It's because they have no idea what "AI" actually is. They think you tell it to make profits, and it just does so. Anyone who has used any kind of "AI" for an hour knows that it's mostly just shit at everything except the absolutely most basic shit.

Some applications of AI are pretty neat. For example the DeepL translation tool. I convinced my employer to spend money on that. And they make 55 million in profits.

But forcing AI down our throats, like Google does with those horrible auto-dubbed videos? There's no way that will ever be profitable

It's seeing a vision of the future and the technology that will transform it but not having the patience to let it happen and wanting to jump right to printing money. I think the fact that it happened to the internet should show that even incredibly useful tech can go through this process. It happened with video games, too. They see the potential but their eyes are only on the money, so they don't have the ability to meet that potential.

And in the case of the metaverse, they killed it off entirely by wanting to build a virtual storefront and advertising space before building a virtual space people would want to visit. Facebook thought the idea would sell itself just based on pop culture, despite none of the pop culture versions involving just a headset and trackers to enter a world you can only see and hear, but not touch (even though it might inconsistently react to your touch). The tech wasn't there but FB had FOMO and wasted billions chasing it anyways.

Exact same thing is happening with AI. LLMs improved by leaps and bounds, and once it was conversational, people with money went all in on the idea of what it could become (and probably still will, just not anytime soon and it won't be chatbots, actually I suspect we might end up using LLMs to communicate/translate with the real AIs, though they'll likely be integrated into them because that communication is so useful).

They don't understand that it takes more than just having a good idea or seeing tech before it explodes, you have to have passion for that tech, a passion that will fight against the urge to release it to make money, not a passion to release it regardless to make money sooner and the intent to fix it up later.

It's why they are trying to shove it into everything despite no one wanting it, because they think the exposure will drive demand, when it's actually exposure to something desirable that drives real demand. And exposure is instead frustrating or dangerous because it's often wrong and full of corporate censorship (that hasn't once been accurate but has always been easy to bypass any time I've run into it).

I just wonder if MS bet the farm on it, or only bet a survivable loss. Like is the CEO just worried about his job or the entire company's future?

I do think it's disingenuous to downplay how effective AI can be. If you ask certain AI a question, it will give you a faster and better answer than using a search engine would, and will provide sources for further reading if requested.

And the art, whilst not as good or as ethical as human art, can still be high quality.

Being against AI is completely valid, but disparaging it with falsehoods does nothing but give the feeling that you don't know what you're talking about.

It's simple. They thought they would fire everyone and replace them with chatbots. All the admins? Chatbots. All the bookkeepers? Chatbots. Purchasing? Chatbots. Assembly lines? Robots running chatbot software.

It never occurred to them that training on large datasets does not make for good decision-making. It just makes the chatbot more wordy.