These AI companies are really different.

@tante

• Microsoft: How garbage can we make office and people still pay any markup?

I don't think it's fair to blame the Office team for this. I think the process in MS went something like this (having seen some of this from the inside):

Azure (which, remember, was Nadella's baby: he was head of cloud before he was CEO) noticed that cloud demand was slowing. They needed something that spurred demand.

Google built an 'AI supercomputer' out of TPUs for DeepMind. Look here's a thing that requires enormous compute requirements and even custom silicon. It's a workload perfect for the cloud!

Top-down instruction came that everyone should look at deep learning approaches for things.

OpenAI made an impressive demo and showed that they needed huge amounts of compute to train the model then more for inference. This is perfect for Azure! The start of the circular financing began, with MS investing $10B in OpenAI, which was promptly used to buy $10B of Azure compute.

Internally, investing in OpenAI was pitched as a great thing for a bunch of reasons. OpenAI was ahead of Google, so this let MS overtake Google (yay!) and claim a huge customer for Azure.

Azure's priority shifted to AI. Generic compute was out (growth there was stagnant anyway, mostly led by giving great deals to big companies switching form AWS in the hope of locking them in), AI was in. And now Nadella was going to have a bigger AI supercomputer than Pichai and wave it in his face.

AI is bringing in 'revenue' (pay no attention to the financial shenanigans) and is a big growth thing for Azure. The company's priority is now to make sure that there is demand for the thing Azure is selling.

Every business unit is told to build AI into the things. If it succeeds, great. If it looks moderately good, competitors will need to build something equivalent and that drives growth for Azure.

Everyone's bonus and promotions depend on how well their projects are adopting AI. Microsoft has long incentivised lying to management and this got much worse. Everyone who wants a bonus this year tells their CVPs that they have done a load of AI. The CVPs report to their EVPs that they've done way more AIs than all the other business units. The EVPs tell Nadella that AI is revolutionising the company.

Nadella hears a strong message form all parts of the company that AI is transformational. Any product that he touches that hasn't been sprayed with AI sends questions down the management chain about why not.