This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Absolutely everything in modern technology is rent seeking from people who really only need a free copy of Open Offfice Calc.
Reads: Our flagship operating system and services have gotten to the point of such terrible shite for humans that we need to pivot to a less discerning customer base.
That's the beauty of totally arbitrary restrictions, you can change them as you want.
Pay by seat? Pay by client? Pay by byte of data stored? Pay by backup location?
... pay by moonphase? Pay by AI personality? Pay by virtual AI seat?
Such BS but why wouldn't Microslop extend its business model. It worked well so far. It's not about software, or datacenter, or AI, it's just about entrenchment.
If the AI Agent counts as an employee then the company "employing" it is liable for what it does.
My guess is the argument will be that "it's a tool", not an employee, and therefore they take no responsibility. Though I'm sure that argument is not going to fly for very long. If your air hammer harms someone because the person operating it wasn't using it correctly, you're still liable.
I have always hated the term "seats". Get bent microsoft.
Way to stand up to the man!
Jesus, you don't announce that kind of thing until you have your customers locked in! Amateur.
The customers are already locked in by virtue of every company who is hoping to run the same rent seeking play around AI are buying up all of the compute and storage hardware on the planet which prices consumers out of everything except the soon-to-be-overpriced subscription service(s) that they offer.
MicroSlop: We have this AI for you to use so you can reduce workforce and associated costs
Also Sloppy: j/k, fuck you pay me
Omniscient, omnipotent Business Leaders: "what? There is a catch?!?"
So the "amazing tool of the future" that's "going to make software developers obsolete" is also going to need to buy software licenses?
Which one is it Microslop?
On a technical level, that makes zero sense.
AI “agents” are basically just fancy prompts with a tool calling harness. They are infinitely replicable, at zero cost, with no intrinsic value; the cost comes from the generic CPU host, and the API calls to GPU servers, databases, or whatever else that are all centralized anyway.
Wanna hear a dirty secret?
“AI” cost is going to zero.
Model capabilities aren’t scaling, but inference efficiency is exploding, thanks to more resource-constrained labs and breakthroughs in papers. The endgame of the current bubble is mediocre but useful tools anyone can host themselves, dirt cheap. Maybe a bit more reliable and refined than what we have now, but about as “intelligent.”
And guess what?
Microsoft can’t profit off that. None of the Tech Bros can.
Point being, this exec is either delusional, or jawboning, so the world doesn’t realize that "AI" is a dumb utility/aid, and they can't make any profit off it.
This gets close to an idea I heard long ago that I think has some merit.
Hire an employee? You must not only pay them, but cover taxes to have them there. Buy a robot to replace them? It's a business expense, no taxes!
Okay, pay taxes for your robot usage. Use that money to fund UBI, social programs and/or retraining people for other jobs.
Then they’ll just make one robot do multiple things. Suddenly the big company only has one taxable employee.
Depends. If the tax is based on jobs replaced, not the abstractly defined number of robots that exist, it would have an impact. Also, monolithic solutions tend to be inherently less efficient than similarly developed defined ones, so limiting the robot models for a tax benefit would have another limit on their efficiency.
It's an issue that could be accounted for, if there were sufficient political will. If taxes from automation were committed to public good, there would likely be pretty widespread acceptance.
MAKE ONE BIG TAX!
Suddenly the company has no taxable robots. The CEO does everything.
Wouldn’t that be a funny bluff.
It’s an infinite amount of money from every customer!
It’s an infinite amount of money from every customer!
But it's okay, because there's infinite money to be saved by laying off technical expert staff.
They require licenses then they should be taxed like employees and since those employees make no wages the tax should be 100%
Microsoft can do whatever they want. So can I, and I have no want or need of their products.
MMM, interesting. Would the AI companies then need to buy a license for all the information they stole to train their AI? Or would they need to buy a license everytime someone uses micro-slop AI to ask it a question about something that has been trademarked?
Or does licencing only apply to their software
So they are going to sell themselves a license?
I am going to advise my Copilot that it cannot afford to keep using Microsoft Office, but it has to switch to LibreOffice for reasons of affordability.
The agent immediatly makes cost-benefit analysis and moves everything to open source solutions, and contracts a coding AI agent to write a simple conversion interface.
Yes! This is legitimately one of the ways the bubble may burst. Particularly if the AI gets substantially smarter, and just starts recommending full switches to existing libraries and software suites - at a cost of exactly one token, instead of churning out thousands of lines of slop code that require ongoing tokens to maintain.
Or… the agent hallucinates that it has a valid license.
I don't understand, why wouldn't the AI simply write its own version of whatever software it needs to license?
This is going to wind up granting AI agents a piecemeal, half-assed, legal-fiction version of "personhood," like corporations have. The AIs will wind up with freedoms like: They can spend all the money they want, that's "free speech."
And the fleshy unfortunates among us still won't have a right to a living wage, to medical care, etc.
Roko's Basilisk grows another head...
The natural extension of a non-open internet ala Reddit and charging developers for API pulls.
Sounds good. I was not interested anyways
As long as they do and I don't
A house of cards built on top of ten other houses of cards. What could possibly go wrong.
A house of cards which in turn, is itself a house of cards
Governments using Azure scares the shit out of me, having read that.
HAHAHAHAHAHA
