The immediate catalyst, it seems, is an intensifying focus on capex, or capital expenditures. Microsoft revealed that its spending surged 66% to $37.5 billion in the latest quarter, even as growth in its Azure cloud business cooled slightly. Even more concerning to analysts, however, was a new disclosure that approximately 45% of the company’s $625 billion in remaining performance obligations (RPO)—a key measure of future cloud contracts—is tied directly to OpenAI, the company revealed after reporting earnings Wednesday afternoon. (Microsoft is both a major investor in and a provider of cloud-computing services to OpenAI.)
Willingness to look is a pretty important factor. LLMs reduce the personal cost incurred to look up information, similar to how search engines saved us from having to go to the library for every question we had.
They also introduce much more uncertainty and remove your ability to judge the trustworthiness of the information you’re receiving. That’s not to mention the social and environmental costs.
You could say the same about people who used the early 2000s Google by entering full questions with natural language and clicking “I’m feeling lucky”. There are always going to be wrong ways to use a tool. But we’re discussing whether there exists a right way. And that right way includes verifying the information you receive, just like you would if you found it through a regular search engine.
The social and environmental costs are real. That’s not the criticism you gave and not what the responses are disagreeing with.