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Half-formed thought: partially unseated from centralized, highly visible, near-monopoly market dominance of end user computing; made successful transition to less visible but equally pervasive tentacles-everywhere dominance of computational plumbing + services; now making a killing on rent-seeking from biz clients
⇒ Microsoft is the new IBM
https://www.wired.com/story/the-us-government-has-a-microsoft-problem/
Really good point, and I wish I remembered who made it:
Microsoft’s OpenAI gambit looks like a “head I win, tails I win” play: If OpenAI is renting computing power from MS — and LLMs sure do need gob tons of it — then it’s •already• profitable for MS. This whole AI bubble is pumping money from a sea of revved-up VCs and FOMO-addled CEOs straight into Microsoft’s pockets.
Even if there’s nothing but wreckage when the AI bubble bursts, even if none of the hype pans out, MS still makes bank.
There’s so much hype, it’s easy to miss:
Most AI ventures are money losers right now, and most always will be.
Who’s pocketing cash right now from the AI bubble? Not end users. Not the companies who are buying AI services (except for the sugar rush of premature cost-cutting that will quickly go sour). And not even the AI vendors! No, the cash is ending up in the pockets of the cloud computing vendors who sell to the AI companies: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/stability-ai-reportedly-ran-out-of-cash-to-pay-its-bills-for-rented-cloudy-gpus/ar-BB1kYeBD
There’s a marine isopod parasite that will crawl inside a fish’s mouth, eat the fish’s tongue, and then sit down where the tongue should be and •let the fish use it as its tongue•. The isopod takes a cut of everything the fish eats. The fish is not thrilled about this, of course, but if it kicks out the parasite, it will die.
Just a random fun nature fact. Any relation to the items upthread is left as an exercise for the reader.
@inthehands how is it profitable? Openai is using Microsoft money to pay for it afaik
@Paxxi
This is precisely the question the post and its follow-up answer.
@inthehands Ed Zitron made a pretty good case on tech won’t save us that some companies, like Microsoft, appear to be sort of just creating money right now by throwing money at open AI as cloud computing credits, then receiving it and could be reporting it as revenue sort of? Honestly don’t seem legal but I’ll leave that for Lina Khan.
https://overcast.fm/+ZpQDXOsjk
@cam The financial side of stuff like this is utterly bollixing to me; I don’t even begin to understand the accounting involved, much less the legality. But the strategic side makes sense to me: if the money flows downhill to you in the end, all you need to do is get people with deep pockets whipped up.
@inthehands Oh, that's a good one. But you can't mention it without the real nightmare fuel of a photo.
Might be worse than Cordycepts (google BBC cordecepts video and decide for yourself)
is it called "the capitalist"?
@inthehands Agree with your thoughts about platforms being winners, but not sure you can class the providers of all that expensive hardware as parasites
@Landwomble
Yes, if you try to classify •all• hardware / cloud service vendors as parasites, it doesn’t hold up.
Matthias Wiesmann @inthehands "During the gold rush, sell shovels."
@inthehands It's all just about selling shovels. Selling shovels all the way.
or as @pluralistic put it: "it's about going meta". They're manufacturing demand for their platform and selling the platform itself, and while doing so get to hoover up even more data to spin up the next iteration.
You can probably find the same patterns in a dozen other major endevours over the last two decades that ultimately trashed the commons.
@inthehands someone was making this point on YouTube the other day. Instead of monopolistic practices, the big tech of today just funds startups, gets a seat on the board, then forces them either away from true innovation, or makes them use big tech resources as a means of getting that investment back. In the end, big tech wins. Basically, we need to get big tech out of <s>little</s> new tech.
@inthehands
Responsible public bodies should do what the German Lander Schleswig-Holstein (and Munich did once) is doing and switch to Linux/LibreOffice and other code they can both audit and not pay rent on.