Microsoft AI Chief: Staying in the Frontier AI Race Will Cost Hundreds of Billions (businessinsider.com)
- Reference: 0180424449
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/12/19/1852238/microsoft-ai-chief-staying-in-the-frontier-ai-race-will-cost-hundreds-of-billions
- Source link: https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-ai-ceo-mustafa-suleyman-cost-hundred-billions-superintelligence-2025-12
When asked whether startups could compete with Big Tech, Suleyman said "it's hard to say," adding that "the ambiguity is what's driving the frothiness of the valuations." Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in September he'd rather risk "misspending a couple of hundred billion" than fall behind in superintelligence.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-ai-ceo-mustafa-suleyman-cost-hundred-billions-superintelligence-2025-12
I'll tell you what will cost Microsoft billions (Score:3, Insightful)
Fed up customers fleeing in droves.
Nobody likes Microsoft. Nobody has ever really liked Microsoft. But everybody puts up with Microsoft's low quality products and abuse because Microsoft is a monopoly that's hard to escape - particularly in corporate settings, and for gaming.
But they've really cranked up the abuse to 11 recently, with Windows becoming a terrible advertisement platform, requiring new hardware when people's old machines were still serviceable, the constant privacy invasion, relentless push for online accounts, for their cloud offerings, and now their godforsaken AI shit that literally nobody likes nor want. Not to mention upcoming price hikes for the privilege of getting all that enshittification thrown at your face...
Microsoft has gone too far for a lot of people, and people react by going to Apple or Linux. And quite frankly, personally, I desperately want Microsoft to continue shooting themselves in both feet like they're doing so they make themselves irrelevant as quickly and as thoroughly as possible, and we're finally, at long last, rid of them at last. 50 years we've been waiting! That's like half a century dude...
Re: (Score:2)
> Microsoft is a monopoly that's hard to escape
Only by the addicted. I escaped around 2000 when I installed my first FreeBSD server, surprised at it taking ten minutes instead of forty-five to install a MS 2000 server without even all the updates. On the desktop side, sure, I had to give up a few minor software habits, but I replaced them with others and I never had to look back for my daily computing fix.
In fact, going open source made everything more interesting again.
Re: (Score:2)
Hopefully their well-deserved end is not that far off. They are nothing but a force of the negative.
Who Pays? (Score:5, Interesting)
Who pays the hundreds of billions.
I can assure you that the average person will NOT pay the monthly fee required to earn back that investment. Can Microsoft's stockholders tolerate hundreds of billions in losses?
Oracle investors don't seem to be able to tolerate it. Oracle stock is currently down ~42% from their big-AI-spending-announcement high. That was only 3 months ago.
Re: (Score:2)
Good question. Nobody on the customer side has any real business case that could ever justify that. On the other hand, we have too many ossified big tech companies (no, "AI" is not fixing that, it makes things worse), so Microsoft dying or Oracle collapsing would be entirely good things.
Re: (Score:2)
Same here. It will do a lot of damage and hurt a lot of people, but the longer it runs, the worse the inevitable collapse will be.
Re: (Score:2)
You know how large investors make money right? One day, Investor "A" wakes up and goes to Taco Bell and orders a dozen double cheese bean burritos. Then he takes a big dump, producing a ten pound steaming pile of shit. And now you have investor B come in, who offers $1 million dollars for an ounce of that ten pound steaming pile of shit. That means investor A is now "worth" a billion dollars, because his ten pound steaming pile of shit is "valued" at a billion dollars (valuation is determined at $1 million
Re: (Score:2)
> I can assure you that the average person will NOT pay the monthly fee required to earn back that investment. Can Microsoft's stockholders tolerate hundreds of billions in losses?
I am going to Friday afternoon armchair bet that Microsoft makes waaaaay more profit selling to companies than to individual consumers. I going to bet it's not even close.
So for AI, where Microsoft wants to make that money is by selling their AI scam to companies. Who will then turn around and use it to scam - er, sell - it to their customers and shareholders by claiming their "investment" in AI tools from Microsoft will drive a "new age" of productivity and profitability.
And when the house of cards come
Re: (Score:2)
Over what time period? If I told you that if you give me $100 now, I'll give you $300 in 10 years, that's a fairly good deal if you think I have a good chance of delivering on that or enough other income sources to squeeze if that investment goes sideways. It's the same idea here only in the billions of dollars as opposed to the hundreds.
Microsoft investors either put up with this same shit the last several dozen times the company stuck a lot of money into some dubious but potentially profitable proposit
Translation (Score:2)
We want crazy amounts of money too, don't listen to Sam, spend it here.
Keep up the arms race (Score:2)
Wouldn't it be funny if all of these companies that are trying to out AI each other all go bankrupt in the arms race.
Re: (Score:2)
It would also be good for progress. Lets hope it happens soon.
Then Just Say No to AI (Score:2)
To the consumer, AI is a gimmick. Why whither what little trust customers have in you and your attempts to mitigate the privacy of people who have paid you their hard earned cash?
Duh. (Score:3)
> the high salaries companies are paying individual researchers and technical staff
Stop paying them. Just replace them with AI.
Well, Mustafa Suleyman (Score:2)
I guess we can start paying for AI by using your salary. After all, you goomers are the ones who want this, it is only fair we start by making you pay.
Hyperbole is so 2025 (Score:2)
Any of these corporate guys still spouting the bigger bigger bigger mantra are just showing what tools they are. All the cool kids are finally tempering their statements.
Can we just admit LLMs are underwhelming? (Score:3)
With each new generation, the cost per prompt goes up and the improvements don't even seem to be all that tangible. LLMs are not going to get us actual AI. Companies spend more and more and deliver the same crappy error-ridden responses. They can claim whatever they like on synthetic "trust me bro" benchmarks, but I've never noticed a difference in day to day from Claude versions. I shudder at the thought of someone using that to write real software. I find it useful from time to time, but it definitely has proven it doesn't know what it's doing...and it gets more expensive with each generation (from an electricity perspective alone)
Re: (Score:2)
I can, you can, but the usual idiots cannot. In actual reality, the LLM approach is a dead end, because it cannot be improved beyond a pretty low level of quality. There may (or may not) be long-term applications for specialist LLMs, but even that looks less and less likely. Agents based on LLMs? Pure hallucinations that they will ever be secure or reliable.
The only thing that keeps the hype going now is that too many organizations have invested far too much in them and too many people are very easy to mani