Satya Nadella says AI is yet to find a killer app that matches the combined impact of email and Excel While the likes of OpenAI and Alibaba are talking up artificial general intelligence (AGI) capable of replacing humans, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella argues AI's success should be measured by its benefit to the global economy – which may come once the technology finds a killer app to match the impact of email or Excel. "Us self- …
Isnt it sad that the only use these people can think of for AI is to make yet more money. No mention of using it to reduce the work for ordinary folk... not so much those lovely 1950's images of our 'robot helpers', far more the terminator style robot overlords, but funneling the money to the select few. bah.
That's not actually a compelling argument in favour of the Wall Street and Big Business way. It just indicates that the pension funds have been sucked in by the same hype and nuttery as other investors.
Pension funds in particular are the sort of investor who should be taking the view of "ten years is short term" and scale the rest to match, not "profit at any cost and fuck tomorrow".
That would depend on your definition for "wet", but I think you'd find it hard to prove. Wet tends to be used to describe things that have a lot of liquids in them, and that would make water one of the wettest things around, along with other liquids with no solids at all. Something doesn't have to be a liquid to be wet, if for example a solid got covered in a liquid, but that doesn't make liquids non-wet.
Don't hold your breath. The best-case scenario for the current "AI" is that it increases productivity. Increments in productivity never result in more free time for workers. That's not because of evil overlords; it's just the way economy works. See the real industrial revolution, which brought productvity increases that dwarf any that could ever come from AI, but at the same time the ordinary folk got worked nearly to death.
There are systems that, historically, actually work to give workers more free time and other benefits. They were used successfully to eventually bring some sanity to the industrial revolution, for example. Functional unions. An informed electorate. A state that's stronger than companies. Things like that. Not coincidentally, these structures have been being systematically discredited, corrupted and dismantled for a while now. The final nails are getting driven into the coffins as we speak.
Yes. If we want to shorten the 5-day work week, it requires workers (unions) doing something about it. Otherwise those productivity gains just mean we either maintain the status quo or work even longer.
Just like how we got a 5-day work week of 35-40 hours mostly M-F 9-5 depending on country in the first place.
This, at least on the surface, indicates that modernity has granted us more sleep:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/hunter-gatherers-need-less-seven-hours-sleep-180956953/
which might be something like more free time.
Albeit, if the choice of how to use more free time is to sleep more, depression might be on the diagnosis.
Btw, while I agree with you about progressive systems; how do they stand up to a dystopian democratic theatre that votes on issues related to who you let touch your privates and the price of cheetoes?
I'm holding out hope that if AI ever achieves power, it applies a sigma-six inspired rule with a guillotine too all that dead-weight.
>Btw, while I agree with you about progressive systems; how do they stand up to a dystopian democratic theatre that votes on issues related to who you let touch your privates and the price of cheetoes?
They do not stand up. They are not standing up. We are in a negative feedback loop of poor system functioning -> distrust in systems -> election of system disrupters -> poor system functioning. I understand the why and how of each individual step, but I don't know how to break it. It might just have to run all the way to collapse.
In Nadella's favor, he didn't say only MS should be making a profit, he specifically said GDP. I much prefer the view Nadella is announcing here to the uber-Hype of AGI being on verge of replacing all workers so front us another 3 trillion please. (FWIW - no thanks to total recall, although that has nothing to do with an evaluation of this particular statement by Nadella).
@Paul Garrish "Isnt it sad that the only use these people can think of for AI is to make yet more money."
To me it's bloody funny, after years of hype and the billions spent, they have still to find a killer app, That's the one thing these people can't think of, a use for AI* that has a ROI (make more money).
* Generative AI
LOL you only need to see the screaming outrage at any mention of going to a 4 day working week with no reduction in pay.
We'll never get to the utopian ideal of an easier life for anyone becasue the politics of envy kicks in immediately, "I had to work 60hr a week to make a crust 50yr ago so you must work a 60hr week as well".
It's not hard to find lists of headlines along the lines of "young people are all lazy and don't want to work" going back to the 1800s. Business wan't to pay you as little as possible for the most work as possible and it's most likely been the case for the entirity of human history.
Once you're aware of the gaslighting you see it everywhere and most of us are complicit in it.
Email has given us Reply to all, To or CC instead of BCC and simply sending an email to the wrong person. A top ten list of excel disasters misses out that 20% of genetics papers have errors introduced by Excel autocorrupt.
I am sure AI is yet to find a killer but is is doing well at false accusations. Given a bit more time AI should be able to generate spectacular news headlines, just like email and Excel.
Digging a little deeper, email satisfied a communication need by basically enabling a cheaper and fast letter service, initially within organisations (1960s). The external email service, we now take for granted, took another couple of decades to arrive (early 1990s).
Spreadsheets did similar, making it easier to create and maintain tabular data and thus communicate. VisiCalc, was probably the first killer app, followed rapidly by 1-2-3 for the personal computer.
The trouble is does AI facilitate communication, or is it, in the case of the LLM chatbots actually hindering communication. I suggest find an application where AI represents a massive improvement over what went previously and it may stand a chance of becoming more widely used and accepted.
You scrap what ya got at windows 11. Stop the shenanigans, and release a bright shiny new os 12 from all the lessons and terrible mistakes you've made in the past.
Of course, the billionaire class might have to forgo their billion dollar paycheck or 100 million dollar bonus for a couple of years. Some hardship would have to be endured by the 1% I'm afraid.
A reset may be in order tho.
On perusing relatives W10 laptop to identify why the new Outlook mail app that replaced the perfectly good mail app, I find that (a) it’ll never run W11 due to unsupported CPU, but it’s still asking said relative to check if it can run W11 and (b) somehow Copilot got installed.
I’d love to have been a fly on the wall at the MS meetings where management were insisting on these changes and engineering were screaming WTF are you doing stupid managers.
You can deploy whatever you like, wherever you like. The problem is that the output from "these intelligences" is often wrong, irrelevant, downright stupid or violates copyright and other laws. In other words, they're not actually intelligent. And there will never be a killer app for an unreliable garbage generator.
> Just imagine how a multinational corporation like us did forecasts pre-PC, and email, and spreadsheets.
So he hasn't *quite* got the guts to claim that it was Outlook that gave the world email, but conveniently forgets that the spreadsheet became available to people well before most of them got email! And that spreadsheet was *not* Excel - personal-computer using CFOs were banging away at VisiCalc and then Lotus 1-2-3, easily beating usage of MS's efforts at the time - and even that wasn't Excel! Ah, Multiplan, how soon we forget you.
Sure, Excel overtook Lotus, in particular, because MS was ready to bring it out on Windows before the other products and now has a lock on the business world (mostly due to the need to be bug-compatible with Excel?!) but dang, it seemed expensive![1]
> Just imagine
I get the feeling more than a few of us don't need to just imagine, we can just remember!
[1] Not needing to do any heavy lifting[2], we had a few copies of the Borland demo source code spreadsheet program in use for a while!
[2] Although that meant we never realised what so many people do now, that Excel is actually a database /s
To me AI is the "killer app".
It kills one's will to live everytime AI shit is forced on your whether you want it or not.
That's before we even mention the resource hog it is in terms of electricty and water.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce85wx9jjndo#:~:text=Sir%20Keir%20Starmer's%20plan%20to,to%20prevent%20them%20from%20overheating.
Yeah, nice BBC link ... if AI doesn't outright kill us all by direct agentic violence or the inducement of unrecoverable mental distress, it'll likely do so by attrition, further desertifying the land, and pricing us out of food, drinking water, the electricity to run our EVs (at first) and smartphones (eventually), and even work (both on site and from home).
The "Critical National Infrastructure" that are AI datacenters is going to turn us all irreversibly into vulture gnaw ... if they even make it through the AI-Pockyclypse!
They're just driving headlong into A.I. without any useful applications on the horizon. It's all triggered by marketing and stock-market valuation, nothing more. Windows is dead and Azure's growth is slowing down so they need something new to fuel the fire (stock market price). Just like with internet and cloud every engineer within Microsoft is currently pivoting towards A.I. since a wealth of new products using this nonsense needs to hit the market, useful or not, or their stock price will tank.
The entire stock market is basically pathetic and lethargic.
Why don't you get AI to take out the garbage? Or mow the lawn?
Just like all the intellectual socialist leftists, AI wants to sit around and make decisions for me like some Soviet Politburo. But get down here in the trenches and unclog the pipes? "Sorry. Not my job."
Ok, just for a brief moment, LET US PRETEND, that the now being worked on / developed LLMs, (I refuse to call it A.I. because it most definitely is NOT Artificial INTELLIGENCE) actually do surprise everyone and EASE the "work" of all of today's "my job is not to MAKE anything, my job is to sit on conference calls, or Teams, or Zoom meetings, and I really don't "do work" people, and you really THINK they will take that extra time allotted to them to ummm, do more "work"??? These are human beings, and we as a race are flawed with being "lazy", not all, but there are a significant amount out there today, trust me. They will only use that EXTRA TIME to do things like surf Facebook, The Net, or other things that fall under TIME WASTING bullcrap, and NOT DO MORE "work". So you are spending billions to make people WORK LESS. Goodluck with that!!!
If it actually worked, then at least some people would be expecting more performance out of people and penalizing lazy ones who didn't do it. It has worked before. When computers sped up certain operations, most workers, either by choice or by management started doing more things. The problem is that this might also happen now, when the tools don't actually improve productivity but some have come to believe that they do. If someone has been convinced to buy expensive LLMs, they will probably conclude that they must improve productivity, otherwise they wouldn't have bought them, and that if they're not seeing productivity increases, it must be because someone is being lazy.
"If someone has been convinced to buy expensive LLMs, they will probably conclude that they must improve productivity, otherwise they wouldn't have bought them, and that if they're not seeing productivity increases, it must be because someone is being lazy."
Because, God forbid, they'd spent all that money on something and it is a pile of crap....
That was the point. It's easy for people to convince themselves that there is some other problem when the alternative is that they've made a bad decision. It's common to ascribe any bad decision, whether or not it was obvious beforehand, as stupidity. People don't want to feel stupid or to have others view them as stupid, so in defense, they find reasons why that's definitely not what is going on.
I've seen lots of people do it, for example a person who doubled down on a massively expensive contract they could have cancelled at will because doing so would suggest they didn't pick right the first time. I've also done it myself. This is why, while I'm not concerned about the comments made in the original post of this thread, I'm concerned about people trying to identify the lazy before the tool can improve productivity.
"Then somebody said: 'Hey, I'm just going to take an Excel spreadsheet, put it in an email, send it around, people will go edit it, and I'll have a forecast.' "
Er, no. Most of us had file sharing networks long before email, let alone Excel.
Is this guy some kind of Macintosh shill?
-A.
Notice the weasel words *killer app* and *impact*; not willing to express whether the *impact* was good, maybe like the asteroid that seeded life on this planet, or bad, like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs.
Lookout, Encel and Wierd were, and continue to be, awful programs propagated by the ethos that "cheap and good enough" trumps (intentional) "good".
Yes, Lookout was a *killer app*; it killed decades of innovation and progress. As did Encel.
But maybe this Press Retch was composed by a self-effacing regression analysis
Email cannot be considered an "app" as such, in fact I believe it is one of the most productivity-killing tools in the world.
About Excel: I noticed quite a lot of people using Excel as a word processor or database system, "because it can do it". But a "killer app"?
So Nadella is looking for the "one-app-fits-all-purposes" app?
This is exactly the point I was going to make!
Excel's position as a "killer app" is more like being the lowest common denominator. It's flexible enough to let non technical people do practically anything they wish and I'd argue that this often harms "productivity"
For example I'll be asked to take an arbitrary list of tasks or goals written in Excel by a project manager, and manually add related ticket numbers (e.g. JIRA) and their status. It's then expected that these statuses be manually synchronised periodically with the real tickets. It's pointless and stupid but the powers that be don't see anything wrong with it.
Got a list of project issues? Excel
Want to manage a list of hardware assets? Excel
Want to draw a crude block diagram? Excel
List of team members/contacts? Excel
Heck a friend of mine who's a true power user and did national statistics for a living, ended up making a garden plan in Excel because it was just the tool he knows best!
In my own work environment Excel + OneDrive can't even handle the most basic synchronisation as still doesn't seem to support any kind of collaborative editing...
Create a new excel file and save it. Immediately there's a warning that the Server version of the file has changed and would I like to keep my version or the server version!?!?! It's a new file for Christ's sake!
And then people decide to send spreadsheets to multiple people by email for editing so then you end up with multiple edited forks of the original file. In some cases the owner of the file will then spend hours copying and pasting bits from the various edits into the master version...
It's a hideous mess and I can only hope the the "killer" AI / AGI / LLM application is something significant better and more meaningful than email spam and crappy "creative" uses of Excel.
AGI that has been trained on information scraped from the Internet is unlikely to result in great economic impact beyond enhancing search into something like "search and summarize". There is simply too much nonsense in the training base.
For economic impact AI will need to be trained on the proprietary internal information base of each major corporation or organization. For example, Intel's AI would have to be trained on everything Intel knows about designing and manufacturing integrated circuits in order for the AI to find a path out of Intel's current mess. Same with Boeing.
"For example, Intel's AI would have to be trained on everything Intel knows about designing and manufacturing integrated circuits in order for the AI to find a path out of Intel's current mess. Same with Boeing."
That might actually work. Even though hallucinations are endemic to LLMs because of the way they operate, they'd be much clearer to people who are familiar with the information it was trained on. There might even be fewer of them with a smaller training base.
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