Ask Paul: January the 13th (Premium)

Happy Friday the 13th! Here’s another monster installment of Ask Paul with some great questions to kick off the weekend a bit early.
Microsoft’s datacenter moves
wright_is asks:

Microsoft has bought DPU builder Fungible and HFC manufacturer Lumenisity in the last couple of weeks. Are they trying to restrict other cloud providers possibilities for expanding or are they moving into the datacentre and long distance fibre optics device manufacturing?

Lumenisity looks good on paper, it could increase the performance on transoceanic cable runs, HFC (Hollow core fibre) is much faster than traditional fibre, because light travels faster through air than through the fibre, on a 5KM transatlantic run, it could save about 16ms in latency, for example.

We can only speculate. Given that Azure is Microsoft’s future, it makes sense that it would make ongoing investments in the form of acquisitions and partnerships. I’m no expert in this area, but I would say that these two investments are both for in-house needs and that what Microsoft sells to customers on the other side will continue to be cloud services that run in datacenters that use these technologies. And that’s how simple I am when it comes to Azure. :) More seriously, apologies.
Microsoft’s AI flanking maneuver
poppizel asks:

In what looks like the most significant step by Microsoft in years may be bearing fruit. Its investment, both financial and technical ,in a leading AI "startup" has yielded some early and very compelling results, summarized well in a recent NY Times article. 

Yes, I was going to point people at that New York Times article, which I read with great interest this morning. There are a couple of key new bits of information there:

We all know about Microsoft’s initial $1 billion investment in OpenAI and that Microsoft is rumored to be looking at investing another $10 billion with various conditions around commercial availability and ownership. But the article cites multiple sources who say that the company had quietly invested another $2 billion in OpenAI since that initial investment. (This other investment was also reported elsewhere.) So it clearly saw the value here and raced to secure as much of its work for itself as possible
The article confirms that Microsoft is in talks to invest another $10 billion.
Microsoft has been quietly integrating AI technologies across its stack in recent years and at least some of that came out of OpenAI. I would love to see a breakdown of that, and it almost makes me want to go back and reexamine every time that Microsoft touted anything as being AI- or ML-based. Almost. But that Tay chatbot experiment may very well have been an early example of Microsoft going public with this work. (“We’re pushing the envelope in A.I., and we’re going to do that across our products,” Microsoft’s Eric Boyd told the publication. “Microsoft incorporated GPT-3, DALL-E, and similar technologies into its ow...