulu to a Linux desktop for a home server running Immich, Mealie, Jellyfin, and the Arr suite in docker containers. All proxied on Cloudflare for remote access. I would never have been able to do that without the use of ChatGPT. I had no knowledge of software development, Linux, networking, etc at all. If you know how to query, AI can be a huge aid in learning. It’s helping me brush up on my Italian right now too since I haven’t spoken it in 5 years.
Did you pay for the AI service you used to do that and if it hadn’t been available would you have just started reading the online resources the AI trained on and got to the same place eventually?
Tbh it’s not much different than search engines. You need to learn how to use them and when it’s appropriate to do so…it’s basically a skill issue 🤷♀️
Reminds me of when search engines first arrived and we were taught very early in school how library research works and then when to use digital academic databases vs regular search engines or just hit the books.
And yeah tech support is a great use case and you can just use the Gemini links that send you to the Reddit threads where the information came from to verify it.
I feel like if you’re minimally responsible it’s pretty hard to have AI backfire on you
That’s cool. I did all of that without AI coming from a similar place as you. AI didn’t open up a new path for you, it just showed you a path that already existed, which isn’t any different from what a regular search engine can do. There was nothing stopping you from finding that path on your own except your unwillingness to look.
Willingness to look is a pretty important factor. LLMs reduce the personal cost incurred to look up information, similar to how search engines saved us from having to go to the library for every question we had.
They presented to you a reasonable use case (assisted learning) and your response was “lol, you’re just lazy. Do it on your own. I did it, so can you”.
I am in a similar position, networking is Martian to me and if I search guides on how to do stuff, it’s full of people that go “just use X to do a reverse proxy”, as if I have 200h of experience under my belt. I’d rather have a chatbot explain to me like I am 5 in some cases.
I don’t consider myself a “proponent” of ai and I think it gives dependent and lazy people brain damage lol
But these people seem like complete contrarian Luddites who just want to insist it’s bad because they don’t like it and have seen too many negative memes about it