Technology

The key highlight being: you don't need more than a gallon of lemonade. I for once wished big corps heard their engineers and domain experts over wall street loving exec's.

Nah its just part of the MLM scheme that is "AI". Its useful because they said it would be useful. Its worth the investment because it cost a lot of money. Once you realize that all these companies care about is revenue and "growth" then it all clicks. It doesnt have to work or be profitable, it just needs to look good to investers.

They will even go as far as firing loads of workers and saying publicly that they "replaced them with AI" while in reality those workers were just doing something that the company was willing to sacrifice. They just replaced something with nothing to make it look like their magic AI can actually do things.

Cory Doctorow put it better than i ever could: https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/07/rah-rah-rasputin/
The whole post is good but i will just quote this section.

The "boy genius" story is an example of Silicon Valley's storied "reality distortion field," pioneered by Steve Jobs. Like Jobs, Zuck is a Texas marksman, who fires a shotgun into the side of a barn and then draws a target around the holes. Jobs is remembered for his successes, and forgiven his (many, many) flops, and so is Zuck. The fact that pivot to video was well understood to have been a catastrophic scam didn't stop people from believing Zuck when he announced "metaverse."

Zuck lost more than $70b on metaverse, but, being a boy genius Texas marksman, he is still able to inspire confidence from credulous investors. Zuck's AI initiatives generated huge interest in Meta's stock, with investors betting that Zuck would find ways to keep Meta's growth going, despite the fact that AI has the worst unit economics of any tech venture in living memory. AI is a business that gets more expensive as time goes on, and where the market's willingness to pay goes down over time. This makes the old dotcom economics of "losing money on every sale, but making it up in volume" look positively rosy.

Ai definitely can't replace many (if any) microsoft employees.

can i send an AI bot to all my Teams meetings? THAT would actually increase my productivity.

Microsoft is in the process of downsizing to the tune of 3% of its global workforce and rising.

Could be they really are unironically cruising towards a CEO overseeing a bunch of spam bot email accounts they're treating as headcount.