Matisyahu's Blog

Finished work tonight and I noticed it had started raining – basically it has been going on and off the whole night so I decided I’ll take the night off from going for a walk and instead chill out. Had some weird behaviour today with the work VPN crashing out and ended up going offline a few times but I cleared the cookies and cache, checked for updates via the company portal, shut down the laptop then rebooted – long story short it appeared to have fixed the problem. Ah technology, just when you think you’ve mastered it there is a spinner being bowled and you don’t know how to deal with it but eventually it works out in the end.

Just a follow up to the comment I made about Microsoft 365 – one of the things I do like about Microsoft Edge is that the grammar and spell checker is so much better than what is included with Chrome. It reminds me of the video:

The one thing I am reminded of when I visit YouTube is why you never go to the news.com.au YouTube channel – a News Corp outlet that interview idiots and attract morons in the comment section. Unfortunately, social media has emboldened idiots into believing that the noise they make online is a representation of their numbers when in reality they just make a lot of noise – like an empty soft drink can with a couple of stones inside it rolling down a flight of stairs.

The narrative that has been making the rounds recently has been talk about AI being in a giant bubble and how what we’re going to see is a correction in the next year or two. For me I put myself into that camp because I look around at what is happening and see a change in relationships between organisations. For example, the massive agreement that Oracle has signed with OpenAI, the move by Microsoft to build its own models after ending its exclusive agreement with OpenAI, Meta downsizing its AI team and nVidia working closely with Intel which make me wonder nVidia is realising that the hype cycle around AI is coming to an end and they need something to come in as a replacement or at least a partial replacement for that demand.

One to look at is the relationship between OpenAI and Microsoft – I wonder whether OpenAI approached Microsoft with the business proposal and Microsoft made the decision that they weren’t going to plough billions of dollars into building data centres. Maybe there is something Microsoft knows that OpenAI isn’t willing to admit – that the hype cycle of AI is coming to an end, businesses are now questioning about how it can be integrated into actual products to improve productivity rather than just an expensive toy not to mention Microsoft working on their own specialised AI models rather than having a single one that tries to be everything to everyone (and do it a mediocre job at it while consuming more energy than required). Is Oracle’s play that they build out for OpenAI, when OpenAI run out of cash that Oracle is one of their creditors where they pick up OpenAI for a song then integrate it into their own cloud-based service offerings.

This is the reason I believe the wailing and gashing of teeth regarding Apple and what they were doing in AI (along with the tech media and YouTube tech dude bros going on and on about how they’re ‘losing’ and ‘behind their competition’) was over blown. When you’ve got Google getting better results using less power and less hardware than OpenAI and Meta (using their own LLAMA model) I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple is taking a good look at the layout of the land before making any big investments and if there is going to be something I wouldn’t be surprised if we see Apple lean on Google given that Apple already has a long standing relationship with them. I think long term what you’re going to see is Apple employing specialised models, making use of on device AI where possible and for most people, apart from the oxygen thieves going on about how they’re going to sue Apple, for most people they either don’t know or don’t care about AI outside of it being a curiosity. How do we know it is merely a curiosity? because the dearth of paying customers willing to pay the amount that OpenAI is demanding and I would hazard to guess that would very much be the same when it comes to Google Gemini but then again for the Google AI Pro it is NZ$36.99 along getting more Google Drive storage and integration into Google Apps (which appears to be better value than what OpenAI is offering).