> 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?
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.
This is what happens in VC-driven hype cycles that are all about the technology, when VC orthodoxy is that it’s not about technology but utility (see PMF etc).
My take is that if we are still scrambling to find something objectively useful (as recognized by the median person) then we really are in AI bubble territory.
When non techie friends/family bring up AI there are two major topics: 1) the amount of slop is off the charts and 2) said slop is getting harder to recognize which is scary. Sometimes they mention a bit of help in daily tasks at work, but nothing major.
LLMs and their capabilities are very impressive and definitely useful. The productivity gains often seem to be smaller than intuitively expected though. For example, using ChatGPT to get a response to a random question like "How do I do XYZ" is much more convenient than googling it, but the time savings are often not that relevant for your overall productivity. Before LLMs you were usually already able to find the information quickly and even a 10x speed up does not really have too much of an impact on your overall productivity, because the time it took was already negligible.
It really depends on what 'XYZ' is and how many hoops you need to jump through to get to the answer. ChatGPT gets information from various places and gives you the answer as well as the explanation at each step. Without tools like ChatGPT its definitely not negligible in a lot of cases.
I think you're underestimating how many people don't know how to properly search on google (i.e. finding the proper keywords, selecting the reputable results, etc etc). Those are probably also the same people that will blindly believe anything a LLM says unfortunately.
True, I do not know how two properly search something on google.com in 2025. I only know how to do it on startpage.com in 2025, kagi.com in 2025 or google.com in 2015.
spam implies low effort BS used in a low-hanging-fruit sense
LLMs will be used for aggressive, yet incredibly subtle manipulation, consensus building, and response tracking.
20-40% of social media is already bots, and in the future it is likely you will not be able to reply to anything anywhere without a bot either 1) responding, or 2) logging and sending your response to multiple parties instantly.
If the Stasi had LLMs the Berlin Wall would have never fallen
“Buy our stuff, or we’re seen as wasting energy and helping to destroy the world”?
That’s courageous from a CEO of an US company, where the current government doesn’t see burning more oil as being bad for the planet, and is willing to punish everyone who thinks otherwise.
I get it. A stunning indictment of our times… but there is something useful AI could be doing that MS has dropped the ball on: personal finance management. I should be able to have copilot grab all my transactions, build me budgets, show me what if scenarios, raise concerns, and help me meet my goals. It should be able to work in Excel where I can see and steer it. The math should be validated with several checks and the output needs to be trustworthy. Ship a free personal finance agent harness and you have your killer app.
I think there are business reasons why they wouldn’t do that, and that makes me sad.
Energy doesn’t take “social permission,” but it costs money. Translation for this is: we need to make AI make money or the bubble will collapse.
I’ve been predicting for a while: free or cheap AI will enshittify and become an addictive ad medium with nerfed capabilities. If you want actually good AI you will have to pay for it, either a much heftier fee or buying or renting compute to run your own. In other words you’ll be paying what it actually costs, so this is really just the disappearance of the bubble subsidy.
It does take social permission in places like Europe. There's a big pressure against datacenters here that use scarce resources. Like here in Holland the power grid is overloaded and companies need to wait for ages to get a connection.
So this is something that factors in hugely in planning permission. What do we get back for it is a question asked a lot. And datacenters are notoriously bad at providing jobs, during construction yes but in the run phase it's mainly low-value remote hands and security stuff.
Wasn't Satya saying earlier that AI would replace knowledge workers? Now he's saying we need to find something useful for AI...lol. Quite the reversal.
When I read HN comments where people say "AI sux, AI is useless, AI is a waste of time", I think I must be living in a different universe. Maybe Hacker News is a dimensional portal between my reality and other people's.
Hi there, friends from another dimension! In my reality, there's a cold front coming from the north. Healthcare is expensive and politics are a mess. But AI? It hallucinates sometimes but it's so much better for searching, ad hoc consultation and as a code assistant than anything I've ever seen. It's not perfect, but it saved me SO much time I decided to pay for it. I'm a penny pincher, so I wouldn't be paying for it otherwise.
I think Satya is talking about cost/benefit. AI is incredibly useful but also incredibly expensive. I think we still need to find the right balance (perhaps slower model releases), but there's no way we'll put the genie back in the bottle.
There’s more to AI than foundation models. I think you are going to see meaningful progress on chore automation over the next decade through a combination of algorithmic and mechanical improvements, and it will measurably improve our lives. Recently got a Matic robot (awesome btw), and I no longer feel the need to vacuum my floors. It’s not life changing, but it’s an appreciable convenience upgrade. The capabilities feel like a peek into the future.
Things AI is already better at than (many/most) humans: Customer service (chat, phone), writing software, writing docs about software, computer graphics (animation, images), driving cars.
There are plenty of uses for AI. Right now, the industry is heavily spending on training new models, improving performance of existing software and hardware, and trying to create niche products.
Power usage for inference will drop dramatically over the next decade, and more models are going to run on-device rather than in the cloud. AI is only going to become more ubiquitous, there's 0% chance it 'fails' and we return to 2020.
Investor hype bubbles kill technologies. If we let tech mature at a reasonable pace, we would actually get there faster in the long run. There are real applications of AI that aren't ready yet. All the hype bubble has done is push out unnecessary and broken AI, eroding consumer trust, use up valuable resources, eroding public trust, hype up ability to destroy jobs, causing public discontent, and push out unsafe AI that has real societal harm.
I agree with this dicussion, AI should be used for improving, researching, and as he says, do something useful that changes the outcomes of people and communities and countries and industries.
BUT IT'S SATYA NADELLA SAYING IT!
The person whose company owns Copilot, Copilot in Bing, Copilot for Word, Copilot for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain...
With all this useless slop, he’s literally arguing against his own point.
They have made huge investments into hardware so everyone is getting more expensive hardware, and now begging everyone else to make their investments worthwhile. Don't mind that they are driving up prices for hardware and requiring new hardware for Windows 11 upgrades. I'm suspecting that we don't have enough memory manufacturing capacity in the world to do both AI datacenters and replace all hardware that they made obsolete with their forced upgrade. AI didn't turn everyone into paperclips but it turned everyone to memory and AI processors in datacenters that can't be powered or has no useful economic utility.
Evangelists keep insisting that healthcare is one of the things that AI will revolutionize in the coming years, but I just don't get it. To me it's not even clear what they mean by "AI" in this context (and I'm not convinced it's clear to them either).
If they mean "machine learning", then sure there are application in cancer detection and the like, but development there has been moving at a steady pace for decades and has nothing to do with the current hype wave of GenAI, so there's no reason to assume it's suddenly going to go exponential. I used to work in that field and I'm confident it's not going to change overnight: progress there is slow not because of the models, but because data is sparse and noisy, labels are even sparser and noisier, deployment procedures are rigid and legal compliance is a nightmare.
If they mean "generative AI", then how is that supposed to work exactly? Asking LLMs for medical diagnosis is no better than asking "the Internet at large". They only return the most statistically likely output given their training corpus (that corpus being the Internet as a whole), so it's more likely your diagnosis will be based on a random Reddit comment that the LLMs has ingested somewhere, than an actual medical paper.
The only plausible applications I can think of are tasks such as summarizing papers, acting as augmented search engines for datasets and papers, or maybe automating some menial administrative tasks. Useful, for sure, but not revolutionary.
Totally anecdotal, but recently my wife had to go to urgent care for something wrong with her ankle- They send a 4-5 page sheet of arcane terms and diagnoses to her care app (relayed to me via text) and I just slammed that into gemnai and asked "what does this mean" and it did quite well! Gave possible causes, what it meant for her in the long term vs short term, and ways to prevent it. I had a better understanding of what was wrong before the doctor even got to my wife in the waiting room!
Obviously still double check things, but it was moment of clarity I hadn't really had before this. Still needed the doctor and all the experience to diagnose and fix things, but relaying that info back to me is something doctors are only okay at. Try it out! take a summary sheet of a recent visit or incident and feed it in.
> Evangelists keep insisting that healthcare is one of the things that AI will revolutionize in the coming years, but I just don't get it. To me it's not even clear what they mean by "AI" in this context (and I'm not convinced it's clear to them either).
It's a more-or-less intentional equivocation between different meanings of AI, as you note, machine learning vs generative AI. They want to point at the real but unsexy potential of ML for medical use in order to pump up the perceived value of LLMs. They want to imply to the general public and investors that LLMs are going to cure cancer.
No, doctors are smart enough as a group to have inserted themselves as middlemen and codified it into law, so it will not revolutionize healthcare in a meaningful sense of cutting through the bureaucracy. You may be able to use LLMs to get a suggested diagnosis once tests and symptoms are communicated, but you're going to need to go the doctor to get a referral for the tests/imaging, for formal recognition of your issue (as needed for things like workplace accommodations), and of course for any treatments as well.
At best and if you're lucky to have a receptive doctor you can use it to nudge them in the right direction. But until direct to consumer sales for medical equipment and tests are allowed, the medical profession is well insulated. It is impossible by regulation to "take healthcare into your own hands" even if you want to.
Interesting statement coming from Nadella - almost that AI is a solution looking for a problem, or at least looking for a problem that justifies the cost in terms of the resources (energy, memory chips, fab capacity) it is sucking up, not to mention looming societal disruption.
There obviously are some compelling use cases for "AI", but it's certainly questionable if any of those are really making people's lives any better, especially if you take "AI" to mean LLMs and fake videos, not more bespoke uses like AlphaFold which is not only beneficial, but also not a resource hog.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 87.0 ms ] threadA 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?
When non techie friends/family bring up AI there are two major topics: 1) the amount of slop is off the charts and 2) said slop is getting harder to recognize which is scary. Sometimes they mention a bit of help in daily tasks at work, but nothing major.
And yet studies show the opposite [0].
[0] https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt...
Now instead of the wikipedia article you are reading the exact same thing from google's home page and you don't click on anything.
LLMs will be used for aggressive, yet incredibly subtle manipulation, consensus building, and response tracking.
20-40% of social media is already bots, and in the future it is likely you will not be able to reply to anything anywhere without a bot either 1) responding, or 2) logging and sending your response to multiple parties instantly.
If the Stasi had LLMs the Berlin Wall would have never fallen
That’s courageous from a CEO of an US company, where the current government doesn’t see burning more oil as being bad for the planet, and is willing to punish everyone who thinks otherwise.
I think there are business reasons why they wouldn’t do that, and that makes me sad.
I’ve been predicting for a while: free or cheap AI will enshittify and become an addictive ad medium with nerfed capabilities. If you want actually good AI you will have to pay for it, either a much heftier fee or buying or renting compute to run your own. In other words you’ll be paying what it actually costs, so this is really just the disappearance of the bubble subsidy.
So this is something that factors in hugely in planning permission. What do we get back for it is a question asked a lot. And datacenters are notoriously bad at providing jobs, during construction yes but in the run phase it's mainly low-value remote hands and security stuff.
Hi there, friends from another dimension! In my reality, there's a cold front coming from the north. Healthcare is expensive and politics are a mess. But AI? It hallucinates sometimes but it's so much better for searching, ad hoc consultation and as a code assistant than anything I've ever seen. It's not perfect, but it saved me SO much time I decided to pay for it. I'm a penny pincher, so I wouldn't be paying for it otherwise.
I think Satya is talking about cost/benefit. AI is incredibly useful but also incredibly expensive. I think we still need to find the right balance (perhaps slower model releases), but there's no way we'll put the genie back in the bottle.
I hope your AI gets better! Talk to you later!
AI is subsidized for the users
This probably has nothing to do with gen AI (the kind of AI Nadela is speaking about).
There are plenty of uses for AI. Right now, the industry is heavily spending on training new models, improving performance of existing software and hardware, and trying to create niche products.
Power usage for inference will drop dramatically over the next decade, and more models are going to run on-device rather than in the cloud. AI is only going to become more ubiquitous, there's 0% chance it 'fails' and we return to 2020.
An AI might be better than an indian call center but I doubt that when the AI is made by indians anyway.
> writing software, writing docs about software
I have asked AI about exactly one topic and it lied about the API of a library making up the functions I was supposed to call.
> computer graphics (animation, images)
I have indeed seen many wonderful meme images come out of the generators but that was before they got lobotomized for producing that subject matter
[EDIT]
And the worst part is these are all just more "software as a service" designed to remove the possibility of using a tool without approval.
With all this useless slop, he’s literally arguing against his own point.
And no, I'm not saying the technology is bad. The business isn't going swimmingly, though.
If they mean "machine learning", then sure there are application in cancer detection and the like, but development there has been moving at a steady pace for decades and has nothing to do with the current hype wave of GenAI, so there's no reason to assume it's suddenly going to go exponential. I used to work in that field and I'm confident it's not going to change overnight: progress there is slow not because of the models, but because data is sparse and noisy, labels are even sparser and noisier, deployment procedures are rigid and legal compliance is a nightmare.
If they mean "generative AI", then how is that supposed to work exactly? Asking LLMs for medical diagnosis is no better than asking "the Internet at large". They only return the most statistically likely output given their training corpus (that corpus being the Internet as a whole), so it's more likely your diagnosis will be based on a random Reddit comment that the LLMs has ingested somewhere, than an actual medical paper.
The only plausible applications I can think of are tasks such as summarizing papers, acting as augmented search engines for datasets and papers, or maybe automating some menial administrative tasks. Useful, for sure, but not revolutionary.
Obviously still double check things, but it was moment of clarity I hadn't really had before this. Still needed the doctor and all the experience to diagnose and fix things, but relaying that info back to me is something doctors are only okay at. Try it out! take a summary sheet of a recent visit or incident and feed it in.
It's a more-or-less intentional equivocation between different meanings of AI, as you note, machine learning vs generative AI. They want to point at the real but unsexy potential of ML for medical use in order to pump up the perceived value of LLMs. They want to imply to the general public and investors that LLMs are going to cure cancer.
At best and if you're lucky to have a receptive doctor you can use it to nudge them in the right direction. But until direct to consumer sales for medical equipment and tests are allowed, the medical profession is well insulated. It is impossible by regulation to "take healthcare into your own hands" even if you want to.
There obviously are some compelling use cases for "AI", but it's certainly questionable if any of those are really making people's lives any better, especially if you take "AI" to mean LLMs and fake videos, not more bespoke uses like AlphaFold which is not only beneficial, but also not a resource hog.