Microsoft Talks Costs of AI and Integration with Office in CoPilot

 Based on experience the integration is very important ... 

CNBC.COM     July 18, 2023

By Todd Haselton  @ROBOTODD

• Microsoft shares rallied to an all-time high after the company announced pricing for its new AI subscription service.

• Microsoft’s Copilot subscription service adds AI to the company’s popular Office products such as Word, Excel and Teams.

• It will cost an additional $30 per month and could increase monthly prices for enterprise customers as much as 83%, bringing in additional revenue through recurring subscriptions.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks at the company’s Ignite Spotlight event in Seoul, Nov. 15, 2022.

shares closed at a record Tuesday after the company announced pricing for its new Microsoft 365 artificial intelligence subscription service.

The stock jumped 4%, closing at $359.49. It’s now up about 50% for the year. The prior record came on June 15, when the stock closed at $348.10.

Microsoft’s Copilot subscription service adds AI to the company’s popular Office products such as Word, Excel and Teams. It will cost an additional $30 per month and could increase monthly prices for enterprise customers as much as 83%, bringing in additional revenue through recurring subscriptions.

The announcement shows how Microsoft is continuing to build on its suite of Office software, making it more attractive for businesses that are seeking to add AI into their workflows. Microsoft has been pouring money into generative AI, largely through a multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT.

Microsoft Copilot, first announced in March, can design presentations, offer writing prompts, summarize meetings and rank incoming emails. It’s already being tested by 600 customers such as Goodyear  and General Motors

, although Microsoft hasn’t said when it will be available to the wider public.

— CNBC’s Hayden Field contributed to this report.

Subscribe to CNBC on YouTube. 

AI Chatbots Lose Money Every Time You Use Them. That's a Problem.

Fascinating aspect. Thinking impact. 

AI Chatbots Lose Money Every Time You Use Them. That's a Problem.

By The Washington Post, June 5, 2023

ChatGPT running on a smartphone.

The tech giants staking their future on AI rarely discuss the technology’s cost.

The enormous cost of running today's large language models, which underpin tools like ChatGPT and Bard, is limiting their quality and threatening to throttle the global AI boom they've sparked.

Their expense, and the limited availability of the computer chips they require, is also constraining which companies can afford to run them and pressuring even the world's richest companies to turn chatbots into moneymakers sooner than they may be ready to.

"The models being deployed right now, as impressive as they seem, are really not the best models available," said Tom Goldstein, a computer science professor at the University of Maryland. "So as a result, the models you see have a lot of weaknesses" that might be avoidable if cost were no object — such as a propensity to spit out biased results or blatant falsehoods.

From The Washington Post

View Full Article    

US Rail Strike Implication Studies

 Looking for studies that have been done regarding the current and near future implications regarding the possible US labor rail-strike.  In particular how this could could change costs of the supply chain by industry,  and ultimately costs for consumers.   Any pointers are appreciated and sources will be cited.  

Cutting Back on Alexa AI?

Was just thinking about this.  Alexa seems to have stopped getting much more clever.   Shes OK, like Siri and Google, but not very noticeably better.  Is more general AI the the biggest cost element? 

Alexa Might Not Get Much Smarter Than It Is Right Now  in Wired

Plus: Apple pays for more emergency satellite tech, LG is working on a stretchy screen, and we answer all your burning questions about Mastodon.

"HEY ALEXA, CAN you make some money?"

As reported by The Wall Street Journal, Amazon is aiming to cut costs by slimming down some of its less profitable departments. The big one is Alexa, Amazon’s voice assistant software. Despite Alexa’s existence inside millions of Echo devices and other smart speakers around the world, the business of building, supporting, and licensing a voice assistant platform has apparently been less profitable than Amazon hoped. (According to WSJ, the Alexa business has been operating at a $5 billion-per-year loss.)

Amazon has a couple options here. It can either invest in Alexa and work to add more functions, or scale back its efforts to improve the service and let it exist as is. However, as the WSJ report notes, most users typically get into a habit of only using a few key voice commands. If that’s the case, it may make more sense for Amazon to let Alexa be instead of continuing to add more features.

Alexa is not the only voice assistant with an uncertain future. Google made a similar move in October, when part of its cost cutting restructuring plan de-emphasized the program that puts Google Assistant into partner devices like smart speakers. Both of these reprioritizations come as companies across the technosphere lay off thousands of employees. It may not be the end of an era exactly, but it’s clear the companies don’t see their voice assistants as top priorities when facing an economic downturn.  ... ' 

Surveillance Too Cheap to Meter?

 Interesting point ....   And consider as AI in general becomes cheap.

Surveillance Too Cheap to Meter   By Poul-Henning Kamp

Communications of the ACM, July 2022, Vol. 65 No. 7, Pages 42-44   10.1145/3511661

During his keynote address, risk management specialist Dan Geer asked the 2014 Black Hat audience a question: "What if surveillance is too cheap to meter?"

As is the case with electricity from nuclear power, technology has little to do with it: This is a question about economy, specifically the economy of the path of least resistance.

Surveillance is ridiculously cheap for governments. Many have passed laws that obligate the surveillance industry—most notably, the mobile network operators—to share their take "at cost," and we know law enforcement uses it a lot.

So why is so much cheap surveillance available for purchase?

Telephones work because telcos can route calls to and from them. The backbone and its routing tables are trivial compared with the airgap from the mobile base station to the wireless device, where there is no escape from knowing which phones are where. Because bandwidth is limited and everybody and their Internet of Things (IoT) gadget has a SIM card these days, the density of mobile base stations has increased, which has reduced the uncertainty of the position from tens of kilometers in the 1960s to tens of meters today.

In theory, a mobile network company could throw away that information the moment the mobile phone moved to a different location—and they do anything but.

First, collecting data is deep in telco DNA. If you try to convince them not to, Mr. Prosser answers, "It's a call data record! You've got to collect call data records!" If you really press the networks, they will tell you old tales of people refusing to pay for long-distance calls being taken to court and shown the evidence. Never mind that today, nearly all contracts are fixed price and people complain only when they get hit with predatory charges from third parties, cruise-ship networks, in-game purchases, among others.

Second, the data can help diagnose trouble in the network for the first few days. This was quite important in earlier generations of mobile networks, but not so much now.

Third, it is truly interesting data. AT&T used to send out press releases about how many holiday calls they had handled each year; similarly, modern telcos often boast how many handsets have been at sports events and stadium concerts.

But, most importantly, it is cheap data. It pours out of the system whether you want it to or not, and disk space costs nothing.

To stop the surveillance, the mobile networks would have to get their equipment suppliers to make changes; they would have to change their own back-office systems; they would have to reformulate customer contracts so they would not rely on the data being available in case of disputes; and so on.

Even ignoring the fact that lawmakers have generally made the collection of surveillance data a requirement for mobile network licenses, it would cost the telcos more money to stop the surveillance of their customers than to continue doing it.

That is quite literally what "surveillance too cheap to meter" means. ..... 

The way that Crude Costs Influence Retail Prices

Costs Interacting in many ways. 

Gas Prices Raise Costs In 8 Surprising Ways

Bryan Pearson in CustomerThink 

There’s a reason the price of chewing gum is up 7% from last year, and it’s not all related to supply and demand. It turns out that chewing gum is a crude habit, regardless of personal opinion.

The average 42-gallon barrel of oil historically has produced nearly 20 gallons of gasoline and four gallons of jet fuel, according to Earth Science Week. That leaves 18 gallons for other uses, from making plastics and paint to asphalt and ammonia. And yes, to make some candies and gum.

Many of these other uses for petroleum affect the operating costs of retailers and the brands they carry well beyond the length of a gas pump. From product ingredients to the containers that carry the products to the light needed to read the labels, petroleum and natural gas are necessary through virtually every step of the path to purchase. 

Fuel For Thought: 6 Ways Crude Boosts Retail Prices

Thousands of everyday products spring from petroleum today, thanks to chemists who have been – for more than a century – exploring new uses for it. So when the price of a barrel nears $100, the ripple effect is extensive. Here are six ways through which the ripples reach consumers in the retail industry.  ... 

Ransomware: Insurance Might Pay

And of course will foreign plays admit guilt for hostile actions?  And surely insurance premiums will increase. 

Via Schneier, with further comments:

The insurance company Ace American has to pay for the losses:

On 6th December 2021, the New Jersey Superior Court granted partial summary judgment (attached) in favour of Merck and International Indemnity, declaring that the War or Hostile Acts exclusion was inapplicable to the dispute.

Merck suffered US$1.4 billion in business interruption losses from the Notpetya cyber attack of 2017 which were claimed against “all risks” property re/insurance policies providing coverage for losses resulting from destruction or corruption of computer data and software. ...,, '

CPG Costs Rise in Pandemic

Seems like a need for analytical modeling of costs.  My former employer needs to step up to the  problem.

Price hikes on the horizon for P&G as material costs rise

In Reuters: 

Procter & Gamble Co (PG.N) said on Tuesday it would raise prices of certain products in the United States to offset rising costs that were already weighing on its fourth quarter, after reporting a better-than-expected quarterly result.

The Cincinnati-based company joins a growing list of consumer product makers hiking prices this year as they battle increasing costs for everything from transport to pulp and resin or edible oils and nuts.

P&G said since it gave its initial guidance for fiscal 2021 last year, costs had risen by $400 million, including after tax costs of $125 million for commodities that will largely hit the fourth quarter and $200 million in higher freight costs.... " 

Time to Rethink Your Global Logistics

Some thoughts about changes Post Pandemic adjustments in supply chains.

It’s Time to Rethink Your Global Logistics

by Willy C. Shih and Adrien Foucault  in the HBR

Over the last three decades, companies have established wide-ranging global supply chains that have taken advantage of steadily improving scale economies in global logistics. Efficient and reliable ocean and air cargo have linked low-cost manufacturing hubs across Asia with major markets in the United States and Europe. Much of this global sourcing was driven by the cost savings reaped through labor arbitrage, cost savings that were so dramatic that it more than covered the expense associated with moving products across vast distances to markets, or the extra cost of carrying inventory in long pipelines.

Yet the disruptions in logistics networks caused by the Covid-19 pandemic have added to the woes of supply chain managers who have tended to focus narrowly on their production partners and less on their geography and the links that connect them. With some of the shifts already underway to diversify production and make supply chains more resilient, it is a good time for managers to take a more holistic view of logistics as a dynamic and evolving link in their supply chains.

Concentrated East-West Trade Lanes

The massive increase in global merchandise trade of the last two decades and the shifts in production from the West (United States and Europe) to the East (Asia, particularly China) were fueled by labor arbitrage and cost advantages, but they were powered by low-cost container shipping and air cargo. On the ocean trade side, subsidies for shipbuilding and tax incentives for shipowners combined with giant new Euromax container ships (starting with the Emma Maersk in 2006) brought a step change in lower costs.

To utilize this capacity efficiently, container lines built east-west networks with efficient transshipment hubs, creating high-volume trade lanes on the trans-Pacific and East Asia-Suez-Europe routes. Fueled by a race to deploy larger and larger ships, chronic excess capacity also led to irrationally low prices for transporting goods halfway around the world. ... ' 

 

Article Summary Experiment: Some Simple Economics of the Blockchain

I had mentioned this article previously, found it interesting and well written.   Here an experiment with its content.   Below it is excerpted ...  with summary points, summary short video  and link to the full (10 page) text.    What do you think?

Some Simple Economics of the Blockchain
By Christian Catalini, Joshua S. Gans
Communications of the ACM, July 2020, Vol. 63 No. 7, Pages 80-90
10.1145/3359552

 

Total Cost Visibility in the US Army

We recently participated in:

Graphs in Government: Achieving Total Cost Visibility for the U.S. Army
via Lauren McCormack, Neo4j    Presentation below:

Thanks for your interest in the Graphs in Government: Achieving Total Cost Visibility for the U.S. Army webinar. Click here to watch the recording.  

Cost and Process Model for IOT

n Gartner.  An example of a cost model for IOT.  Part 1. Have not looked at it in detail,  Even without using something this detailed directly it is useful to think about elements that should be considered.   Also how a more formal process model might be integrated

Brands, Private and National, Matter

From Bain:  National brand vs Private label.  " .... It was only a decade ago when many industry analysts looked at two looming trends—the rise of retail consolidation and proliferation of private labels—and issued dire warnings about the power of consumer packaged goods brands. However, their predictions turned out to be premature. Brands aggressively managed overhead costs, pursued dynamic growth in developing markets and gained scale, efficiency and entry to new markets through mergers and acquisitions (M&A). As a result, brands now report 10-year high operating margins. ... " 

Omnichannel Delivery Costs in Retail

Thoughts on costs of omnichannel delivery in retail.   In RetailWire:

" ... Buried by the high cost of fulfilling online orders across multiple channels, only 16 percent of companies can fulfill omnichannel demand profitably today, according to a new study from JDA.

The "Omni-Channel Fulfillment Imperative" report, based on a global survey of more than 400 retail and consumer goods CEOs, also found 67 percent of respondents reporting that these costs are growing. ... " 

Hidden Costs of Manual Data Collection

The RFCode site blog was just brought to my attention.  My investigation into data costs and data asset value led me to this. They have an Infographic on the cost of manual data collection. Also need information about the rsk of data, would like to see all data tagged with metadata that indicated cost, value (in context) and risk.