Tag Archives: support

December 6, 2025 · 20:40

TBD CEO OpenAI 

That is the thought I had, yesterday, 5 hours after I wrote my piece, I still saw the news appear all over the media, some on it was getting a ridiculous amount of attention, so I decided to take another look at some of this. First there was the Business insider (at https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-code-red-chatgpt-advertising-google-search-gemini-2025-12) giving us ‘OpenAI’s Code Red: Protect the loop, delay the loot’ where we see “Focus on improving ChatGPT, and pause lower-priority initiatives. The most striking pause is advertising. Why delay such a lucrative opportunity at a moment when OpenAI’s finances face intense scrutiny? Because in tech, nothing matters more than users.” This was followed by “Every query and click fed a feedback loop: user behavior informed ranking systems, which improved results, which attracted more users. Over time, that loop became an impenetrable moat. Competing with it has proven nearly impossible.

ChatGPT occupies a similar position for AI assistants. Nearly a billion people now interact with it weekly, giving OpenAI an unmatched new window into human intent, curiosity, and decision-making. Each prompt and reply can be fed back into model training, evaluations, and reinforcement learning to strengthen what is arguably the world’s most powerful AI feedback loop.” All this makes sense, it comes with the nearly mandatory “Google’s Gemini 3 rollout has lured new users. If ChatGPT’s quality slips or feels cluttered, defecting to Google becomes easier. Introducing ads now risks exactly that. Even mildly irritated users could view ads as one annoyance too many.” Whilst in the background we are ‘sensitive’ to “OpenAI has already committed to spending hundreds of billions of dollars on infrastructure to serve ChatGPT at a global scale. At some point, those bills will force the company to monetize more aggressively.

If OpenAI manages to build even half of Google’s Search ads business in an AI-native form, it could generate roughly $50 billion in annual profit. That’s one way to fund its colossal ambitions.” This gives OpenAI a two sided blade in the back. It was a good ploy, but that ploy is deemed to be counter productive and I get that, but dropping the ads might sting with the investors as It was the dimes that they were seeing coming their way and ChatGPT needs to make a smooth entry all the way to the next update, which will be near impossible to avoid in several ways. Google has the inside track now and whilst there are a few settings that are ‘malleable’ for the users, the smooth look is essential for ChatGPT to continue. And that is before other start looking at the low quality data it verifies against. Google has, as I see it, exactly the same problem, but as I see it, ChatGPT gets it now in advance. 

Newcomer (at https://www.newcomer.co/p/openais-code-red-shows-the-power) gives us “In truth, as Newcomer’s Tom Dotan wrote back in April, Google, with all of its formidable assets, was never very far behind. Nor is it currently very far ahead. Anthropic too has always been essentially neck-and-neck with OpenAI on the core technology. The capabilities of the big foundation models, and even some lighter ones like DeepSeek, are broadly similar. Marc Benioff, himself a skilled practitioner in the arts of attention, even claimed this week that the big models will be interchangeable commodities, like disk drives. Yet the perception of who’s on top matters quite a lot at a moment when consumers, enterprise technology buyers, and investors are all deciding where to place some highly consequential long-term bets. That brings us back to Altman’s “Code Red.”” Is a truth in itself, but the next part “while the alarm came in a company-wide memo that wasn’t officially announced publicly, we can stipulate that the “leak” of the memo, if not necessarily orchestrated, was almost certainly part of the plan. A media maestro like Altman surely knew that a memo going out to thousands of employees with charged language like “Code Red” was all but guaranteed to make its way to the press. Publicizing a panicked internal reaction to a competitor’s new product might seem like a counter-intuitive way to maintain your reputation as the industry leader.” As I see it, someone in Microsoft marketing earned his dollars in marketing that day, but this is a personal feeling, I have no data to back it up. It is now up to Sam Altman to deliver his ‘new’ version in the coming week and it better the a great new release, or as I see it, there will be heads rolling all over the floor and Sam Altman knows that the pressure is up. I don’t think he is scared as some media says, but he is definitely worried, because this setting will set the record of $13 billion straight, into or away from Microsoft and Sam Altman knows this, as such he is probably a little worried and in a software release any of a hundred things can go wrong and they all need to go right at present. 

Then we get “Altman and OpenAI are so good at making news that it’s sometimes hard to tell what’s real.” So, isn’t that the setting all the time? I have always seen Sam Altman as a bad second hands car salesman, That is my take, but I have had a healthy disgust for salespeople for over 30 years. I am a service person, Technical support, customer support. That was always my field. I am not against sales, merely against cleaning up their messes. At times this comes with the territory, shit happens, but those salespeople overselling something just so that they can fill their pipeline and make their numbers are not acceptable to me. To illustrate this, A little setting (devoid of names and brands) “A salesperson came to me with what he needed. We could not do that and I told him, so off he goes calling every technical support person on the planet until he found one that agreed with him and then he sold the solution to the customer and hung that persona name on this. I had to clean up the mess and set up a credit invoice, but after I went through the whole 9 yards making it over 30 days ensuring him that he kept his commission” that is the type I am disgusted with because the brands as a whole suffers, all for the need of greed. It is short sighted thinking. I goes nowhere, but his monthly revenue was guaranteed. And I feel that Sam Altman is not completely like that, but it is the ‘offset’ of salespeople that I carry within me. For me protecting the product and the customer are first and foremost on my mind. 

Then we get Futurism (at https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/openai-is-suddenly-in-major-trouble) where we see ‘OpenAI Is Suddenly in Major Trouble’ OK, is this true? We are given “The financial stakes are almost comical in their magnitude: The company is lighting billions of dollars on fire, with no end in sight; it’s committed to spending well over $1 trillion over the next several years while simultaneously losing a staggering sum each quarter. And revenues are lagging far behind, with the vast majority of ChatGPT users balking at the idea of paying for a subscription.” I don’t agree with this setting. You either pay, or you see advertisement that is the setting. There are no free rides and the sooner you realise this, the easier this gets. Then we are given “Meanwhile, Google has made major strides, quickly catching up with OpenAI’s claimed 800 million or so weekly active ChatGPT users as of September. Worse yet, Google is far better positioned to turn generative AI into a viable business — all while minting a comfortable $30 billion in profit each quarter, as the Washington Post points out.” I agree with the setting the Washington Post sets out with and Google does have an advantage, but that is still relying on the fact that Sam Altman does not get his new version seen as stellar in the coming week. He still has a much larger issue, but that is for later. All this comes at the price of being in the frontrunner team. Easy does it, there is no other way and the stakes are set rather high. So then we are given “In a Thursday note, Deutsche Bank analyst Jim Reid estimated staggering losses for OpenAI amounting to $140 billion between 2024 and 2029.” This is probably true, but where are the numbers. $140 billion over 5 years is one, but what revenue is set against it? Because if this is still set against a revenue number that OpenAI keeps making they are going decently sweet, the numbers were never in debate, the return on investment was and these stakes are high and there is no debating that, these numbers are either given or they are not. 

Then we are given something that makes sense ““OpenAI may continue to attract significant funding and could ultimately develop products that generate substantial profits and revolutionize the world,” he wrote, as quoted by WaPo. “But at present, no start-up in history has operated with expected losses on anything approaching this scale.” “We are firmly in uncharted territory,” Reid added.” I agree, in several ways, but the revenue is not given as such the real deal is absent. Consider YouTube, did anyone see the upside of a $1.65 billion acquisition 20 years ago? It now generates $36.1 billion in annual revenue (2024), Microsoft and OpenAI are banking on that same setting and Microsoft needs it to get a quality replacement for Clippy and they are banking on ChatGPT, this will only happen if they win over Google and I have my doubts on this. There is no real evidence because the new version isn’t ready yet, but it really needs one hitch to make it all burn down and Altman knows this. The numbers or better, the statistics are not on his side. And as I haven’t see a decent software price fight for a while, so I am keeping my thumbs up for Altman (I am however a through and through Google guy). This is a worthy fight watching and I am wondering how this might evolves over the next week.

The stakes are high, the challenge is high, lets see if Sam Altman rises to the occasion. It’s almost Sunday for me so have a great day you all, I reckon that Ryan Reynolds is about 6 hours from breakfast in Vancouver now.

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May 1, 2022 · 18:34

The IP many desired

There is a side I contemplated in the last week. The thoughts started almost 38 years ago. I didn’t think of it to any degree at that time. In the early years (when I actually was young and innocent) I started my career in technical support I got spoiled. I didn’t know it at the time but that application was close to perfect and designed by technical support people for technical support people. I had the option to enter a phone number, the number of the person I was talking to and digit by digit the list got smaller. And 9 out of 10 times it ended with the person. Consider a system where you have to look up Rosan Perkasa Roeslani? How many typo’s does it take for people to see that when you are a number, service goes up, because you are often instantly found.

The others (Scopus, Siebel), and whatever other sales system there was (and pretended to include technical support). They were for the most a sales concept of a system to drive more sales, at most times merely lacking service and support. Yet recently I got to be on the other side, I needed a larger station of pre-sales support, perhaps it should be called pre-sales determination. They too need a decent tool and it is lacking to a a setting that is almost too much to do the job right. Of course it is MY view on the matter. You see if one tries to represent a company, one must set the larger station to THEIR representation and a little less to the need of their sales department. The object does need to be determination of sales and to propagate the company as best as possible. In this we might need to call everyone, but we should be clever about it, don’t we? 

Lets take a look at the setting of ‘the list’. In this we have two parts. The list we need to call and how we can go about it. I have a method. As we see the list, we can call Peter Rabbit, yet the people of the Animal Farm we need to call one at a time until we connect. You see, the Switchboard operator is ignored, but its role evolved from a mere connector to a high value yielding gatekeeper. So when we get one connection, we need to leave the rest alone until the next day (two days later is better). And the next company who holds the cast of Flipper has the same approach. It is the IMF team that is the most interesting one. We can call them all, they all have their own numbers. It is when we get a list where generic and direct numbers intertwine, that is when we need to become clever about how we call. You see people talk too and when we call them all in one burst we get the label of ‘sales pusher’ and that is one of the most dangerous labels to get, when we have that label we will get stopped too often and we cannot do our job. So as you see the images, these callers need some kind of overlay filter, one that overlays the call list and can set fill colours like a spreadsheet. Yet these programs are not ready for such a leap, the ‘sales people’ behind it are at present not educated enough to see this need, so any third solution will do. Consider that spreadsheet fill on any solution Scopus, Oracle, Hubspot, SAP, Siebel and clever enough when a row is added or removed to that all list and one that has a multitude of colour selections that can be personalised by any person using it, so that the person will have the personal use and strengths working FOR THEM. 

In all these years no one considered the specific needs that some people have, they are merely pushed to some solution that their sales director seem to fathom. And consider that in over 35 years none of them got clever enough to figure this out? (As far as I can tell) Boggles the mind, does it not?

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January 30, 2017 · 13:00

Taking Xbox to Court?

Microsoft seems to have done it again and if the evidence holds up, there will be a powerful backlash towards Microsoft which will have interesting repercussions for Sony. Now, we have seen this all before and even I have a few issues with this all, which was until the following evidence was presented.

  1. The Broadband 4G modem had been exclusively used for the Xbox One.
  2. Security was properly in place (as far as I have been able to confirm)

The following had happened:

Without consent, the Xbox One has seemingly uploaded the following amounts of data:

Date Uploads Date Uploads
2017-01-13 339.1 MB 2017-01-21 591.0 MB
2017-01-14 445.1 MB 2017-01-22 277.6 MB
2017-01-15 242.3 MB 2017-01-23 607.5 MB
2017-01-16 268.8 MB 2017-01-24 210.6 MB
2017-01-17 113.1 MB 2017-01-25 358.8 MB
2017-01-18 793.6 MB 2017-01-26 493.5 MB
2017-01-19 251.6 MB 2017-01-27 482.4 MB
2017-01-20 332.0 MB 2017-01-28 65.2 MB

 

According to the mobile provider the uploaded files are all labelled Windows Azure – support large files download? When calling Microsoft, the help was not any better, the lady was trying to be nice, yet not really aware of what she was talking about. Her response was: ‘we have no influence on uploads, that is the responsibility of your ISP!‘

So, as the Xbox is uploading, that is suddenly the worry of the victims ISP?

So far the player has only played Fallout 4 without DLC’s, Diablo 3 and the Ezio Collection (Assassins Creed), all these games were played in single player only, so there is absolutely no reason to upload at all. What is even more disturbing is that there are no checks on this part, the mobile provider data so far matches the times that the system was in use for gaming and the times the uploads were happening.

What Microsoft would not be realising, which was a former Microsoft executive referred to as Don Mattrick, who tried to be funny with: “Fortunately we have a product for people who aren’t able to get some form of connectivity; it’s called Xbox 360“, yes and as orders were cancelled all over the place Xbox suddenly had a new boss. This all started in November 2015. Well as we seem to gather Microsoft is at it again and they haven’t been thinking this through as per usual (that is, if the facts handed to me and collected are correct), because some gamers are now facing a $120 a month additional bill, so year one for these gamers would be 12 * $120 + $450 for the console, making this device at $1850, three times more expensive than any other console. I think Microsoft forgot about mobile broadband users, they just get additional hardship. What is the issue is that all this is happening without consent and as far as the absent help from Xbox support has indicated, without the ability to switch it off. You see, there are plenty of places where broadband is an issue and those people are depending on mobile broadband and at $10 per 1 GB it adds up really fast.

So, even as Microsoft has now changed this approach (again), would customers have a case to get a full refund for console and all purchased games? Let’s not forget that Microsoft has done a 180 degrees turn on their ‘online requirements’ twice now, as well as it seems the requirement to be online to upload, which in light of single player games should result in several additional questions by parties involved.

So this is where I now stand. Awaiting two additional pieces of evidence. Should they arrive, the plan as the victim wants it is to prohibit Microsoft to continue sales of their devices until the forced uploads are deactivated, as well as reimbursements have been made. I do not think that this has any decent chance, but I will lend my support to all this. Microsoft has been playing their game via third party ‘players’ and as such there have been a few things rising to the surface. I personally believe it to be a harassment approach by Microsoft ‘to be online or else‘. I tested that with the Ezio collection. I went offline and played the game, so far after two days, after restarting the game, the achievement begotten whilst off line did not update. An issue the Xbox 360 never had and actually until recently it was not an issue (so this might be the side effect of something else). As I see it, the same day our victim suddenly say his annual Xbox one usage cost go up by a potential $1440, so we can agree that Microsoft, as per their usual self decided that profit at the expense of anyone else is preferred to a situation where the needs of the customer were respected, especially after the backlash that the first attempt had given them, again, awaiting those two pieces of evidence.

So far all contacts with Microsoft have been with the given air of ‘Well, everyone has unlimited broadband, don’t they?‘, which is nice until you get confronted with the most dangerous of obstacles, the disagreeable landlord, which in this day and age is not a good person to cross and that tends to happen more and more often, yet that is not what this fight is about. We are dealing with consent and undocumented consequences that doubles a person’s internet bill, through means that were not even essential. Off course that is not regarding the need Microsoft has to keep a record and copy of everything you are doing on your console, which by the way is well over 1000% of what multiplayer bandwidth would require, so there too are questions that need to be addressed.

From my point of view, apart from the financial damages that some players are now facing there is:

  1. How can uploads without consent be allowed?
  2. How can 2 single player games trigger a 5.8 GB upload in 15 days?
  3. The reference that the Mobile operator gave was: ‘Windows Azure – support large files download’, all uploads have that same title!
  4. Why is there no logging of uploads in the Xbox One?
  5. Which files and what exactly is being uploaded?
  6. Why did this suddenly start at midnight Friday January 13th 2017? (Which reads equally weird).

These are questions that matter, the reason is that without certain facts, there is absolutely no guarantee that this isn’t merely a hijacked router, which I have been able to prove that this is not the case to some extent.

Questions remain, you see, that part is given by the following sources: “They have clearly mentioned that their commitment to the UK is unchanged. In particular, those customers in Microsoft’s UK data centres should continue to rely on Microsoft’s significant investment plans there“, as well as “Microsoft highlighted that they have more than 5,000 highly qualified people working in fields including support, marketing, gaming, communications, cybersecurity and computer science research in the UK. Also, they have built a global centre of excellence for the development of artificial intelligence and other computing disciplines“, which we see in MS Power User (at https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-re-affirms-its-commitment-to-the-uk-data-centre-expansion-plans-are-still-on-track/), now we need to realise that these are statements from a spokesperson, which means that that we are misrepresented without being lied to. I know, it’s a harsh world. Yet ‘5,000 highly qualified people‘, whilst seeing ‘marketing, gaming, communications, cybersecurity‘, could clearly imply that these are employees and it is not impossible that 40% of that workforce is not working on or connected to Azure. You see, the issue is when we see “Global Data Center Market Strategies, Analysis and Opportunities 2017-2023: Amazon (AWS), Microsoft, Google, and Facebook are in a Class of Their Own“, which we see in Global Newswire. The question that these parts lead to is whether it is possible that:

  1. Microsoft is trying to get an advantage on its capabilities and is trying to maximise the load of their Azure data centres, someone had the bright idea to use gamers for that and the people who tend to be useless in the technical field (read: senior management) forgot about the fact that not everyone has unlimited broadband and that some people (all over the world) pay per gigabyte and after a certain point that gets to be very expensive.
  2. Because the test requires that all (read: unknowingly) must participate, there is no option to switch uploads off, leaving us with the mess in option 1.

Now, this is for now speculative, but in light that I got this scoop and the media is ignoring gaming issues, just like the Sony Issue of 2012, so I am going ahead, so mind you, this story will be updated and there will be a part 2 when the rest of the evidence arrives, which could spark an official request against Microsoft with the Australian ACCC and the British CPS, and if Microsoft is proven not to be the evil organisation that they have been too often, than I will report that too, because just and fairness go both ways, and because it must rain on the just and unjust alike.

So stay tuned!

 

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