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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 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)
@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.