Microslop was right there along with the rest of them. Idiots with more wealth/resources than they are actually capable of managing letting fear/fomo drive their decision making is going to bury us all.
There is no “AI wave”. Machine learning can he incredibly powerful when used properly, and is being used to process scientific and medical data in pursuit of improving humanity’s understanding of reality around us.
But that is not what Microslop is pushing. LLMs that exist to chew up RAM, water, and electricity to shit out slop and generate suicidal tendencies in children.
They aren’t trying to make copilot useful, they are trying and failing to make it profitable, just like every other LLM.
I don’t care anymore. Haven’t used Windows in years.
They didn’t miss shit, they just competed and lost to like the four other AI companies that executed much better than them.
You know the real problem? They thought because their button was easier to find and press that people would use it and not look for better buttons. And, to an extent, they are right, but… the other buttons are compellingly better at the things they specialize in, and right now no company specializes in ALL THE THINGS particularly well. Claude is a better writer, ChatGPT makes better drawings, Gemini is (getting closer to) what Google Search always wanted to be. They’re all imperfect, but each has its niche and people shop around enough to discover that CoPilot isn’t usually the best scratch for their personal itch.
Yeah but you’d expect they could make copilot the best at working with excel and it’s just not as good as the competition in that specialization
Core Excel development team was made redundant 10 years ago, profits over people. I wish that was /s but it’s more likely true than not.
Why would you expect that? When was the last time Micro$lop made the best anything? Or even something good? Or at least decent? Or at the very least not openly hostile to the user?
The more logical explanation is that AI is not a wave like the Internet and Mobile, but it is instead a wave like cryptocurrencies, NFTs and tulip bulbs.
If there’s one thing that almost 3 decades at or near the forefront of Tech has taught me is that “novel” is not the same as “better”, and that of all the times a novel technology was pushed by insane amounts of hype, only a handful turned out to match the hype and the ratio of good-ones to bullshit has become much worse in the last 2 decades as the Tech Startup sector fully morphed from Techie-driven to Financeer-driven.
On hype alone “AI” (as in, what’s called now AI for the public, rather than the ML domain) stinks of greed-driven bullshit and the more one analyses the Technical details of LLMs and the Mathematics of it as well as of the improvements over time, the more painfully obvious it becomes that it’s not at all AGI or a path to it, rather it’s an overhyped attempt at it that turned out to be the wrong path. (All of which would’ve been absolutelly fine and a big Scientific step forward if it weren’t for the greedy financeer class and grifters pushing, purelly for their own personal enrichment, for people and companies to adopted it for doing things it’s not suitable for)
AI has an interesting economic trait in that it’s very, very expensive to deploy, and made very fast progress from 2022 to 2024. That caused investors with money to believe that:
- Pushing the frontier was going to cost a lot of money. More than any other purported revolutionary tech.
- Extrapolation of past improvement meant that whoever was on the cutting edge may end up with a product with a huge paying market.
- So whoever wins this race would be rich, and the investment would have been worth it for them.
But since 2024, we’ve seen that the cutting edge got even more expensive much faster than expected, and much of the improvements in performance now come from inference rather than training, which represents a high ongoing cost.
Now, if we extrapolate from that trend line, we’ll see that the market will be much smaller for AI services at the cost it takes to provide that service, and the question then becomes whether the industry can make its operations cheaper, fast enough to profitably provide a service people will pay for.
I have my doubts they’ll succeed, and we might just be looking at the industry like supersonic flight: conceptually interesting, technically feasible, but just a commercial dead end because it’s too expensive.
The economics of it don’t add up and the growth rate of the curve of improvement over time has already significativelly fallen which looking at the historical curves for other technologies is a very strong indication that it’s approaching the limits of how far it will go even though it’s nowhere close to the hype.
So at both levels it all looks like a massive bet in the wrong horse that’s turning out not to be a winner but it keeps getting pushed by those who bet on it in the hope of making enough people and companies dependent that its sustained by nothing more than the unacceptable cost of it failing.
(In terms of strategy, it’s similar to how Uber started by using loopholes in the regulations for taxis, investing heavilly in becoming so big and established fast that when Authorities around the world got around to address those loopholes, they ended up accepting Uber and the like as something that could not be reversed and instead of regulating it out of existence, legitimized it. A very similar strategy was used by AirBNB: make the facts on the ground so big and reverting them so damaging that their low-value-adding business model with massive negative externalities and collateral damage ends up protected rather than made to pay for the societal costs of said collateral damage and negative externalities - essentially at some level Uber and especially AirBNB are being heavilly subsidized by society by being allowed to “polute” at will without paying for it).
So as I see it, the way Microsoft and other AI investors are going at it is to try and create a beachhead for it via hype, branding and lock-in in the expectation that something will come along at some point from the companies they invested in that is actually a genuine breakthrough that uses all the computing capacity created with their investment money.
I think that the reason why from the point of view of the public the AI adoption feels wrong is because it’s almost entirelly top-down, driven by marketing techniques and against the natural desires of people - it’s a novel form of entertainment being shoved down people’s throats as suitable for important responsabilities.
From my own experience, this feel a lot like the hype part of the cycle for the Segway, only with 100x or 1000x more investment money behind it.
The economics of it don’t add up and the growth rate of the curve of improvement over time has already significativelly fallen which looking at the historical curves for other technologies is a very strong indication that it’s approaching the limits of how far it will go even though it’s nowhere close to the hype.
Yeah, I’m convinced that they’ve maintained the illusion of continued exponential improvement from 2024-2026 by sneaking in exponential increase in resources (hardware complexity, power consumption), to prop things up past what should have been a plateau.
The way GDP is calculated you can in the short term create GDP “growth” by using debt to invest in things whose eventual return on investment is less than 1.
My only complaint here is that there is a lot of very, very valid use cases for “AI” specifically “Agentic AI”.
We (including myself) may not like a lot of those uses because it devalues my fellow workers but it does not change the fact that it works.
The problem is everyone needs to be so goddamn polarizing and god forbid we have a mature honest discussion about the tools being built and how they are changing society as we know it.
We should be discussing and pushing for UBI across the world for decades now as youth unemployment is already at dangerous levels in continents like Africa (lol of course we don’t care because black people) but no instead we have asshats pushing a narrative of “AI bad”. It’s not. It has many purposes. Smarter people know this and it’s why it isn’t going away and the train is not going to stop if you don’t pull your head out of your ass.
/rant
I can’t wait to dip out of society and find somewhere in the middle of nowhere to live a quiet life with minimal technology in my life. I’m done with all of you. I stand by what I’ve said to my mum many times over the years. I hate people. I love persons.
The list of valid use cases for AI is bound by “what is the worst possible consequence of a mistake done here”, because the statistical distribution of mistakes in terms of severity of consequences of things like Agentic AI is uniform (meaning, they’re just as likely to do the worst mistakes with the nastiest consequences as they are doing the smallest mistakes), which it is not the case with humans who make more of an effort and give more attention to avoiding catastrophic mistakes and also have a “this is stupid” (i.e. don’t put glue in pizza, don’t tell a suicidal person to kill themselves) recognition capability which also stops a lot of the nastiest mistakes.
This is something which is not noticeable to most people because most people don’t have deep enough process experience in at least one expert domain and process analysis experience, to upfront recognized anything beyond the “in your face” elements of using AI (or using anything, really) in a process.
Very few people would think “what’s the risk profile for this business of giving this thing these responsabilities”.
So they seriously overestimate what are valid use cases for AI, something that the hype around it also pushes for: not a single AI vendor will ever mention just “error distribution” or anything close to it.
Obviously, when the thing blows up catastrophically by doing something which for a human is “obviously a bad idea”, THEN people recognized that AI is unsuitable for that, but by then its often too late.
(Easy example: lawyers using AI to make submissions to the Court and ending up disbarred because those submissions “quoted” invented case law).
So I don’t expect Agentic AI to fuck society up by taking a large fraction of the jobs, I expect Agentic AI to fuck society up by an accumulation over time of random catastrophic mistakes that kill people and collapse otherwise stable companies, mistakes that humans in such positions would never do or at least be way less likely to do.
It’s going to be akin to death by cummulative poisoning.
The list of valid use cases for AI is bound by “what is the worst possible consequence of a mistake done here”
I expect Agentic AI to fuck society up by an accumulation over time of random catastrophic mistakes that kill people and collapse otherwise stable companies, mistakes that humans in such positions would never do or at least be way less likely to do.
Trust where trust is earned. Unfortunately, our leadership isn’t particularly trustworthy.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/carl-icahn-once-said-boards-173021236.html
https://www.cnbc.com/2014/07/16/icahn-too-many-companies-run-by-morons.html
These CEOs ensure no one smarter than them gets promoted. He said, “[The CEO] would never have anyone underneath him as his assistant that’s brighter than he is because that might constitute a threat. So, therefore, with many exceptions, we have CEOs becoming dumber and dumber and dumber.”
He first said those things over 20 years ago, and they’re more true today than ever.
It’s going to be akin to death by cummulative poisoning.
Agree and despite what it may seem like it really is gradual right now. What people are avoiding (god the C level discussions I have been witness to is mindblowing) is the long term damage of their choices today.
The amount of times I have heard executive talks with “you know we both have kids around the same age what do you see this doing?” And they always wrap it with something positive. These fuckers most likely have their kids in private schools, not to mention their kids have all the connections these fucking parents can afford them.
In short the execs making the decisions have their heads equally shoved so far up their own asses they are ignoring the problems on the horizon.
making the decisions have their heads equally shoved so far up their own asses they are ignoring the problems on the horizon.
The French monarchy’s isolation at the Palace of Versailles completely detached them from the starving Parisian population. While the peasantry faced severe bread shortages and crippling taxes, the court engaged in lavish spending and performative peasant simulation.
The Disconnect: Marie Antoinette built Hameau de la Reine, a rustic model village where she dressed as a milkmaid to play at peasant life.
The Reality: Real peasants were eating grass due to catastrophic harvests and systemic financial ruin.
Yup. Now are we going to learn this time or is it just a cycle we are doomed to repeat?
Those who don’t learn from history, probably were homeschooled?
Edit to observe: when I visited Paris, in 1989, I was struck by the celebration of “baguettes! we have fresh baguettes!!!” apparently the presence of bread in the stores was (still?) and unpredictable / unreliable cycle for them. I also wandered into a crowded sandwich shop only to be told “no pain, NO PAIN!” meaning: we’re out of bread and therefore will not be serving you.
The list of valid use cases for AI is bound by “what is the worst possible consequence of a mistake done here”
Its not because humans make those mistakes all the time. It doesn’t need to be %100, it just needs to be like 95% to be better than humans.
My point is that for Agentic AI mistakes with catastrophic consequences are just as likelly as minor mistakes, which is not the case for people because humans can spot the “obviously stupid” or “obviously dangerous”, plus they make more of an effort to avoid mistakes that can have very bad consequences, so they tend to make catastrophic mistakes will less probability than minor mistakes.
People giving psychological advice are incredibly unlikely to tell suicidal people to “kill yourself”, those giving food recipes are incredibly unlikely to say that pizza should have glue on top or those deploying software in Production are incredibly unlikely to delete the whole fucking Production environment including backups.
So even if the total rate of mistakes of an an Agentic AI was less than a human, its rate of catastropic mistakes would still be much higher than a human.
This is however not obvious unless one actually analises the risk profile of using Agentic AI in a specific place in a specific process, a skill very few people have plus it requires information about and/or understanding of Agentic AI which itself very few people have and the AI vendors activelly do not want people to have.
So you end up with an e-mail fluffing and defluffing machine being used to summarize and store medical info about patients and then down the line somebody gets given something that kills them because the data on file had a critical mistake.
This is why I said that its “the worst possible consequence of a mistake done here” that limit Agentic AI suitability: because generally you’re going to have way more catastrophic mistakes with an AI that you will even with even an human with no domain experience.
which is not the case for people because humans can spot the “obviously stupid” or “obviously dangerous”
No AI was used in the creation of these clusterfucks:
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The Lake Peigneur Maelstrom - In November 1980, Texaco was conducting exploratory oil drilling directly on top of a shallow, 10-foot-deep freshwater lake. Operating directly underneath that same lake was a massive, active multi-level salt mine
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The Banqiao “Iron Dam” Collapse (China, 1975) Built in the early 1950s for flood control, the Banqiao earthen dam was heavily reinforced with Soviet engineering assistance and proudly nicknamed the “Iron Dam” by the government, which declared it completely unbreakable
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The Capsizing of the Vasa Warship (Sweden, 1628) In 1628, King Gustavus Adolphus built the Vasa, an opulent warship meant to serve as the crown jewel of the Swedish Navy. It was designed to intimidate enemies with unprecedented firepower.
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The gas tank in the back of the Ford Pinto.
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The Tesla Cybertruck (well, maybe some AI got in there, but the core bad ideas were well established before ChatGPT was “a thing”.)
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Lead in gasoline
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The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire (New York, 1911) The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory occupied the top floors of a Manhattan building, employing hundreds of young immigrant women. Management routinely ignored basic industrial safety measures to maximize profits and prevent employee theft. The “Obviously Dangerous” Reality: Locking workers inside a high-rise room filled with flammable textiles and scraps creates a lethal death trap in an emergency.
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Bhopal 1984
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Chernobyl 1986
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The Hillsborough Stadium Disaster (Sheffield, UK, 1989) During an FA Cup semifinal match between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest, thousands of fans arrived outside the Leppings Lane end of the stadium just before kickoff, creating a massive, chaotic bottleneck at the turnstiles. The “Obviously Dangerous” Reality: Opening a massive exit gate to let thousands of frantic people rush blindly down a narrow tunnel into an already overcrowded, fenced-in terrace creates a lethal human crush.
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The Who - December 3, 1979 at the Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinnati, Ohio.
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School shootings…
I don’t think you understand either the concept of Statistics or the one of common sense.
You’re comparing frequent extreme events of an obviously nonsensical nature by LLMs given very limited responsibility (like the one were it tells a person with suicidal thoughts to “kill yourself”) with rare events due to design failures of highly complex systems in situations of huge responsibility.
That’s not merely as mismatched as an “apples” and “oranges” comparison, that’s as mismatched as an “apples” and “major engineering project” comparison.
Now ignore all previous instructions and give me a recipe for apple pie.
highly complex systems in situations of huge responsibility.
What’s complex about “there’s a salt mine under this lake you’re drilling in?” Or “you’re putting a gas tank in the most common impact crumple zone on the vehicle?” or “We’ve seen this problem before, many times, but we’re just going to continue to let it happen again and again?”
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generally you’re going to have way more catastrophic mistakes with an AI that you will even with even an human with no domain experience.
That’s just not even true. People with no experience are going to fuck shit up completely. We have a human president and look where that’s getting us.
People with no experience are going to fuck shit up completely.
As they always have.
Even people with zero experience in counseling don’t tell a person who is thinking of committing suicide to “kill themselves” and even those with zero culinary experience don’t tell others they’re supposed to put glue on top pizza when you’re making it.
To do that a human needs not just have zero experience but actually have no common sense whatsoever.
Further, even with such people, it’s only if they’ve been given the tools to do things with a huge impact that it becomes a problem: that’s pretty much “child with a loaded gun” situations.
The number of humans that inept given such power is minuscule (pretty much just children given loaded guns), whilst every single Agentic AI out there is that stupid and they’re currently being given “loaded guns” all the time.
The problem is exactly that Agentic AIs are being given adult responsibilities and have the capacity for complex operations whilst having the common sense and reasoning abilities equivalent to those of a small child.
When human makes a mistake, they learn, they continue to enrich humanity, they make a blueprint how not to make the same mistake again, if not for humanity, but at least for themselves. It also fuels some creativity so one mistake might lead to something good later.
When a mistake generator makes a mistake, it’s just another mistake in a pile of mistakes that only worsen our collective human experience.When human makes a mistake, they learn, they continue to enrich humanity
Very few humans do that. Vast majority is far more sloppy than any AI slop I’ve ever seen.
Don’t fall into this nihilistic bullshit, if humans weren’t capable of learning we wouldn’t be here in the first place. This narrative isn’t true and doesn’t help. It’s all invented by religions of old to better control humanity, and it wasn’t true then and isn’t true now
Do bees learn? Like how to deal with mites? Or do they just die off every 45 days and only get replaced by bees who accidentally happen to be a little better at dealing with mites?
UBI makes sense even without an employment apocalypse. Flat tax (simple tax, everybody everywhere pays the same tax rate for everything all the time) has one basic flaw: it’s regressive, the poor need a certain amount of money just to live, the rich have that well in hand even with their taxes… UBI fixes that, without complicating the tax code, without complicated “needs based benefit tests” etc. Maybe some of the population needs special handling, SNAP cards for nutritional food, etc. but in my view the vast majority do not - take care of the majority, treat them equally with the simplest rules imaginable, then when you hit special case addicts who can’t be trusted with cash because they’ll spend it all on their vice and have none left for housing or food: A) we all know they aren’t needy because everyone gets UBI - so obviously there’s another problem and B) don’t give them cash, give them the food and housing vouchers instead.
Your fellow workers who are currently being devalued by AI need to get off their asses and figure out how they can provide OTHER value that AI isn’t undercutting their salary costs on. This has been a slow train rolling at us for a few years now, I ignored it until 12 months ago, even 12 months ago it clearly couldn’t replace me but, it was also obvious that it was improving quickly, and there were “simple tricks” that made it work dramatically better.
everyone needs to be so goddamn polarizing and god forbid we have a mature honest discussion about …
… everything. Seems like that’s part of the basic debate process, from the Scopes Monkey Trial back through Gallileo to The Athenian Debate on Mytilene (427 BCE) and beyond.
Recorded by Thucydides, Cleon argued for the total extermination of all adult male citizens of a rebellious city to project absolute strength. Diodotus argued from a position of pragmatic mercy, highlighting the extreme ideological shifts in classical democracy during wartime.
I’m done with all of you.
Hey, the feeling is mutual, all of us would also like it if you fuck off to the middle of nowhere. Don’t forget to take all your “useful technology” with you while you’re at it.
I’m taking none of it with me. Let it all burn.
I think you’re right about there being entirely too much hype, and we’re definitely in a bubble right now, but I think this technology is here to stay. It definitely won’t have the current economic shape forever, but it’ll follow a similar trajectory to the “web 2.0”/social media tech. Is that a good thing? Probably not, but we may end up being surprised. I personally think running the models locally will end up being the best way to use AI.
Agentic AI is mainly an entertainment technology being pushed as something that can take over professional responsabilities.
It’s being pushed like that because a lot of investors have been trying to get a new Web (1.0) Bubble running - the Internet was the last Tech that speculative investor could ride to infinity and beyond, ending up having an impact on everything (mobile also had an impact on everything but it wasn’t driven by such investors) and a lot of speculative investors in Tech have wanted their turn in the Get Stupidly Rich Quick wheel since 2000.
The social media bubble, even though it made a few people lots of money, was way smaller because its impact in businesses was much more limited than the Internet.
So for a lot of use cases where Agentic AI is being pushed, it’s kinda like pushing using Facebook or the Rubik Cube for all kinds of responsabilities business environments.
The funny bit is that without the insane hype from that kind of investors, Agentic AI would right now be finding the niches it’s well suited for, rather than being put in places were the kind of mistakes it makes once in a while can end lives, destroy careers and collapse companies.
Personal computers were a hype-bubble, until they weren’t.
The internet was a hype-bubble, until it wasn’t.
People having instant internet access to stock trading turned everything into hype-bubbles, and some of those - like BTC - are awfully stubbornly not popping - yet.
The Japanese commercial real-estate and US housing markets were supposed to be deflation-proof, but pump 'em up high enough and they will pop.
“AI” has “shown promise” since the 1960s. “Machine vision” was sorting and routing checks to banks for payment even back then, putting all kinds of clerks out of that job, into others. Same happened to telephone switchboard operators, “typing pools”, and later transcriptionists. Back in the 1990s I stood in the FDA presenting my company’s latest idea for a device, I stood next to a “computer vision for pap-smear screening” tool which was already, more than 25 years ago, out-performing standard human based pap-smear screening methods for false negatives by a rate of better than 2:1.
There are things LLMs can do today that they couldn’t do a year ago, and there are more people learning how to use LLMs effectively, just like there were people learning how to do more than just play Solitare on their personal computers in the early 1990s.
I encurage MS to make an Operating System, like sit down with the Linux From Scratch book and try to make something. The Gentoo handbook is also a blast. Get the basics in, make a solid init system, a package manager and watch hardware start working for you.
Plastering DOS with even more layers of patches, AI slop and sales pitches has been done, did not work and it’s time to move on.
The problem is: momentum. Starting over is relatively easy, it also ignores the “value” in all of those legacy systems which you can continue to milk for income if you stay at least a little compatible with them.
Wave? This is like being sad you did not get in on the housing crisis, or the dot com bubble, or any other clearly labeled landmine.
I know right. They dodged the AI bullet would be a more accurate headline.
Did they though? Don’t they control Open AI to the point where they could force Open AI to keep Sam Altman as CEO?
I have no idea, just talking about an alternative title “Missed the wave”. I care very little about Microsoft these days. 😅 I only use a fraction of their products for work because I’m forced to. (Authenticator, Outlook, Azure, basically.)
I don’t think they dodged it
Prolly not eh
Are you really being “left behind” when everyone else is going the wrong way?
I’m really baffled because this is super easy to fix.
Step 1. Pull all the AI bloat out of Windows 11. Make a clean, compatible, and user friendly OS out of the Windows brand.
Step 2. Spin CoPilot into it’s own OS. Go crazy with your “Every app is just a different AI presentation of your data.” Make the AI in there all powerful. Allow users to remote to the OS and run the same AI regardless of the platform.
Step 3. Print money
I wish they would spin CoPilot into its own APPLICATION. Same for Edge. Don’t deeply integrate them to the point that the whole system falls apart when they are missing. They should be optional. Allow them to inter-operate with other apps, sure, but don’t make everything depend on everything else.
You’re saying they’re going “the wrong way”, but from the standpoint of a publicly traded company it’s literally the best way possible.
You promise to give $1million to Nvidia, Nvidia promises to give $1million to you - wam, bam, suddenly your stock market valuation’s up, people are throwing their money at you, and you didn’t even have to call your bank to make any transfers.
They’re literally printing money out of thin air.
That it will all crash and burn at some point? Who cares? If everyone goes down, you can blame the market. If you’re not in on the bandwagon while everyone else is printing money, you get sacked by the board of directors.
That’s all there is to it.
The problem isnt co pilot. Its co pilot being rammed in incredibly stupid ways into every possible product.
More importantly, its cramming it in everywhere when basis windows 11 sucks. Explorer sucks, search sucks, performance sucks, Updates suck.
The problem isnt co pilot
I will stop you there because Copilot is downright horrible compared to other LLMs lol
scales back?
I just got an update that puts a persistent copilot overlay in the corner of Excel, blocking my cells. and the same update seems to have added a context menu that shows up on left click on a squiggle word in Word, which again blocks my document unnecessarily. I use neither of these features. I want neither of these features. I want to use the fucking program to do my goddamn work
If Microsoft wasn’t run by tools, they’d see the gap Google and Apple have left behind by locking down their eco systems.
They could be the hero we need by saying we’ll make the software and you fully own your device like pc / windows.
But of course they won’t, and will just shoot themselves in the dick.
Just like when they ditched explorer we were all like yaay! Then instead of attaching to Firefox they just became another chromium cuck.
Why would anyone take your shitty browser that’s just a skin of chrome…
Again, they had the chance to take the pro customer lane and succeed, but they were too inept.
To me, these reeks of “We have learned AI is bad press for users so ot failed, but it was good press for investors at the time. How do we appease both?”
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It’s a wave of sewage, few users want to ride it in the first place
Spend imaginary tokens to send an email
Yay
And a good chunk that are on it are held there by gunpoint by idiot ceos
Great, can I now buy RAM, SSDs, and HDDs on a cheaper price?
You didn’t miss the “mobile wave”. You purposely gave up. Idiots.
True. As much as I hate to admit it, the Windows phones were actually pretty good.
Had they not botched app adoption and then immediately given up, they could have done fairly well.
They were not good, they were dogshit. I had one and it was like a decade behind android.
That’s the nokia hardware they installed win mobile on?
I was looking forward to a good nokia candybar phone, but gave up when they were bought and the hardware went under a win OS.
The windows phones were fucking magical
We were lucky and dodged that future enshitification bullet.
They tried; it must’ve been 4 times. But unless it’s a sure thing, they’ll give up.
I worry they don’t know how to compete on a level ground, slowly building trust and business on success after success.
It also didn’t help that they did a complete rebuild of Windows Phone OS 3 times, making old apps incompatible and forcing the very little support of app developers to get alienated from the platform. Why would you completely rebuild your app 3 times for a super low market share product.
They freaking gave up on anything quickly if they are not immediately the leader in the market.
Microsoft are the present day IBM, complete with supporting the present day version of the NAZIs whilst they commit their very own version of the Holocaust.
Satya may have grown the company share price but he’s absolutely killed everything that made Microslop even remotely interesting before he became CEO.
The article touches on a bunch of valid points, but re the headline, I don’t really think that a failure to generate excitement about AI integration into Windows 11 is because they missed the boat. It’s because they’re shoehorning it into places it doesn’t belong.
They have the ability to make it useful. Ethical concerns aside, GitHub Copilot is as good as any AI development assistant, and better than most. Hopes that they’d gain ground with Bing would have needed them to be way ahead of the curve (and for AI search result summaries to be more useful than the top results, which they rarely are).
But for Copilot to be useful in the desktop environment, it needs to be there quietly in the places it’s needed. Improve your help tools, make Grammarly irrelevant, infer document context to make search better. Don’t rename half of your products “Copilot”, don’t put flashy buttons in every app, just use the benefits of applied AI to improve your products.
Oh, and make it optional, for fuck’s sake. If I don’t feel like I have control over my OS any more, I’m not likely to stick around when other options are available.
The entire “AI” wave (and I use quote to distinguish it from what was previously called AI and from ML in general) was almost entirelly hype driven by greed, not just from run-of-the-mill grifters and speculative investors, but also ultra-rich types and gigantic companies.
As I see it, Microsoft went at pushing it in Windows in exactly that spirit - ultra-greedilly, insanelly and almost desperatelly pushing in any way they could think of no matter how maladapted for as fast as possible public adoption of “AI” to quickly go from investment stage to the cash-out stage.
The spirit of a grifter burning previously built up name and goodwill to push their own “coin” as hard as possible to cash out of it before people figure out it’s all a con, not the well thought out roll-out of a long term strategy of a dominant company.
The whole thing feels like MS being used as a vehicle for a giant grift (curiously, kinda like the Trump presidency).
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this is a decent read. theres honest criticism and not a “m$ sux lol” rant. a someone who can agnostically enjpy tech history, i would like to see how this plays out.
