GoKawiilSign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Email address Sign Up Thank you!
OpenAI made headlines this year after announcing it was giving up on what one exec categorized as distracting “side quests,” including its Sora text-to-video app, to double down on enterprise and coding, which are lucrative revenue drivers that could stop the company from hemorrhaging billions of dollars a quarter.
Many saw the moves as an effort to catch up with competitor Anthropic, whose Claude Code and Claude Cowork have made major headway this year.
Meanwhile, Microsoft’s AI assistant Copilot is struggling to gain traction, causing the tech giant to fall strikingly behind in the AI race. As CNBC reports, the company just closed out its worst quarter stock performance since the 2008 financial crisis, with shares sliding over 20 percent so far this year.
While shares have rebounded somewhat over the last week, its slumping shares have wiped out all gains since roughly the same time last year. It’s a terrible look.
Microsoft has made massive investments in data centers and building out its Azure cloud AI infrastructure, but is struggling to efficiently scale up its Copilot assistant without sending expenses soaring.
Then there’s the major backlash to its Windows team stuffing the operating system with AI features nobody asked for, garnering it the pejorative nickname of “Microslop.”
“Redmond is in a pickle,” Melius Research analyst Ben Reitzes wrote in a note last week, referring to the Washington state city where Microsoft is headquartered.
The tech giant has been swept up in a much broader market phenomenon dubbed the “SaaSpcalypse” this year, with software-as-a-service companies getting hammered by ongoing sell-offs. Panicked investors are afraid AI coding tools could make their often costly services redundant by allowing firms to develop their own in-house tools from scratch instead.
“Much of traditional SaaS is dying/in likely terminal decay,” investor Jason Lemkin tweeted amid the panic.
... continue reading