I think deepseek shook them enough to realize what should have been obvious for a while… Brute force doesn’t beat new techniques, and spending the most might not be the safest bet
There’s a ton of new techniques being developed all the time to do things more efficiently, and if you don’t need a crazy context window, in many use cases you can get away with much smaller models that don’t need massive datacenters
jj4211@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
That’s compatible with a lack of faith in profitable growth opportunity.
So far they have gone big with what I’d characterize as more evolutionary enhancements to tech. While that may find some acceptance, it’s not worth quite enough to pay off the capital investment in this generation of compute. If they overinvest and hope to eventually recoup by not upgrading, they are at severe risk of being superseded by another company that saved some expenditure to have a more modest, but more up to date compute infrastructure.
Another possibility is that they predicted a huge boom of a other companies spending on Azure hosting for AI stuff, and they are predicting those companies won’t have the growth either.