Yes but you forget that spending on compute is spending on machines that the company owns while spending on researchers is spending on other apes that trigger the social hierarchies of executives brains and who have the dreaded key word of “rights”

Companies will try to ruthlessly rid themselves of labor as long as those members of labor have agency and rights.

If someone disagrees they can convince me by explaining why a company wouldn’t choose to spend X on a machine they wholly own vs X on an employee they don’t.

There’s some room for argument that employees can do more than machines can but in the current AI zeitgeist arguing that we have machines with equivalent to human intelligence I don’t see how you wouldn’t see this coming if you believed the zeitgeist.

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RetroTechie 18 hours ago | parent [-]

If compute:people were roughly equal spend, I'd agree with that thinking. But we all know AI's 100s of billions $$ spend is on datacenters+GPUs, not people.

In a way this suggests that MS doesn't aim to be a leader in AI <the core tech>. Only in its applications + related services (read: profit to be had there).

Nothing wrong with that btw. But understandable that fundamental researchers then pack up & leave.

	▲	lovich 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> But we all know AI's 100s of billions $$ spend is on datacenters+GPUs, not people. That’s bolstering my argument. Companies are willing to spend a shit ton on machines. They are not only unwilling to spend on labor but are actively seeking ways to remove labor spend, even though this new technology supposedly makes every unit of labor significantly more productive and thus profitable. This is a cultural choice not an economic one. If I see a company laying off people while admitting they’ve maximized a niche and automation lets them increase profitably, or I see them go on a hiring spree because labor is now netting them 10x-100x-1000x-whatever productivity increase they claim, then I will believe them about the value add of AI. Currently I see companies using AI’s productivity increase as a reason to cut labor and achieve roughly the same productivity. They aren’t competing, they just want to cut out workers.