Oh absolutely, the rabbit hole of deception can just go a lot deeper when people don’t even have to report numbers at all.
Like, they can fudge line items, but, if the line items are growing at the same rate after they merge them, then it’s pretty clear the new thing isn’t driving growth. And changes like that are visible and can be scrutinized as well.
We can watch the hands on this kind of reporting.
ALL ai efforts are face planting, but microsoft is the most easily scrutinized. The important thing being that they’re publicly traded and their business model is built on selling subscriptions and products; So we can see where they’re making money and spending it, and they can’t make demonstrably false claims about the success of projects (they might get sued for market manipulation).
As supposed to private companies like anthropic and openAI who can say what ever the hell they want about their success or failure, or companies like Google and Amazon who make their money in ways that make it hard to scrutinize if the AI stuff is landing.
“Well, to get people to consider if our method is potentially applicable to their situation and needs, we need to give it descriptive names that sound dynamic and cool to get their attention. If it’s not right for their needs they’ll disregard it of course.”
The business idiots: “Hmmm, yes, fancy words, trendy, apply it immediately to everything so I can say I “over saw implementation” on my resume next time I hop jobs”