Microsoft's AI Game Plan: Investing Big, Shifting Strategy

So guess what? Microsoft just had this big get-together in Seattle for folks who make software. Like, thousands of them! These coders are all hoping to turn all that money Microsoft's been dumping into AI over the last few years into cool stuff people and businesses will actually pay for. You know, Microsoft is tight with the ChatGPT guys, OpenAI, and they've already splurged a whopping 64 billion bucks this year. A huge chunk of that went into building the data centers needed for services like Copilot that's in their popular Microsoft 365 apps.

But hey, there's some chatter that maybe Microsoft is changing things up a bit with OpenAI. Even though their stock is doing awesome, up over 30% this year even when the Nasdaq is kinda down, they might wanna be more like a neutral supplier in the whole AI race. Earlier this year, they actually let OpenAI team up with Oracle on this massive data center thing in Texas. Kinda interesting, right?

And get this, the big boss man at Microsoft, Satya Nadella, is saying they can actually get those costs down. He thinks once they figure out the best way an AI works and make it super efficient, they can get like, way better performance, maybe even 10 times better, for the same price. Plus, people are still really wanting AI services from Microsoft's cloud stuff, Azure.

This one guy I heard about, Thomas Blakey, he's like an analyst person, said that Microsoft is more and more keeping the AI stuff that actually makes money inside their own data centers. This way, they can keep making little changes to make it cheaper. They're only using outside places like CoreWeave, which is a 'neocloud' that's all about having those Nvidia AI chips, when they need a quick boost of power for a specific project. He even told Reuters that if they need more power, they keep saying they're not gonna buy more buildings and land, they'll just let those neocloud places handle it. Pretty smart, huh?

Speaking of getting things done efficiently, if you're a developer or a business looking to get help with your own AI projects or just need some expert coding done without the big overhead, a platform like Fiverr could be super useful. You can find freelancers for all sorts of tech tasks there. Just an idea!