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points by rvz 3 days ago | 0 comments

Maybe Microsoft achieved AGI internally.

[–] pier25 3 days ago

or maybe they just need to lower their operating expenditure because they're spending too much money...

[–] gottorf 3 days ago

Or maybe, every tech company is still shedding the overhiring they did during the Covid years.

[–] vkou 3 days ago

A hundred years from now, COVID overhiring will still be the excuse trotted out in every layoff cycle.

[–] philipwhiuk 3 days ago

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/num...

They gained 40,000 people in 2022. It's not a totally crazy argument.

[–] rvz 3 days ago

Both can be true:

1) "AGI" has been achieved internally which means...

2) ...we need to lower "operating expenditure" which includes i.e (human employees) so that the AI agents can take over.

Lastly, they will use the remaining capital to build homes (data centers) for these AI agents.

[–] _vertigo 3 days ago

How banal. The first action after achieving "AGI" is not taking over the world, curing cancer, or anything fantastic like that, but rather "lowering operating expenditure"..

[–] pier25 3 days ago

if they had actually reached AGI they would simply fire +90% of employees and make a huge announcement

[–] j45 3 days ago

Maybe they are shedding workforce to spend more on AI infrastructure like many of the other layoffs to remain competitive.

The layoffs could have nothing to do with the employees.

[–] Spooky23 3 days ago

They've figured out that they can offer poorly performing services that suck and nobody cares. The company will continue to explore that concept until people care.

I run an org with 200k employees. We're on our 4th significant outage with M365 services in a month. We're talking major stuff -- including user data like email getting deleted by various processes. Their approach is pretty much "meh".

[–] bigbadfeline 3 days ago

> The company will continue to explore that concept until people care.

MS is an entrenched monopoly which is hard to move off of, especially in times of low budgets and tough debt markets. On the other hand, LLMs are reshaping the competitive landscape and MS might be reacting to that threat, in their usual MS way.

[–] tayo42 3 days ago

They have net income in the billions per quarter

[–] drillsteps5 3 days ago

There is a joke "When it comes to AI psychosis, Sam Altman was likely patient 0"

Given all insane bets made by previously (somewhat) reasonable and successful business owners, I wonder how much of a joke it really is...

[–] BobbyTables2 3 days ago

Of course it’s a joke.

In order to be “patient 0”, he’d have to be human in the first place…