AI running out of juice despite Microsoft's hard squeezing
- Reference: 1741955903
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/03/14/ai_running_out_of_juice/
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Yeah, with the release of [1]ChatGPT-3.5 in November 2022 , AI became a huge deal. Now, though, the AI revolution, once heralded as the next big leap for businesses worldwide, is facing a sobering reality check. Recent data reveals a marked slowdown in AI adoption.
The simple truth is that AI is not living up to its rep. Sure, Elon [2]Musk still thinks "there will come a point where no job is needed ." Especially in the US government, where his [3]Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is using AI to help fire employees and, eventually, replace them.
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Other people, however, have figured out that AI is not ready for prime job time. AI adoption rates in business are stalling. In the US, general AI adoption rates are grinding to a halt. According to the Fall 2024 [5]Slack Workforce Index , AI adoption growth rates among US workers have slowed over the last three months to a mere percentage point gain versus [6]near-double digit gains in the same period a year earlier .
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Why? Well – surprise, surprise! – they don't know how to use it. Christina Janzer, Slack's senior VP of research and analytics, explained: "Too much of the burden has been put on workers to figure out how to use AI. To ensure adoption of the technology, it’s important that leaders not only train workers but encourage employees to talk about it and experiment with AI out in the open.”
People are experimenting with AI, though often with [9]AI sexting rather than anything that affects a business's bottom line. I find it interesting, though, that neither workers nor executives know how to use AI for the job.
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A recent IDC research paper found that while IT decision-makers expect to triple their AI investments in 2025, there's still a disconnect between their spending and their doubts about AI's value. The study found that " [11]37 percent of management remain skeptical or have reservations toward AI ."
Indeed, 45 percent of companies rank AI implementation as a significant challenge, with 38 percent citing integration issues as a primary concern. In other words, they still don't know what they're doing, and it shows. As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently observed, there's [12]still no killer app for AI and we still don't understand how to use AI effectively in business. This, mind you, is from someone who's invested over 10 billion bucks in AI.
If you look closely at what Microsoft has been doing with AI, you'll see that [13]it's pulling back in places some of us wouldn't think to look. Microsoft has canceled more than a gigawatt of datacenter operations in addition to numerous 100-plus MW agreements.
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As Edward Zitron, CEO of tech PR biz EZPR, [15]points out : "These numbers heavily suggest that Microsoft – the biggest purchaser of Nvidia's GPUs and, according to investment bank TD Cowen, 'the most active [datacenter] lessee of capacity in 2023 and 1H24' – does not believe there is future growth in generative AI, nor does it have faith in (nor does it want responsibility for) the future of OpenAI."
Less electrical juice means fewer datacenters and fewer AI resources, which means Microsoft isn't seeing as much AI demand as it thought it would.
Why not? Well, [16]Canalys reckons AI licenses aren't selling as much as they'd hoped . Is it too expensive, or does it lack value or a killer app? I'd say both.
At the recent Canalys Channel Forum in Berlin, Alistair Edwards, Canalys chief analyst, said: "Almost every customer is struggling to really define how they can deploy AI effectively internally, how they can drive change within their business organizations and processes, and how they can build the models cost effectively to deliver the returns they need."
[17]Hey programmers – is AI making us dumber?
[18]Musk's move fast and break things mantra won't work in US.gov
[19]Windows 10's demise nears, but Linux is forever
[20]The US government wants developers to stop using C and C++
Simultaneously, AI continues to deliver plausible, but wrong, answers to questions. The BBC, for example, found that when asked to summarize news stories, [21]over half the time major chatbots make blunders in their responses. For example, both ChatGPT and Copilot insisted Rishi Sunak and Nicola Sturgeon were still in office after they had exited.
Worse still, according to a [22]Nature study , the bigger, "better" LLMs tend to be the ones that deliver the worst answers. I've been noticing this myself. I use [23]Perplexity now as my main search engine , but in the last few weeks alone I've found its answers to be less trustworthy. This is ticking me off.
What about Microsoft Copilot? Isn't it going great guns? It appears not. An October Gartner survey found [24]few companies have moved Copilot initiatives beyond the pilot stage . In particular, they're finding tangible business impact to be elusive. In addition, implementation and security measures are requiring more effort than anticipated.
More recently, in a [25]Gartner discussion , a government IT executive noted: "Copilot is so far behind that it is frustrating to use, makes frequent mistakes, and doesn't really have the omniscient integration across the Azure, Office 365, Sharepoint Teams space that it should to be effective at good use cases."
He concluded: "On the other hand, it's really great for preparing meeting minutes and for skipping meetings because of the lovely summaries. But that makes it a one-trick pony. And by the way, why have meetings if they get skipped?"
Good question.
A major trend is that AI's primary business use case is to eliminate make-work, such as most meetings. One especially amusing use of this is OPM Reply. This AI-driven tool enables employees to use AI to answer DOGE's ultimate micromanagement demand of asking everyone for five-point emails on what they did last week. We have a perfect ouroboros of AI-driven pointless work since DOGE is believed to use AI to read these messages.
Pointless is increasingly becoming the word I use for AI. Yes, it can be helpful when used carefully as a tool, but that's not what I see happening. Instead, AI's being used as either a lazy way to create second-rate work or to make work. Businesses are also finally figuring this out. In Gartner Hype Cycle terms, we're entering the Trough of Disillusionment. I'll wake you up when we start climbing the Slope of Enlightenment. ®
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/03/in_brief_ai/
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/02/tesla-boss-elon-musk-says-ai-will-create-situation-where-no-job-is-needed.html
[3] https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/04/tech/doge-ai-government-cuts-expert-concerns/index.html
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2Z9Rgs3Bf6DiqvlhPhXbJNAAAAUQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[5] https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/blog/news/the-fall-2024-workforce-index-shows-ai-hype-is-cooling
[6] https://www.salesforce.com/news/stories/ai-adoption-slows-statistics/
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Z9Rgs3Bf6DiqvlhPhXbJNAAAAUQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Z9Rgs3Bf6DiqvlhPhXbJNAAAAUQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[9] https://artsmart.ai/blog/ai-girlfriend-statistics-2025/
[10] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Z9Rgs3Bf6DiqvlhPhXbJNAAAAUQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/06/lenovo_ai_report/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/26/microsofts_nadella_wants_to_see/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/24/does_microsoft_pull_back_on/
[14] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Z9Rgs3Bf6DiqvlhPhXbJNAAAAUQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[15] https://www.wheresyoured.at/power-cut/?ref=ed-zitrons-wheres-your-ed-at-newsletter
[16] https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/29/microsoft_preps_big_guns_for/
[17] https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/21/opinion_ai_dumber/
[18] https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/07/opinion_column_musk/
[19] https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/28/windows_10_demise_linux/
[20] https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/08/the_us_government_wants_developers/
[21] https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/12/bbc_ai_news_accuracy/
[22] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03137-3
[23] https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/16/opinion_column_perplexity_vs_google/
[24] https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/5818647
[25] https://www.gartner.com/peer-community/post/anyone-executed-valuable-use-cases-using-ms-copilot-d-willing-to-share-welcome-thoughts-links-to-previous-posts-where-might
[26] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: nobody who knows how it actually works is surprised
I see improvements in copilot (as a non-registered user): months ago before making it swear to Dog I had work around it for a bit, now most of the times it never eve bother withe the usual boilerplate "I see you are frustrated ...", just basically asks me to teach it more "local expressions" ;-)
Re: nobody who knows how it actually works is surprised
IBM about a decade ago used Watson to ingest publications (or medical equivalent of white papers) on cancer treatments, ingest all the current of the time research etc. and then IBM had Watson review the medical notes of cancer victims in Japan who have some of the best oncology people and hospitals in the world. Apparently Watson was able to offer lines of treatment to those patients that had never occurred to the oncologists because as a human with a day job he or she could not possibly keep up with all the current research. Watson could read and "understand" a far greater swath of data but importantly this was peer reviewed data, stuff that had been fact checked etc.
Interesting use case, then IBM went and tried to release it early and fell flat on their face https://www.statnews.com/2017/09/05/watson-ibm-cancer/
But it does offer a good insight to one possible use case. Flagging useful data hidden in a sea of data. As long as the sea of data is somewhat curated and validated I could see potential use cases.
Re: nobody who knows how it actually works is surprised
And IBM took care to feed good data into the system instead of scraping all best slurs, extremes and conspiracies from reddit and 4chan/9chan.
Re: nobody who knows how it actually works is surprised
Yep, big difference right there.
If I'm not mistaken, Watson was still of the "excpert system" generation, and did not use pseudo-hallucinating-AI.
The fact that Watson failed is because, well, it was IBM.
I have a colleague who wants to spend over 40K in AI hardware...
.... so he can get his own AI to summarize and query documents/manuals so he doesn't have to read them - something he is also paid for. He fails to understand that often reaading documentation tells you things you didn't know where there, or that could be done, while quertying just return you things you look for only. And if it does report wrong info, you might discover when it's too late. But hey, he's a sysadmin so being lazy is part of his job.
Re: I have a colleague who wants to spend over 40K in AI hardware...
There's a very fine line between laziness and efficiency...
Re: being lazy is part of his job
I'm a programmer. Project manager, senior developer, 25 years of experience in my specific domain.
And yes, I'm lazy as fuck. But that means that I'm going to test my code in every concievable configuration to ensure that it does its job right.
The lazy part comes after, when I just have to select the data set and push a button to get a report.
But before I let that button go into production, you can be sure that I have worked my ass off to make sure that it will respond properly to every concievable case.
But yeah, I'm lazy as fuck.
If only!
The wheels remain on for the foreseeable future, unfortunately.
What's the next boondoggle?
Why does anyone listen to firms like gartner? How much money has been wasted by firms on AI that they'll never use or break even on.
Gartners bloody hype cycle is the biggest joke..I was actually at a tech event the other week & they were talking about how AI is at the top of the hype cycle and then next sentence is how great AI is...
Utter madness! The isn't a killer app. Copilot is worse than useless. Videos on AI search trying to convince you that a 20 minute conversation with AI is somehow better than a single line search
And now on git there's an app called sidekick for mac which seems to be towards a locally run AI tool for free. So even that application isn't going to pay that $trillion odd they want to spend on nvidia hardware.
Bets on what the next gartner hype doodad will be?
Re: What's the next boondoggle?
Next hype candidates:
Fusion power
Space mining
Carrying buckets of water to the ocean
Quantum computing
Single photon memory storage
Anti-gravity waves
Hype for the Hype
War without War
Computing computers
Humanoid robots
Just to name a few.
Re: What's the next boondoggle?
To that list, Elongated Muskrat will claim that they are all HIS and HIS alone because he is a Genius.
Re: What's the next boondoggle?
I believe in fusion, imagine how far we'd be if the money burnt on openai was spent on that..France is at 22 minutes of power.
Listen to Ed Zitrons podcast on this stuff..the numbers are insane. You could literally fix worldwide poverty with the money openai is looking to burn over the next couple of years
Re: What's the next boondoggle?
"France is at 22 minutes of power"
Not quite. The plasma has been maintained for 22 minutes, that's not the same as being over unity end to end (It's still impressive but practical Fusion is still as far off as it's ever been and those neutrons are problematic)
Re: What's the next boondoggle?
Climate change-based drought is going to be a real problem. If anyone wants to invest at an early stage, I have revolutionised the dehydrated water market. Last chance - don't miss out. Some stock is still available for those with a few million to spare. Chicken feed compared to the costs of investing in AI.
Re: What's the next boondoggle?
Perhaps they could replace Gartner with an AI.
Hasn't that been done already ?
MS AI running out of steam?
Why don't you hire Elon the Almighty? Then he'll fire 90% of your workforce and claim $100B per year in savings.
Your SEC reports will look fantastic for 1 or 2 quarters then you will get hit with the realisation that AI is not the best thing since sliced bread. Don't worry, Elon can sell you some obedient robots. No more water cooler conversations.... 24 hours of work a day.
The above text was written by a human. No AI in sight and is intended as a bit of sarcasm. Personally, I wish MS would fire itself. The world would be a much better place without them.
Re: MS AI running out of steam?
"then you will get hit with the realisation that AI is not the best thing since sliced bread"
and then 2-5 years later we'll start seeing quiet announcements of things being facilitated by AI
It's a tool, not a universal panacea. It's already useful but people want flying cars so it's easy to sell hype hype for that. Remember: People once brushed their teeth with radium toothpaste because it was the new cure-all
As much as I agree with the sentiment that AI is overhyped...
...I don't get why it's up to the businesses and workers to figure out what, exactly, are the business user cases for AI.
Used to be back in the day when there was a new technology that was revolutionary, you'd have experts coming by and explaining to the enterprise exactly how and where the technology was supposed to be implemented if you wanted maximum returns.
Just dumping the product in the middle of the office was like dumping an interpreter for a programming language on to the laps of an executive and expecting them to figure it out. Of course they wouldn't, and why should they? They're not the experts on this damn stuff, the supposed technology providers are.
Like, aside from the fact that none of this stuff is reliable and actually good for the environment, of course dumping it on the laps of employees and expecting them to figure it out and experiment... first off, who's got the time to bloody “experiment”? Their department's budget got cut, their metrics have gone up, the labour market is shite, and their workforce has been cut 80% while pay has remained the same. And secondly... this doodad is meant to bloody replace them. Even if they've got the time, no one wants it, or at the very best no one's terribly enthusiastic about finding ways for the bosses to unlock more out of them.
Re: As much as I agree with the sentiment that AI is overhyped...
Shouldn't the AI be able to figure out what the business use cases are for AI? After all, digesting huge masses of information about a problem, digesting it, and spitting out simple responses based on what others have done is exactly what AI is supposed to excel at. In other words, shouldn't business consultancies be just AIs?
If an AI can't do that, then perhaps AI isn't all that it has been cracked up to be.
Re: As much as I agree with the sentiment that AI is overhyped...
perhaps AI isn't all that it has been cracked up to be.
Spolier: it isn't. Nowhere near.
They gave the AI scam their best shot, but...
quote: As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently observed... 10 billion bucks.
That's like the Pope admitting that they don't really know if all that God and Heaven stuff really exists or not after all, but they are going to keep running with it anyway.
AI will have niche value and may support some interface options. The evangelical stuff - universal adoption, gamechanging tech - is a scam. An enthusiastic scam because the last few - the Metaverse, NFTs etc - didn't go so well.
They want to repeat their success with the cloud/subscription/SaaS scam, so this time they are giving it their all and forcing us to pay for it even if we don't want it.
We do still operate on a capitalist basis, and forcing us to buy stuff we don't want, that doesn't work, costs us more than it makes and even has a misrepresentational name - it isn't really intelligent - was never going to go well.
MS have spent years polluting their own ecosystem with duff updates, the withdrawal of options, endless restrictions, terrible OS versions, and the misery of subscription services. Forcing AI on users the way they tried to force W10 downloads on us, may well be the straw that breaks the camel's back. No matter how much of a pain in the arse Linux and the Linux community are, there are just too many reasons now to avoid MS.
Re: They gave the AI scam their best shot, but...
>> Forcing AI on users the way they tried to force W10 downloads on us, may well be the straw that breaks the camel's back. No matter how much of a pain in the arse Linux and the Linux community are, there are just too many reasons now to avoid MS. <<
This camel's back broke at the start of 2020. I may be a pain in the arse, but this Linux user just gets on with stuff, and does not have to put up with Microshit. I do, however, chuckle at the crap Microsoft still throws at users.
So sorry for you lot that just HAVE to stay in the Windows eco-system. You are being shafted, and you know it.
"Yes, it can be helpful when used carefully as a tool"
Exactly what is that use for which it could be a helpful tool?
"I'll wake you up when we start climbing the Slope of Enlightenment."
Much appreciated although I shouldn't imagine that would be much before the Last Trump.
There is no killer app. All these companies are so desperate on deploying AI on ...whatever... that the actual problem to be solved appears to be lost.
So the obvious AI response must be 42. Now let us aim for the question.
LLM "AI" is simply bullshit generation
"AI" is very useful for everyone who needs some plausible (might not be true) text or images or video.
"AI" is completely useless for anyone who wants outputs to be accurate and/or true.
"ChatGPT iS Bullshit": [1]https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5
nobody who knows how it actually works is surprised
1. AI: Picture recognition
2. AI: Picture remix
3. AI: Text remix
It is all a simply pattern-recognition-remix thing. The AI part in the existing pattern recognition is more like that existing tech got renamed, a bit refined, and the computing power did the rest. It is still tech from the late-80's early-90's.
The most annoying thing about that hype bubble is that it shadows the actual good neural network usages, optimization in engineering, cancer recognition and so on.