Yes but you forget that spending on compute is spending on machines that the company owns while spending on researchers is spending on other apes that trigger the social hierarchies of executives brains and who have the dreaded key word of “rights”

Companies will try to ruthlessly rid themselves of labor as long as those members of labor have agency and rights.

If someone disagrees they can convince me by explaining why a company wouldn’t choose to spend X on a machine they wholly own vs X on an employee they don’t.

There’s some room for argument that employees can do more than machines can but in the current AI zeitgeist arguing that we have machines with equivalent to human intelligence I don’t see how you wouldn’t see this coming if you believed the zeitgeist.

If compute:people were roughly equal spend, I'd agree with that thinking. But we all know AI's 100s of billions $$ spend is on datacenters+GPUs, not people.

In a way this suggests that MS doesn't aim to be a leader in AI <the core tech>. Only in its applications + related services (read: profit to be had there).

Nothing wrong with that btw. But understandable that fundamental researchers then pack up & leave.