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.)
“market reaction suggests that more capital isn’t going to be a viable substitute for a business model anymore.”
Time to find the next vague thing that investors can pour trillions into without really knowing what it is or does.
It’ll be quantum computing. Since the last hype around it, a lot of progress has been made to the point that quantum computers are actually becoming useful, since error correction is now mostly resolved.
I would be surprised. Quantum computers haven’t even been proven to be theoretically useful.
Robotics. It will be a pivot to robotics.
Challenge there being that seems to have proven elusive. It’s not too surprising, but trying to use machine learning for robotics is actually really hard.
Driving is much easier, training data with video, audio, and other sensor input complete with how the human manipulated steering and two pedals.
But direct human interaction with the environment is both much more complicated than three controls and is not instrumented. They are trying to build training data from remote operators, but it turns out we aren’t very good at controlling these things remotely anywhere close to acting directly. We are terrible teachers and there’s a fraction of the actionable data that other more successful models had to work with.
If an AI sees a video of someone doing something, it can make a similar video, but can’t model how that might map to what it would see as unrelated motor and hydraulic operation.
Indeed. It will be a shitshow with all sorts of attempts to juice the share price via obfuscation of the actual abilities, like musk has been doing already. It won’t have many tangible outputs, but they’re desperate for the next big growth idea, so here we are.
Which will create a labor boom, to operate the robots, a la Tesla
Don’t forget, though, it does that one thing for that one reason I forgot already as I typed it… But its still good, clearly!