But how are they abandoning AI? They're a major part of the leading AI company.
The thing is 99% of the people I know either played with their proposition and found it irritating or don't give a shit. They literally just want to be left alone and for people not to keep changing things. The machine is a means to an end and that end is well defined for them already. Only the tech and investment industries are gushing all over this and the latter are only riding the hype.
Typical MS this. Give it 5 years and read this comment again...
The interesting thing for me is the push for AI hardware as a baseline in consumer chips, right now I'd assume training and inference is done on their servers, but as it moves from a development/exploration phase to regular operations and scales up they want to offload inference to save costs, and probably provide a better experience running a model locally.
And the Azure hardware situation is so crap they had to buy in capacity from Oracle!
Source: https://www.oracle.com/news/announcement/oracle-cloud-infras...
You've just described every AI company. AI is not even their core business, but MS is certainly in the best position out of any of the Big Tech companies to deliver a successful consumer product. Whether someone else will step in and steal their lunch, or they just fumble the product, only time will tell, but none of this is an indication that they're "abandoning AI" as GP mentioned. Quite the contrary―they're heavily invested in it.
The rest of your post is pure speculation, but I'll set a reminder for 5 years from now in case your crystal ball is legit.
That sounds exactly like how they did Cortana too -> "It'll be GREAT!!!". Fast forward a few years and they're ripping it out of everything as it's actually not useful.