Hacker News Reader

Comment by nojvek | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft knows they won big in Cloud via Azure Big as in 100s of billions.

They know someone is going to win big in AI. They lost big on the mobile OS. It is the biggest blunder of Microsoft.

They don’t want to lose on AI. Better to hedge your bets.

They have so much money lying around. Better to invest where they think the puck will be.

Yes AI is hyped but I doubt the bubble will burst. Cheap human like intelligence if achieved via AGI is gonna make them 10x more valuable.

Meta is all in, Google is all in, Microsoft is all in.

Tesla is betting they’ll be the biggest robotics company on the planet.

Getting to AGI is like getting to first nuke for tech behemoths.

View on HN

> They lost big on the mobile OS. It is the biggest blunder of Microsoft.

I've watched Bill Gates tell Andrew Ross Sorkin during an interview "if it wasn't for the FTC investigating us for the anti-trust lawsuit, we wouldn't have been distracted/took our eye off the prize on mobile"

How sure are we Microsoft "has what it takes/had what it took" to deliver a phone + operating system as polished as Apple?

Windows 11 is very much measurably worse than Mac OS Sonoma. Littered with ads, in between old UI + new UI patterns, etc.

That's 2024

I'm not super confident I'd prefer a Microsoft/Windows mobile OS and therefore I'm not super confident they could actually have delivered a good one

It doesn't matter if it's any good, it just has to be functional, which Microsoft proved they can do, since windows phones existed. Microsoft has the business side (aka money and patience that Google doesn't) to make it happen. Look at how well Microsoft Teams is doing. Look at Bing, now that it's got ChatGPT behind it.

I had multiple Microsoft Lumia as my primary driver for a couple years. I've been on iPhones for 10+ years total. There were some good (better user interface) and bad (Live logins required in random places) with Windows Mobile. Like Windows, they have pockets of good ideas fractured by their lack of cohesion.

I think Windows Mobile could have been better than Android. In fact, at one point it debatably was. Personally I think Windows is considerably more usable than OSX (yeah I know that’s going to offend people and raise a near-religious argument) and while I won’t say Microsoft’s hardware is or ever was as good as Apple’s, I think they are far better at UI/UX and hardware than Google. Actually I think they’re better at almost everything than Google.

They could have easily been where Android is now if they were two years faster. I think we’d just have a different duopoly and iPhone would still be basically where it is today.

> I won’t say Microsoft’s hardware is or ever was as good as Apple’s, I think they are far better at UI/UX and hardware than Google.

Microsoft-proper hardware is crap, even compared to high-end Google. However, that doesn't matter. My Thinkpad eats Apple hardware for breakfast (as well as anything from Google or Microsoft). Dell has a few nicer laptops in the Precision line which do almost as well as Thinkpad, and definitely better than Apple / Google / Microsoft.

It's the ecosystem.

> Actually I think they’re better at almost everything than Google.

I'd agree, except:

- Hardware

- Office 365 typing synchronization

Google Pixel Pro is quite good (as are most top-of-the-line Google phones), as was the Chromebook Pixel (their top-of-the-line Chromebook, when they made it).

I find this ironic because you could say many of the problems with modern Windows (& Linux) GUI stem from distancing the design from the traditional desktop paradigm and seeking to mobile-fy everything, specially with large click targets.

Microsoft has gotten pretty good at software development. Satya Nadella has been doing a surprisingly good job reforming everything about the company.

That doesn't mean Windows wasn't absolute dogs--t for many years and isn't riddled with a pile of technical debt. Apple, in contrast, started with NeXTStep. I agree about the specifics you mention (built-in ads and spyware), but the core problems with Windows predate modern Microsoft, and can't really big fixed.

If, in 2024, Microsoft decided to invest in building a real mobile OS, I think they could do okay. The bigger problem would be lack of app ecosystem, and the chicken-and-egg problem with that and users. It's not clear even the best mobile OS could displace Android + iOS.

If I were Microsoft, and I wanted to get in, I'd probably fork Android, to maintain app compatibility. Doing that well would mean killing the goose which is currently laying the golden eggs, though, as it would require replacing Google apps with Microsoft ones. A lot of what makes Android work are free Google accounts, whereas Office 365 is $100 per year. I don't think a Microsoft phone would be competitive unless it had all the same stuff for free, and likely more.

I actually feel like Android is starting to be a little bit vulnerable; a privacy-preserving, non-user-hostile version could have pretty good uptake. Again, not the business Microsoft is in.

> Getting to AGI is like getting to first nuke for tech behemoths.

Except, unlike AGI, nukes happened. We are no closer to AGI than we were when we lived in caves. We found a small local maximum (LLMs), I have seen NO evidence that there is a path from here to AGI.

Even if LLMs are a local maxima, given that we're even asking that question implies that we are closer to AGI than caveman who didn't have GPUs, even if we don't know exactly how much closer. Unless it takes us 12,000 years to get to AGI, which, it could, since we don't have it yet, but assuming we get AGI before 12,000 years are up, which is when the end of the Paleolithic era was, then yes, we can say we are closer to AGI than cavemen, regardless of if LLM or GPUs are how it comes about. If it never does, then this comment will age poorly in 12,000 years, but I'm okay with that.

> given that we're even asking that question implies that we are closer to AGI than caveman

"Am I close to having gills and breathing underwater?" The fact that I asked, changes nothing.

You don't think having functional computers being capable of trillions of operations per second is even the slightest bit of an improvement over use of literal stones?

I am genuinely curious: What do you imagine would be the kind of thing that would be a meaningful step towards AGI?

I have no idea when we'll get there for real, but it seems a pretty big assertion that nothing invented in the last 150 years even helped. So what do you think would help?

Ok. I’ll rephrase. In caves we were 0% there. Now we’re 0.00001% there :). Maybe. May need a few more zeroes. What we have helps probably, but hard to be sure how much. Maybe we need 1e40 FLOPS for AGI. In that case going from 1FLOP (human in a cave) to 1e14 FLOPS (a GPU now) is irrelevant.

I’ll believe we’re closer when we have a computer solve a novel problem that is not a simple pattern match to a similar solution. When a computer can reply to “write me a JIT translator from ARMv5 to ARMv7M” with working code. That takes actual thought and we’re not even close.

https://chat.openai.com/share/2ae7883d-3df2-40ab-9184-11ad4a... doesn't result in actually working code, but we're clearly closer than cavemen banging rocks together.

That covers 0.001% of the work - the part that my polit-sci-major no-programming experience sister just explained to me given the prompt. Now do the hard parts :)

The hard parts are just an implementation detail. Let's say a human took 15 minutes to draft all that up. It's about 800 words, and given a typing rate of 50 wpm, it would take that long to just type that in, so that seems reasonable. If that's only 0.001% of the work, it means it would take 3 years to finish the project.

3 years to write a JIT from ARMv5 to ARMv7M?

I think your numbers might be off :)

btw, your polit-sci-major no-programming experience sister seems pretty clever if she was able to understand all that. I ran it past a few cavemen I came across and they didn't quite understand the nuances surrounding runtime environment management.

> just an implementation detail

Try it sometime :)

The question wasn't if I could do a JIT compiler but if the LLM could. Which, there are limitations to the technology, but my opinion is it would go quite far at our current level of technology. Presumably you don't, bit you've shown no evidence that it can't. Whereas I've shown that it's able to decompose the problem and start dotproducting the problem.

I think the real nuke will be that we're already at some basic level of AGI because human consciousness isn't as complicated as we think it is. I'm guessing we're only 10 years out from lowly generative AI getting advanced enough to effectively be what think of AGI now.

This seems like a remarkable chain of reasoning. Out of curiosity, what would convince you that there is a path from LLMs (say) to AGI? What would you expect progress along that path to look like?

It’s not just that. Microsoft is in a better position today to make big money from AI because their products are in millions of corporations. B2B is their bread and butter. Google isn’t in that position, neither is Apple, Meta or most AI companies out there. Microsoft has built trust over decades of selling OSes and offering legendary backwards compatibility in anything they build. This is what the big spenders want.

How is Google not? A quick search points that Google Workspace has a huge market penetration.

Correct, but there’s typically a divide between workspace tools and infrastructure for ownership, compliance, and approval internally.

In a prior life, our IT manager was the owner of Microsoft productivity products and I was the owner of Azure. We both had drastically different risk profiles and governance needs.

Those are all web toys. We’re talking about databases and CRMs and programming languages and all the stuff that make the backbone of big corporations.

The Google Workspace is roughly comparable with Office 365. But Microsoft has a lot more than just Office.

i think you're overlooking iOS instances with "neural" accelerators in the pockets of the people in those corporations.

And how will that materialize? Will Apple build a new AI chip that would be affordable enough to embed in every iPhone, or whatever new device they will invent? Or will it all be cloud based where it should be able to support hundreds of millions of users?

Microsoft already has the cloud infrastructure ready. They don't need to build a new device, or a new operating system, or whatever. They're milking the AI cow as we speak.

Apple has had "AI chips" in the iOS devices for years already. I wonder what you define as an AI chip, though, since we could be discussing different sorts of custom accelerators.

Look at what a company called Groq does. Their chip can generate 500 tokens/second from a model like Llama 2 70b.

https://groq.com/

Microsoft's gunning for a far more short-term win: Search.

Bing has been an also-ran in the search world for a decade (single digit % of search volume compared to Google's 90%+), and AI has shown the first real crack in Google's monopoly.

The future is pretty clearly going to be directly getting AI answers to questions and much less looking at a page of 10 blue links and it's still really unclear if Google is going to make the transition.

>The future is pretty clearly going to be directly getting AI answers to questions

with a subscription model, no ads, and therefore no seo manipulation of content/answers. I'm all for it!

Actually hilarious that you think ads are going away. Microsoft has already started pitching ways to embed advertising and sponsored links in AI responses [1]. They've already built prototypes [2]. It will probably be worse than in search because AI ads will blend more seamlessly into a written or spoken paragraph.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsofts-bing-plans-ai-...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35359338

I believe Google stands apart; although their current offerings sucks, they possess all the necessary components, including software, data, and hardware.

And yet, it's kinda looking like everyone except OAI has hit the same pre-gpt4 capability wall.

I'll hedge my bets on whether AGI is even possible entirely on how much of an improvement we'll see with GPT5. If it is just a marginal improvement, that's basically it for the current ML bubble.

that's an interesting take, i wonder what the graph looks like of model capability over time. If GPT5 doesn't fit in the curve and a year goes by with no one else showing the same rate of progress... is that it for the LLM hype machine?

Edit: i was thinking while walking my dogs, if GPT5 was another great advancement and especially if AGI was around the corner then why would Karpathy leave OpenAI?

>Microsoft knows they won big in Cloud via Azure Big as in 100s of billions.

Malarkey. Microsoft got where they are in cloud by dogfooding every single piece of software they wrote into their cloud platform, every single service they ran on their gaming platform, and every single user on github and minecraft. After that they turned to corporate customers and forced them into the cloud as well and finally made every single end user of windows sign up too (cant miss any of those precious KPIs.) If they won anything it wasnt through genuine consumer desire to use Azure. The efforts were mostly a shuffling of deck chairs and pump-job similar to the IIS wars on netcraft back in the day where M$ would pump their IIS numbers with static content served from parked websites at hosting providers they paid to switch from Apache.

>They have so much money lying around. Better to invest where they think the puck will be.

they also have a track record of building things no one wants and ruining things everyone likes. Minecraft and Github are demonstrably worse in a lot of ways than they were before redmond took the helm. having a lot of money doesnt make you clairvoyant.

>Meta is all in, Google is all in, Microsoft is all in.

who the fuck cares? these are all companies that exist in the nadier of their innovation. that they collectively scrape barrel to come up with tech memes for the business kids isnt exactly remarkable outside the fact they havent delivered anything of value in so long its surprising we still have to hear about them at all.

>Tesla is betting they’ll be the biggest robotics company on the planet.

The guys who cant get self-drive right? run by the same guy who pedaled twitter into the ground? sure.

AI is a meme for these companies...a parlour trick they use on the money pump for just another year longer before its reinvented into some other nonsensical sci fi pablum for general consumption under the late hour of capitalism.

Confrontational replies to comments that doesn't provide actual data or concrete examples to support the counterarguments are not very useful. It would be interesting to know why do you find in GitHub worse than before, or why Minecraft is ruined.

Edit: typo fix.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com