Microsoft Knows How to Avoid an AI Bubble: Listen Up, Grunts, Discipline Now!
November 18, 2025
Another short essay from a real and still-alive dinobaby. If you see an image, we used AI. The dinobaby is not an artist like Grandma Moses.
I relish statements from the leadership of BAIT (big AI tech) outfits. A case in point is Microsoft. The Fortune story “AI Won’t Become a Bubble As Long As Everyone Stays thoughtful and Disciplined, Microsoft’s Brad Smith Says.” First, let’s consider the meaning of the word “everyone.” I navigated to Yandex.com and used its Alice smart software to get the definition of “everyone”:
The word “everyone” is often used in social and organizational contexts, and to denote universal truths or principles.
That’s a useful definition. Universal truths and principles. If anyone should know, it is Yandex.
Thanks, Venice.ai. Good enough, but the Russian flag is white, blue, and red. Your inclusion of Ukraine yellow was one reason why AI is good enough, not a slam dunk.
But isn’t there a logical issue with the subjective flag “if” and then a universal assertion about everyone? I find the statement illogical. It mostly sounds like English, but it presents a wild and crazy idea at a time when agreement about anything is quite difficult to achieve. Since I am a dinobaby, my reaction to the Fortune headline is obviously out of touch with the “real” world as it exists are Fortune and possibly Microsoft.
Let’s labor forward with the write up, shall we?
I noted this statement in the cited article attributed to Microsoft’s president Brad Smith:
“I obviously can’t speak about every other agreement in the AI sector. We’re focused on being disciplined but being ambitious. And I think it’s the right combination,” he said. “Everybody’s going to have to be thoughtful and disciplined. Everybody’s going to have to be ambitious but grounded. I think that a lot of these companies are [doing that].”
It was not Fortune’s wonderful headline writers who stumbled into a logical swamp. The culprit or crafter of the statement was “1000 Russian programmers did it” Smith. It is never Microsoft’s fault in my view.
But isn’t this the AI go really fast, don’t worry about the future, and break things?
Mr. Smith, according the article said,
“We see ongoing growth in demand. That’s what we’ve seen over the past year. That’s what we expect today, and frankly our biggest challenge right now is to continue to add capacity to keep pace with it.”
I wonder if Microsoft’s hiring social media influencers is related to generating demand and awareness, not getting people to embrace Copilot. Despite its jumping off the starting line first, Microsoft is now lagging behind its “partner” OpenAI and a two or three other BAIT entities.
The Fortune story includes supporting information from a person who seems totally, 100 percent objective. Here’s the quote:
At Web Summit, he met Anton Osika, the CEO of Lovable, a vibe-coding startup that lets anyone create apps and software simply by talking to an AI model. “What they’re doing to change the prototyping of software is breathtaking. As much as anything, what these kinds of AI initiatives are doing is opening up technology opportunities for many more people to do more things than they can do before…. This will be one of the defining factors of the quarter century ahead…”
I like the idea of Microsoft becoming a “defining factor” for the next 25 years. I would raise the question, “What about the Google? Is it chopped liver?
Several observations:
- Mr. Smith’s informed view does not line up with hiring social media influencers to handle the “growth and demand.” My hunch is that Microsoft fears that it is losing the consumer perception of Microsoft as the really Big Dog. Right now, that seems to be Super sized OpenAI and the mastiff-like Gemini.
- The craziness of “everybody” illustrates a somewhat peculiar view of consensus today. Does everybody include those fun-loving folks fighting in the Russian special operation or the dust ups in Sudan to name two places where “everybody” could be labeled just plain crazy?
- Mr. Smith appears to conflate putting Copilot in Notepad and rolling out Clippy in Yeezies with substantive applications not prone to hallucinations, mistakes, and outputs that could get some users of Excel into some quite interesting meetings with investors and clients.
Net net: Yep, everybody. Not going to happen. But the idea is a-thoughtful, which is interesting to me.
Stephen E Arnold, November 18, 2025
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