Comment on Another Xbocalypse begins: Microsoft are reportedly closing or spinning off Double Fine, Ninja Theory and Compulsion

supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

• definitemaybe@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  I’ve been thinking about this, and I think it’s likely mostly to do with cashflow. They won’t say that, of course, since implying any cashflow challenges is a massive red flag for analysts, but it’s the only thing that makes sense.

  Basically:

  1. Microslop is all-in on AI.
  2. AI infrastructure is incredibly expensive to build, requiring intensive capital investment over years to build out capacity.
  3. AI models are incredibly expensive to train.
  4. Microslop’s gaming division also requires intensive capital over years to deliver games.
  5. Microslop has finite cashflow available to reinvest in long-term bets.
  6. Microslop has to choose where to allocate it’s capital investments, and gaming is less attractive to upper management than AI.

  Because AI is the “it thing” right now, the reputational harm to Microslop for, well, being called Microslop because of their self-inflicted sloppening and the reputational harm from writing off all their investments in gaming is less than the perceived reputational harm they would face of they weren’t seen as being technology leaders in the AI space.

  So, it all comes back to the AI bubble; investors are pumping up any company “doing AI”, so it’s become the target that Microslop cares about, and is redirecting all available cashflow in a mad gold rush to establish Copilot and their agentic OS, regardless of all consequences.

  On the plus side, the world will be a better place with more investment in open software, so Microslop imploding will be fantastic… But that’s not going to do anything, at least not now, for the tens of thousands of laid off employees as they crash and burn.

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  • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    What pisses me off so much about the AI bubble as someone who was trained in science is the basic obvious fact that if you have a magic tool that can “solve any problem” but that takes a nearly impossible amount of energy to do so, taking so much energy that everything else has to be sidelined in order to power this magic problem solving tool… than you are just restating that the tool you have is incapable of problem solving.

    Suppose there are two problem solving machines A and B. Problem solving machine A does not work very well but it takes a small amount of energy, problem solving machine B is like AI in that it can tackle “any problem” if given nearly all the electrical power and computer chips that humans can produce.

    Both problem solving machine A and B are equally useless even though the owners of problem solving machine B can make grandiose claims about the power of their problem solving machine if they conveniently exclude the “energy required” part, which as someone trained in science ends up seeming pretty damn similar to someone arguing that their perpetual motion machine is capable of perpetual motion so long as we feed all of the electrical power humanity can generate into it…

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