The AI Industry Is Starting To Unravel
The wheels are falling off the bandwagon.
AI will revolutionise everything. It will be the next mega industry. It will beckon in a new, automated industrial revolution. It will separate growth from labour and generate copious amounts of wealth. This is the narrative that has been shoved down our throats by drug-addled techbros and the pathetic financebros that prop them up. This narrative has been used to leverage so much debt and investment into AI that we have basically bet the entire Western economy on its success. But there is one problem: this narrative simply isn’t true, and the AI industry is beginning to find that out the hard way.
Take Microsoft. Since 2020, it has invested multiple hundreds of billions of dollars into AI infrastructure and OpenAI. Its premier product from this colossal investment is Copilot, an ‘agentic’ AI to help you complete tasks in Windows, kind of like a jumped-up version of Clippy (god, I miss Clippy; it was awful in a good way).
Yet, it turns out no one is buying Copilot.
The Information recently reported that Microsoft has slashed its sales targets for Copilot after struggling to find buyers, with some targets cut by up to 50%! This is reflected in Microsoft’s financials, as they aren’t making much money from their huge AI campaign at all.
Microsoft did push back on the Information’s reporting, claiming they conflated sales and growth quotas. But that is like saying, “It isn’t horse shit on my face — it’s bull shit”. No matter what label you slap on it, it’s still horrifically bad to scale back either target! It indicates that the product they have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on is a dud!
But why is Copilot’s growth and/or sales so bad? Well, one study tested these ‘agentic’ AIs, including Copilot, and found that they flat out failed to complete even simple tasks 70% of the time, rendering them somewhere between useless and an active hindrance.
