37 pointsby jonbaer9 hours ago18 comments
  • igor478 hours ago
    > Unfortunately, Nadella also refers to AI as “super intelligence” throughout the post.

    What's the deal with these clowns? Nadella's estimated net worth is like $600M. Is that still not enough for him to buy himself a spine?

    • kumarvvr8 hours ago
      At 600M, if keeping a spine has a risk of slight reduction in that wealth, then the spine is thrown out in a jiffy.

      No rich man or woman is a friend of society.

      That is why governments fear revolt from the poor. They have nothing more to lose.

    • dumberquestions8 hours ago
      Not having a spine goes a long way when you're trying to make billions.
      • khazhoux7 hours ago
        If he stands up to Trump, Trump declares Microsoft a national security threat and decimates the company. That’s what this is about.
        • thih93 hours ago
          On one hand I don’t mind the government keeping corporations in check. On the other, the government doing business via random threats and bullying seems worse than corporations.
    • minraws2 hours ago
      That's the thing though, he has $600M dollars worth of reasons to bend.

      People think that money makes you strong, maybe it does but only upto like a couple million dollars if at all, well whatever amount will give you a lifetime of comfortable life, after that it's all about how to preserve or make more money.

      The more you have the more reason you have to do the wrong thing.

    • timcobb8 hours ago
      No he's an automaton optimizing for status
    • gumby6 hours ago
      Otherwise suddenly MS is excluded from government contracts (even ones awarded or in progress), justice department will start attacking it etc.
    • jareklupinski2 hours ago
      its not actually 600M dollars, just promises and notes

      the second he tries to cash out even a fraction of that, it'll start becoming worth less and less

    • imartin2k5 hours ago
      To me, this is a confirmation of how much of a free man I am and how unfree these tech billionaires and CEOs are. Because I can choose to say AI, whereas they seemingly cannot.
    • tbrownaw8 hours ago
      I would expect people selling AI to like that term for marketing reasons, completely independent of their opinion of the person who provided a crystallization point to organize the terminology change around.
    • bushbaba8 hours ago
      You assume he’s a human and not a super intelligent being himself
      • Xirdus8 hours ago
        I am pretty sure he's not super intelligent.
    • NordStreamYacht8 hours ago
      He has to keep The Orange House happy.
      • dudeinjapan8 hours ago
        ELI5 why he needs to please the Dutch royal family?
        • anon77257 hours ago
          The Orange House, not the House of Orange.

          See also: Peoples’ Front of Judea vs Judean Peoples Front.

    • blululu6 hours ago
      Super Intelligence is a term of art that has been around for a few decades now. Nick Bostrom gave a the canonical definition for it almost 30 years ago. Super Intelligence is more relevant to the concerns articulated in this article than AI which is rather broad in its purview. Maybe this is Trump stuff? I don't know. If it were something stupid like Freedom Intelligence then I'd be pretty annoyed, but there is a lot of plausible deniability that Super Intelligence is just a better term for what we're all freaking out about. A world where GPT 4 hits scaling limits and it costs $500 a month to run is definitely AI but none of the catastrophes emerge at that level of intelligence. That would actually be a pretty sweet world. But now we get to have our whole civilization ground up into dust by super intelligence instead.
      • perelin6 hours ago
        True, but for Bostrom Superintelligence was a capability level for AI and not a replacement for the accepted scientific term. Narrow -> General -> Super.
      • thiht2 hours ago
        Stop being obtuse, it’s clearly Trump’s hand up in his ass. No one’s used "super intelligence" before
    • hollowonepl7 hours ago
      600M is not that much actually, just three proper celebrity houses in LA or sth… he’s still poor-man to run a trillion dollar company. SteveB had better deal out that responsibility.
    • downrightmike7 hours ago
      Actual Indians > Super Indians
    • coliveira8 hours ago
      He wouldn't have this net worth if he ever had a spine. Mind you, he's very tough to people under him, and that's a very important characteristic of this kind of people, but he really doesn't have a spine.
    • 8note7 hours ago
      the spine here is going with a deeply unpopular guy's dumb opinions and getting the hate mail
    • khazhoux7 hours ago
      His own net worth isn’t the point.

      Bend the knee or Trump will destroy your company. And every Republican in Congress is cool with that.

    • blagie8 hours ago
      I don't quite see the problem here.

      My AI is regularly solving master's thesis level, and sometimes Ph.D thesis level problems for the purpose of, e.g. routine tasks like filling out random paperwork.

      It's been very odd.

      I'd only assume Nadella has access to more advanced models than I do, just as much as I have more advanced models than my relatives.

      • UnlockedSecrets8 hours ago
        Can you ask your AI to answer the ultimate question, that being the answer to life, the universe, and everything?
        • jonah7 hours ago
          I hadn't tried that question before. Gemini knew the answer.
      • idiotsecant8 hours ago
        Because it's a political loyalty test. Nobody started using it organically until they were ordered to in order to prove their loyalty.

        Using it is embarrassing.

        • blagie5 hours ago
          I feel like I'm missing some context. A lot of context.

          Whose loyalty test? How?

          I mostly heard "super intelligence" a long, long time ago in the context of work on AI / philosophy / futurism which, honestly, sounded pretty detached until the current deep learning sprint, and now sounds pretty prophetic.

        • dofm7 hours ago
          It's a bit more than a mere loyalty test, in that Trump knows it is humiliating for them to listen to him on anything like this.

          He knows humiliation (from his father and from Putin) and he loves to dish it out to others.

          This is Reek, basically.

          • Terr_7 hours ago
            Right, and humiliation rituals are not just about the authoritarian's ego, they do damage that the authoritarian exploits.

            People who comply scar their reputation and trustworthiness, so that it's harder for them to build any alliance against the authoritarian in the future, ex: "We all know Bob lied to keep his job... But if they threaten his job again, doesn't that mean he might lie to us too?"

  • butwhentho8 hours ago
    Should I then assume that Copilot is "compromised", and given that they've shoehorned it into all Microsoft products, then, by extension, that means all Microsoft products are compromised?
  • tbrownaw8 hours ago
    Well of course.

    If you blindly assume it works and it doesn't, that's a problem.

    If your process can handle it not working, it's much less of a problem.

  • trog2 hours ago
    This just feels like more of the war on local models. I expect to see a lot more FUD about this as hyperscalers desperately try to push the message that local models are incapable to keep people on the teat.
  • xscott8 hours ago
    Someone will vibe-code Office and Windows, and he knows it.
    • Xirdus8 hours ago
      Didn't someone vibe code Photoshop this week?
    • steelframe7 hours ago
      Maybe I am living in a bubble, but no company I have worked at in the past 15 years has cared in the least about either Windows or Office.
  • dcmatt8 hours ago
    > More advanced models will require more advanced containment technologies that we need to standardize on.

    How about yanking the cords, or maybe a big red “shutdown” button

  • sandeepkd8 hours ago
    so the grapes are sour for some after all
  • vehemenz7 hours ago
    Once again, why do all these CEOs think they are thought leaders all of a sudden?
    • bmitc7 hours ago
      Rich people in general have this belief, that they somehow got there by objective means and via their superior intellect. I just watched an interview the other day that someone posted where Sam Altman described using a notebook (yes literally pencil and paper) but was describing it as if he had discovered fire. These people are literally blinded by their money.
  • khaled4vokalz8 hours ago
    Yeah, after having a meeting at the Oval office, it's for sure everyone got taught by our bro "Dario" regarding containing things as the Chinese are catching up. Give this a break...
  • stogot8 hours ago
    I was expecting he was going to finally acknowledge these are trained on CSAM, been compromised and used to perpetuate abusive crimes.
  • TZubiri7 hours ago
    Here's a video of Nadella speaking about AI a year ago.

    I couldn't for the life of me understand him, it sounded like when someone I know did cocaine and spent like 8 hours per day with ChatGPT and developed their own internal vocabulary, right around peak AI psychosis era with 4o as well.

    One thing you can hear is that he was super excited about AI, which is very obvious by how Copilot was slapped everywhere. And now that the market is expressing their backlash about AI they are just hopping on the bandwagon.

    But I remember, and I think the MSFT customers will remember how AI was slapped into everything INCLUDING NOTEPAD.EXE

  • hardeepcoder8 hours ago
    [flagged]
  • SadErn8 hours ago
    [dead]
  • ulfw8 hours ago
    [flagged]
  • gexla8 hours ago
    I don't get why using “super intelligence” is an issue here. It seems the US admin sort of politicized this and now US companies have their own reasons for selecting terms that may not make sense to people who aren't making the same decisions.

    Everything else seems reasonable? Assume the worst and put the controls in place to handle that scenario? Isn't this how we approach security normally?

    NOTE: NOT a security expert, so I may be talking out of my...

    • davesque7 hours ago
      Because it's creepy and Orwellian, not to mention hypocritical (MAGA is supposed to hate thought policing). Do you like people telling you what words you can and cannot use?
    • khazhoux7 hours ago
      Because literally one person came up with that term, just to put their own stamp on it.
      • dofm7 hours ago
        Not just to put their own stamp on it. To force others to use it.
        • khazhoux7 hours ago
          Naming it is taking credit for it. “No one’s done as much for tech as me!”

          Forcing others to use it is just par for the course with this administration

      • jiggawatts7 hours ago
        It is a loyalty test, of the type favoured by dictators, emperors, and heads of mafia families everywhere.

        America is lost.

  • rsalus8 hours ago
    I assume he's referring to the long-standing Microsoft engineering principles of "zero trust": https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/security/zero-trust/zero-t...

    and "least privilege": https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/identity-platform/se...

    • greenthrow8 hours ago
      Microsoft didn't invent either of those concepts. They are long standing security principles. Especially least privilege.
      • dudeinjapan8 hours ago
        Microsoft invented those principles when they added UAC to Windows Vista. Also, Al Gore invented the Internet.
      • rsalus4 hours ago
        didn't say they invented them.. I'm just saying they follow them rather dogmatically.