Microsoft Explains that Its AI Leads to Smart Software Capacity Gap Closing

May 7, 2025

dino orange_thumb_thumb_thumbNo AI, just a dinobaby watching the world respond to the tech bros.

I read a content marketing write up with two interesting features: [1] New jargon about smart software and [2] a direct response to Google’s increasingly urgent suggestions that Googzilla has won the AI war. The article appears in Venture Beat with the title “Microsoft Just Launched Powerful AI ‘Agents’ That Could Completely Transform Your Workday — And Challenge Google’s Workplace Dominance.” The title suggests that Google is the leader in smart software in the lucrative enterprise market. But isn’t Microsoft’s “flavor” of smart software in products from the much-loved Teams to the lowly Notepad application? Isn’t Word like Excel at the top of the heap when it comes to usage in the enterprise?

I will ignore these questions and focus on the lingo in the article. It is different and illustrates what college graduates with a B.A. in modern fiction can craft when assisted by a sprinkling of social science majors and a former journalist or two.

Here are the terms I circled:

product name: Microsoft 365 Copilot Wave 2 Spring release (wow, snappy)

integral collaborator (another bound phrase which means agent)

intelligence abundance (something everyone is talking about)

frontier firm (forward leaning synonym)

‘human-led, agent-operated’ workplaces (yes, humans lead; they are not completely eliminated)

agent store (yes, another online store. You buy agents; you don’t buy people)

browser for AI

brand-compliant images

capacity gap (I have no idea what this represents)

agent boss (Is this a Copilot thing?)

work charts (not images, plans I think)

Copilot control system (Is this the agent boss thing?)

So what does the write up say? In my dinobaby mind, the answer is, “Everything a member of leadership could want: Fewer employees, more productivity from those who remain on the payroll, software middle managers who don’t complain or demand emotional support from their bosses, and a narrowing of the capacity gap (whatever that is).

The question is, “Can either Google, Microsoft, or OpenAI deliver this type of grand vision?” Answer: Probably the vision can be explained and made magnetic via marketing, PR, and language weaponization, but the current AI technology still has a couple of hurdles to get over without tearing the competitors’ gym shorts:

  1. Hallucinations and making stuff up
  2. Copyright issues related to training and slapping the circle C, trademarks, and patents on outputs from these agent bosses and robot workers
  3. Working without creating a larger attack surface for bad actors armed with AI to exploit (Remember, security, not AI, is supposed to be Job No. 1 at Microsoft. You remember that, right? Right?)
  4. Killing dolphins, bleaching coral, and choking humans on power plant outputs
  5. Getting the billions pumped into smart software back in the form of sustainable and growing revenues. (Yes, there is a Santa Claus too.)

Net net: Wow. Your turn Google. Tell us you have won, cured disease, and crushed another game player. Oh, you will have to use another word for “dominance.” Tip: Let OpenAI suggest some synonyms.

Stephen E Arnold, May 7, 2025

Google Versus OpenAI: Whose Fish Is Bigger?

May 6, 2025

dino orange_thumb_thumb_thumb_thumb_thumbNo AI, just a dinobaby watching the world respond to the tech bros.

Bing Crosby quipped on one of his long-ago radio shows, “We are talking about fish here” when asked about being pulled to shore by a salmon he caught. I think about the Bingster when I come across “user” numbers for different smart software systems. “Google Reveals Sky High Gemini Usage Numbers in Antitrust Case” provides some perjury proof data that it is definitely number two in smart software.

According to the write up:

The [Google] slide listed Gemini’s 350 million monthly users, along with daily traffic of 35 million users.

Okay, we have some numbers.

The write up provides a comparative set of data; to wit:

OpenAI has also seen traffic increase, putting ChatGPT around 600 million monthly active users, according to Google’s analysis. Early this year, reports pegged ChatGPT usage at around 400 million users per month.

Where’s Microsoft in this count? Yeah, who knows? MSFT just pounds home that it is winning in the enterprise. Okay, I understand.

What’s interesting about these data or lack of it has several facets:

  1. For Google, the “we’re number two” angle makes clear that its monopoly in online advertising has not transferred to becoming automatically number one in AI
  2. The data from Google are difficult to verify, but everyone trusts the Google
  3. The data from OpenAI are difficult to verify, but everyone trusts Sam AI-Man.

Where are we in the AI game?

At the mercy of unverifiable numbers and marketing type assertions.

What about Deepseek which may be banned by some of the folks in Washington, DC? What about everyone’s favorite litigant Meta / Facebook?

Net net: AI is everywhere so what’s the big deal? Let’s get used to marketing because those wonderful large language models still have a bit of problem with hallucinations, not to mention security issues and copyright hassles. I won’t mention cost because the data make clear that the billions pumped into smart software have not generated a return yet. Someday perhaps?

Stephen E Arnold, May 6, 2025

Deep Fake Recognition: Google Has a Finger In

May 5, 2025

dino orangeSorry, no AI used to create this item.

I spotted this Newsweek story: “‘AI Imposter’ Candidate Discovered During Job Interview, Recruiter Warns.” The main idea is that a humanoid struggled to identify a deep fake. The deep fake was applying for a job.

The write up says:

Several weeks ago, Bettina Liporazzi, the recruiting lead at letsmake.com was contacted by a seemingly ordinary candidate who was looking for a job. Their initial message was clearly AI-generated, but Liporazzi told Newsweek that this “didn’t immediately raise any flags” because that’s increasingly commonplace.

Here’s the interesting point:

Each time the candidate joined the call, Liporazzi got a warning from Google to say the person wasn’t signed in and “might not be who they claim to be.”

This interaction seems to have taken place online.

The Newsweek story includes this statement:

As generative-AI becomes increasingly powerful, the line between what’s real and fake is becoming harder to decipher. Ben Colman, co-founder and CEO of Reality Defender, a deepfake detection company, tells Newsweek that AI impersonation in recruiting is “just the tip of the iceberg.”

The recruiter figured out something was amiss. However,  in the sequence Google injected its warning.

Several questions:

  1. Does Google monitor this recruiter’s online interactions and analyze them?
  2. How does Google determine which online interaction is one in which it should simply monitor and which to interfere?
  3. What does Google do with the information about [a] the recruiter, [b] the job on offer itself, and [c] the deep fake system’s operator?

I wonder if Newsweek missed the more important angle in this allegedly actual factual story; that is, Google surveillance? Perhaps Google was just monitoring email when it tells me that a message from a US law enforcement agency is not in my list of contacts. How helpful, Google?

Will Google’s “monitoring” protect others from Deep Fakes? Those helpful YouTube notices are part of this effort to protect it seems.

Stephen E Arnold, May 5, 2025

AI-Fueled Buggy Whip Executive Cannot Be Replaced by AI: A Case Study

May 2, 2025

I read about a very optimistic executive who owned buggy whip companies in the US. One day a horseless carriage, today known as a Tesla, raced past this office. The person telling me the story remembered the anecdote from her required reading in her first year MBA strategic thinking class. The owner of the buggy whip company, she said. “Those newfangled machines will not replace the horse.”

The modern version of this old chestnut appears in “Marc Andreessen Says One Job Is Mostly Safe From AI: Venture Capitalist.” I hope Mr. Andreessen is correct. The write up states:

In the future, AI will apparently be able to do everybody’s job—except Marc’s.

Here’s the logic, according to the write up:

Andreessen described his job as a nuanced combination of “intangible” skills,
including psychological analysis of the entrepreneurs he works with: “A lot of it
is psychological analysis, like, ‘Who are these people?’ ‘How do they react under
pressure?’ ‘How do you keep them from falling apart?’ ‘How do you keep them
from going crazy?’ ‘How do you keep from going crazy yourself?’ You know, you
end up being a psychologist half the time.” “So, it is possible—I don’t want to be definitive—but it’s possible that that is quite literally timeless. And when, you know, when the AI is doing everything else, that may be one of the last remaining fields that people are still doing.”

I found this paragraph from the original story one that will spark some interest; to wit:

Andreessen’s powers of self-delusion are well known. His Techno-
Optimist’s Manifesto, published a few years ago, was another great window into
a mind addled by too much cash and too little common sense. If you’re one of
Silicon Valley’s Masters of the Universe, I guess having weird, self-serving views
just comes with the territory.

Several observations:

  • In my opinion, some VCs will continue to use AI. Through use and greater familiarity, the technology will gain some traction. At some point, AI will handle jobs once done by wild-eyed people hungry for riches.
  • Start up VCs may rely upon AI for investment decisions, not just gaining through the business plans of fund seekers. If those “experiments” show promise, whoever owns the smart VC may develop a next generation VC business. Ergo: Marc can stay, but he won’t do anything.
  • Someone may stumble upon an AI VC workflow process that works faster, better, and more efficiently. If that firm emerges, Mr. Andreessen can become the innovator identified with digital horse accelerators.

How does one say “Giddy up” in AI-system-to-AI-system communication lingo? Answer maybe: Dweep, dweep, dupe?

Stephen E Arnold, May 2, 2025

Outsourced AI Works Very Well, Thank You

May 2, 2025

Tech experts predict that AI will automate all jobs and make humanity obsolete. If that’s the case then why was so-called AI outsourced? Engadget reports how one “Tech Founder Charged With Fraud For ‘AI’ That Was Secretly Overseas Contract Workers.”

The tech founder in question is Albert Sangier and the US Department of Justice indicated him on misleading clients with Nate, his financial technology platform. Sangier founded Nate in 2018, he raised $40 million from investors, and he claimed that it could give shoppers a universal checkout application powered by AI. The transactions were actually completed by human contractors located in Romania, the Philippines, and bots.

Sangier deception was first noted in 2022:

“ ‘This case follows reporting by The Information in 2022 that cast light on Nate’s use of human labor rather than AI. Sources told the publication that during 2021, “the share of transactions Nate handled manually rather than automatically ranged between 60 percent and 100 percent.’”

Sangier isn’t the only “tech leader” who duplicitously pretends that human workers are actually an AI algorithm or chatbot. More bad actors will do this scam and they’ll get more creative hiding their steps.

Whitney Grace, May 2, 2025

Anthropic Discovers a Moral Code in Its Smart Software

April 30, 2025

dino orange_thumb_thumb_thumbNo AI. This old dinobaby just plods along, delighted he is old and this craziness will soon be left behind. What about you?

With the United Arab Emirates starting to use smart software to make its laws, the idea that artificial intelligence has a sense of morality is reassuring. Who would want a person judged guilty by a machine to face incarceration, a fine, or — gulp! — worse.

Anthropic Just Analyzed 700,000 Claude Conversations — And Found Its AI Has a Moral Code of Its Own” explains:

The [Anthropic] study examined 700,000 anonymized conversations, finding that Claude largely upholds the company’s “helpful, honest, harmless” framework while adapting its values to different contexts — from relationship advice to historical analysis. This represents one of the most ambitious attempts to empirically evaluate whether an AI system’s behavior in the wild matches its intended design.

image

Two philosophers watch as the smart software explains the meaning of “situational and hallucinatory ethics.” Thanks, OpenAI. I bet you are glad those former employees of yours quit. Imagine. Ethics and morality getting in the way of accelerationism.

Plus the company has “hope”, saying:

“Our hope is that this research encourages other AI labs to conduct similar research into their models’ values,” said Saffron Huang, a member of Anthropic’s Societal Impacts team who worked on the study, in an interview with VentureBeat. “Measuring an AI system’s values is core to alignment research and understanding if a model is actually aligned with its training.”

The study is definitely not part of the firm’s marketing campaign. The write up includes this quote from an Anthropic wizard:

The research arrives at a critical moment for Anthropic, which recently launched “Claude Max,” a premium $200 monthly subscription tier aimed at competing with OpenAI’s similar offering. The company has also expanded Claude’s capabilities to include Google Workspace integration and autonomous research functions, positioning it as “a true virtual collaborator” for enterprise users, according to recent announcements.

For $2,400 per year, a user of the smart software would not want to do something improper, immoral, unethical, or just plain bad. I know that humans have some difficulty defining these terms related to human behavior in simple terms. It is a step forward that software has the meanings and can apply them. And for $200 a month one wants good judgment.

Does Claude hallucinate? Is the Anthropic-run study objective? Are the data reproducible?

Hey, no, no, no. What do you expect in the dog-eat-dog world of smart software?

Here’s a statement from the write up that pushes aside my trivial questions:

The study found that Claude generally adheres to Anthropic’s prosocial aspirations, emphasizing values like “user enablement,” “epistemic humility,” and “patient wellbeing” across diverse interactions. However, researchers also discovered troubling instances where Claude expressed values contrary to its training.

Yes, pro-social. That’s a concept definitely relevant to certain prompts sent to Anthropic’s system.

Are the moral predilections consistent?

Of course not. The write up says:

Perhaps most fascinating was the discovery that Claude’s expressed values shift contextually, mirroring human behavior. When users sought relationship guidance, Claude emphasized “healthy boundaries” and “mutual respect.” For historical event analysis, “historical accuracy” took precedence.

Yes, inconsistency depending upon the prompt. Perfect.

Why does this occur? This statement reveals the depth and elegance of the Anthropic research into computer systems whose inner workings are tough for their developers to understand:

Anthropic’s values study builds on the company’s broader efforts to demystify large language models through what it calls “mechanistic interpretability” — essentially reverse-engineering AI systems to understand their inner workings. Last month, Anthropic researchers published groundbreaking work that used what they described as a “microscope” to track Claude’s decision-making processes. The technique revealed counterintuitive behaviors, including Claude planning ahead when composing poetry and using unconventional problem-solving approaches for basic math.

Several observations:

  • Unlike Google which is just saying, “We are the leaders,” Anthropic wants to be the good guys, explaining how its smart software is sensitive to squishy human values
  • The write up itself is a content marketing gem
  • There is scant evidence that the description of the Anthropic “findings” are reliable.

Let’s slap this Anthropic software into an autonomous drone and let it loose. It will be the AI system able to make those subjective decisions. Light it up and launch.

Stephen E Arnold, April 30, 2025

Google Wins AI, According to Google AI

April 29, 2025

dino orange_thumb_thumbNo AI. This old dinobaby just plods along, delighted he is old and this craziness will soon be left behind. What about you?

Wow, not even insecure pop stars explain how wonderful they are at every opportunity. But Google is not going to stop explaining that it is number one in smart software. Never mind the lawsuits. Never mind the Deepseek thing. Never mind Sam AI-Man. Never mind angry Googlers who think the company will destroy the world.

Just get the message, “We have won.”

I know this because I read the weird PR interview called “Demis Hassabis Is Preparing for AI’s Endgame,” which is part of the “news” about the Time 100 most wonderful and intelligence and influential and talented and prescient people in the Time world.

Let’s take a quick look at a few of the statements in the marketing story. Because I am a dinobaby, I will wrap up with a few observations designed to make clear the difference between old geezers like me and the youthful new breed of Time leaders.

Here’s the first passage I noted:

He believes AGI [Googler Hassabis] would be a technology that could not only solve existing problems, but also come up with entirely new explanations for the universe. A test for its existence might be whether a system could come up with general relativity with only the information Einstein had access to; or if it could not only solve a longstanding hypothesis in mathematics, but theorize an entirely new one. “I identify myself as a scientist first and foremost,” Hassabis says. “The whole reason I’m doing everything I’ve done in my life is in the pursuit of knowledge and trying to understand the world around us.”

First comment. Yep, I noticed the reference to Einstein. That’s reasonable intellectual territory for a Googler. I want to point out that the Google is in a bit of legal trouble because it did not play fair. But neither did Einstein. Instead of fighting evil in Europe, he lit out for the US of A. I mean a genius of the Einstein ilk is not going to risk one’s life. Just think. Google is a thinking outfit, but I would suggest that its brush with authorities is different from Einstein’s.  But a scientist working at an outfit in trouble with authorities, no big deal, right? AI is a way to understand the world around us. Breaking the law? What?

The second snippet is this one:

When DeepMind was acquired by Google in 2014, Hassabis insisted on a contractual firewall: a clause explicitly prohibiting his technology from being used for military applications. It was a red line that reflected his vision of AI as humanity’s scientific savior, not a weapon of war.

Well, that red line was made of erasable market red. It has disappeared. And where is the Nobel prize winner? Still at the Google, that’s the outfit that is in trouble with the law and reasonably good at discarding notions that don’t fit with its goal of generating big revenue from ads and assorted other ventures like self driving taxi cabs. Noble indeed.

Okay, here’s the third comment:

That work [dumping humans for smart software], he says, is not intended to hasten labor disruptions, but instead is about building the necessary scaffolding for the type of AI that he hopes will one day make its own scientific discoveries. Still, as research into these AI “agents” progresses, Hassabis says, expect them to be able to carry out increasingly more complex tasks independently. (An AI agent that can meaningfully automate the job of further AI research, he predicts, is “a few years away.”)

I think that Google will just say, “Yo, dudes, smart software is efficient. Those who lose their jobs can re-skill like the humanoids we are allowing to find their future elsewhere.

Several observations:

  1. I think that the Time people are trying to balance their fear of smart software replacing outfits like Time with the excitement of watching smart software create a new way experiencing making a life. I don’t think the Timers achieved their goal.
  2. The message that Google thinks, cares, and has lofty goals just doesn’t ring true. Google is in trouble with the law for a reason. It was smart enough to make money, but it was not smart enough to avoid honking off regulators in some jurisdictions. I can’t reconcile illegal behavior with baloney about the good of mankind.
  3. Google wants to be seen as the big dog of AI. The problem is that saying something is different from the reality of trials, loss of trust among some customer sectors, floundering for a coherent message about smart software, and the baloney that the quantumly supreme Google convinces people to propagate.

Okay, you may love the Time write up. I am amused, and I think some of the lingo will find its way into the Sundar & Prabhakar Comedy Show. Did you hear the one about Google’s AI not being used for weapons?

Stephen E Arnold, April 29, 2025

China, Self-Amusement, and AI

April 29, 2025

China pokes fun at the United States whenever it can. Why? The Middle Kingdom wants to prove its superiority over the US. China is does have many technological advances over its western neighbor and now the country made another great leap forward with AI says Business Insider: “China’s Baidu Releases Ernie X1, A New AI Reasoning Model.”

Baidu is China’s equivalent of Google and the it released two new AI models. The first is Ernie X1 that is described as a reasoning model that delivers on par with Deepseek R1 at half the price. It also released a multimodal foundation model called Ernie 4.5 that could potentially outperform GPT-4.5 and costs only a fraction of the price. Baidu is also developing the Ernie Bot, a free chatbot.

Baidu wants to offer the world cheap AI:

“Baidu’s new releases come as Silicon Valley reckons with the cost of AI models, largely spurred by the latest drops from Deepseek, a Chinese startup launched by hedge fund High Flyer.

In December, Deepseek released a large language model called V3, and in January, it unveiled a reasoning model called R1. The models are considered as good or better than equivalent models from OpenAI but priced “anywhere from 20-40x cheaper,” according to analysis from Bernstein Research.”

China is smart to develop inexpensive AI, but did the country have to make fun of Sesame Street? I mean Big Bird?

Whitney Grace, April 29, 2025

Synthetic Data: It Sucks, Says Designers

April 25, 2025

Some would argue taking actual customers out of market research is a bad idea. Smashing Magazine supports that reasonable perspective in, “How to Argue Against AI-First Research.” Yes, some AI enthusiasts praise synthetic user testing as a valuable new tool. The practice is exactly what it sounds like—using LLMs to build fake customers and performing market research on them. Admittedly, it is much faster and cheaper than surveying actual humans. But what good is that if the results are bad? Writer Vitaly Friedman explains:

“When ‘producing’ user insights, LLMs can’t generate unexpected things beyond what we’re already asking about. In comparison, researchers are only able to define what’s relevant as the process unfolds. In actual user testing, insights can help shift priorities or radically reimagine the problem we’re trying to solve, as well as potential business outcomes. Real insights come from unexpected behavior, from reading behavioral clues and emotions, from observing a person doing the opposite of what they said. We can’t replicate it with LLMs.”

But budgets are tight. Isn’t synthetic user data better than nothing? No. No it is not. We learn:

“Pavel Samsonov articulates that things that sound like customers might say them are worthless. But things that customers actually have said, done, or experienced carry inherent value (although they could be exaggerated). We just need to interpret them correctly. AI user research isn’t ‘better than nothing’ or ‘more effective.’ It creates an illusion of customer experiences that never happened and are at best good guesses but at worst misleading and non-applicable.”

Not only that, cutting real customers out of the equation means not catching AI errors. And there will be errors. Furthermore, emphasizes Friedman:

“Synthetic testing assumes that people fit in well-defined boxes, which is rarely true. Human behavior is shaped by our experiences, situations, habits that can’t be replicated by text generation alone. AI strengthens biases, supports hunches, and amplifies stereotypes.”

All of which could send marketing dollars down the wrong, unprofitable track. As suspicious as we are of AI hype, even we can admit the tech is good for some things. Market research perhaps is not a core competency.

Cynthia Murrell, April 25, 2025

AI Crawlers Are Bullying Open Source: Stop Grousing and Go Away

April 25, 2025

AI algorithms are built on open source technology. Unfortunately generative AI is harming its mother code explains TechDirt: “AI Crawlers Are Harming Wikimedia, Bringing Open Source Sites To Their Knees, And Putting The Open Web At Risk.” To make generative AI work you need a lot of computer power, smart coding, and mounds of training data. Money can buy coding and power, but (quality) training data is incredibly difficult to obtain.

AI crawlers were unleashed on the Internet to scrap information and use it for training models. The biggest information providers for crawlers are Wikimedia projects and it’s a big problem. Wikimedia, which claims to be “the largest collection of open knowledge in the world,” says most of its traffic is from crawlers and it is eating into costs:

“Since January 2024, we have seen the bandwidth used for downloading multimedia content grow by 50%. This increase is not coming from human readers, but largely from automated programs that scrape the Wikimedia Commons image catalog of openly licensed images to feed images to AI models. Our infrastructure is built to sustain sudden traffic spikes from humans during high-interest events, but the amount of traffic generated by scraper bots is unprecedented and presents growing risks and costs.”

This is bad because it is straining the Wikimedia datacenter and budgetary resources. Wikimedia isn’t the only information source feeling the burn from AI crawlers. News sites and more are being wrung by crawlers for every decimal of information:

“It’s increasingly clear that the reckless and selfish way in which AI crawlers are being deployed by companies eager to tap into today’s AI hype is bringing many sites around the Internet to their knees. As a result, AI crawlers are beginning to threaten the open Web itself, and thus the frictionless access to knowledge that it has provided to general users for the last 30 years.”

Silicon Valley might have good intentions but dollars are more important. (Oh, I am not sure about the “good intentions.”)

Whitney Grace, April 25, 2025

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