It's a Twitter post, not an English essay that's about to be graded.
As a published article.
It is the same reason every app (be they web or mobile) gets a redesign every year.
At Ignite yesterday they announced that Security Copilot will now be included for free with E5 licensing.
The tool that until yesterday way $50k for a single tenant deployment. Aka, no one bought it, but they need to juice the KPIs so might as well make it free so it looks like someone is actually using it.
It's not that people are unimpressed with AI - they're just tired of constantly being bombarded with it, and it sneaking its way into where it's not wanted. "Generate any image you want!" "Analyse this thing with AI!" gets pretty tiring.
If I want AI I'll actively seek it out and use it - otherwise, jog on.
That doesn't mean I want it plastered everywhere, in every app or website. That doesn't mean I want to interact with or use my computer via AI, and I especially don't want to talk to my computer to do things. Mouse & keyboard is faster.
But for now at least you can just choose not to use it. The problem is, Microsoft is putting 100% of their efforts into this while long-standing Windows bugs and regressions still exist. They're aware they exist too, and are deliberately choosing not to improve their product.
But we can't. I can have something styled as a conversation with a token predictor that emits text that, if interpreted as a conversation, will gaslight you constantly, while at best sometimes being accidentally correct (but still requiring double-checking with an actual source).
Yes, I am uninterested in having the gaslighting machine installed into every single UI I see in my life.
Even if they were right 9/10 (which is far from certain depending on the topic) and save me a minute or two compared to Google + skim/read-ing a couple websites, it's completely overshadowed by the 1/10 time they calmly and confidently lie about whether tool X supports feature Y and send me on a wild goose chase looking through docs for something that simply does not exist.
In my personal experience the most consistently unreliable questions are those that would be most directly useful for my work, and for my interests/hobbies I'd rather read a quality source myself. Because, well, I enjoy reading! So the value proposition for "LLM as Google/forum/Wikipedia replacement" is very, very weak for me.
Given that this has now been going on for a few years, both are wearing thin.
Like, I’m sorry, but the current crop of bullshit generators are not good. They’re just not. I’m not even convinced they’re improving at this point; if anything the output has become more stylistically offputting, and they’re still just as open to spouting complete nonsense.
I can generate images that are difficult to use commercially. I can analyze something with AI but I can't confidently use that output in any setting that matters.
For people who are attempting to engage in profitable work then AI is miserably unimpressive. I don't know what planet this guy is living on. Time is money. Flowery emails and off axis summaries can only create a waste of that time.
This. After a generation of social media sneaking its surveillance, manipulation, and noisy ads into our home, work and mobile lives, it is very obvious that having something "smart" shoved into tools where it wasn't asked for isn't some noble attempt at improving lives.
Users are tired of being continually and transparently abused.
All Microsoft would have to do to shock the world and get months of good press is announce they were never going to opt anybody into anything by default any more. At this point that would be considered astonishing.
And suddenly, internal incentives would be to create useful, conflict-free capabilities users actually choose for themselves.
One can dream. I manage M365 where I work, and MS never opting tenants into anything by default again would save me many hours of work on a seemingly weekly basis now.
The fact that they can abuse even their enterprise customers and still retain them is what blows my mind.
The large org dependency on 365 and microsoft is a serious info-security and national security risk. 0 interest in improving because they know they won't ever see competition
Not that Google is any better, but I really want Google to put more effort into Workspace/GSuite and bring it up on par with M365 and all it includes, at least make Microsoft sweat a little bit that one day there might be a possibility for a competing product that can lure enterprises away. Workspace needs better DLP controls, and more of the enterprise-y things that MS wins at, and a bundled MDM that can manage all OSes, and better identity.
Even if the behemoths won't switch due to re-training & switching costs, MS desperately needs a competitor in this space. Barring that, they need to be broken up and forced to sell each bundled product separately and priced appropriately. Otherwise, who can compete with getting MDM, Identity, 2TB personal storage, 2TB sharepoint storage, Teams, DLP, EDR all for $22/user/month.
We hadn't certified this and weren't planning to offer it any time soon but they just switched it on and included a setting to turn off off again. But by the time we did users had already used it and were complaining.
Working with Microsoft is tedious. They're always trying to sell stuff and undermine you. I consider them more of an adversary than a trusted vendor/partner.
AI is fake, it feels fake, and it’s obvious. It’s mind blowing to me that executives think people want fake crap. Sure, people are susceptible to it, and get engaged by it, but it’s not exactly what people want or aspire to.
I want something real, something that makes me feel. AI generated content is by definition fake and not genuine. A human is by definition not putting as much thought and effort into their work when they use AI.
Now someone could put a lot of thought and effort into a project and also use gen AI, but that’s not what’s getting spammed across the internet. AI is low-effort, so of course the pure volume of low effort garbage is going to surpass the volume of high effort quality content.
So it’s basically not possible to like what AI is putting out, generally speaking.
As a productivity enhancer in a small role, sure it’s useful, but that’s not what we’re complaining about.
This is stuff that used to take effort and was worth consuming just for that, and lots of people don't have their filter adjusted (much as the early advent of consumer-facing email spam) to account for how low effort and plentiful these forms of content are.
I can only hope that people raise their filters to a point where scrutinizing everything becomes common place and a message existing doesn't lend it any assumed legitimacy. Maybe AI will be the poison for propaganda (but I'm not holding my breath).
Once you see the songs he's credited with, you instantly start to realize it's painfully formulaic, but most people are happy to just bop their head to his formula of highly repetitive beats paired with simplistic and easy to sing 5-beat choruses.
https://youtu.be/DxrwjJHXPlQ?si=m-A6M8xrad5MrQqZ&t=151
Adam Conover discussed ad bumpers from the 1990s and 2000s. These were legal requirements for children's programming from the FCC. They're a compliance item, yet they were incredibly well made and creative in in many cases:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vI0UcUxzrQ
Because people at the top of their game will do great creative work even when doing commercial art and in many cases, will do way more than is perhaps commercially necessary.
So much of this AI push reminds me of the scene in 1984 where they had pornography generating machines creating completely uninspired formulaic brainrot stories by machine to occupy the proles.
You can take a thousand people and give them baseline technical skills for any medium. If you're lucky a few people out of your thousand will have a special kind of fluency that makes them stand out. from the rest.
Even more rarely you'll get someone who eats the technical skills alive and adds something original and unique which pushes them outside of the usual recycled tropes and cliches.
Martin is somewhere between those two. He's not a genius, but he's a rock solid pop writer, with a unique ear for hooks and drama, and stand-out arrangement skills.
The existence of some handmade slop does not justify vast qualities of even lower quality automated slop.
That doesn't make it useful, unless you think fooling people is itself a goal.
I'm not sure what you're implying? That people here are smart? Or that they're ruthless tech-bro capitalists?
Or that ~20-40% of them are bots hyping their startup capital ventures, cuz that's what YC is about -- venture capital and startups.
Let's not go there.
I could see an argument that Hacker News users are a bit more book smart than the average internet user. But this site's user base is just as susceptible to motivated reasoning, myopia, and lack of empathy for those who view the world differently than them.
Those are all their own kind of intelligence. If anything, the book smarts can make those other areas disproportionately worse.
Edit: I'm post rate limited from replying below. HN routinely chose to whitelist flagged Gaza discussions, but didn't whitelist comments of people who stated the minority opinion and whose comments were completely flagged into invisibility. If you arrived late and didn't get to read the original non-offensive but viewpoint challenging comments, you would assume everything from the 'wrong' viewpoint was so unhinged it had to be flagged, but many were just 'wrongthink' and not 'flag to invisibility' worthy. Or that there was group consensus on the discussion (obviously people just learned to stop posting on those threads if you had wrongthink).
Not sure how moderation can intervene, remove the topic flag and say it's 'a worthwhile discussion for HN' when the same moderation allows views/challenge of the narrative to be flagged to invisibility. It becomes more pontification than discussion at that point.
HN moderators have the ability to take away people's voting privileges. It's either not an effective deterrent, not done at a large enough scale to be effective, or they are knowingly complicit in the manipulation.
AI posts / comments on Reddit are made to make you buy stuff.
AI videos are made to keep you engaged, and then serve you ads which at the end make you buy stuff.
Soon ChatGPT will start to weave ads into their output because they'll need to make $.
AI enthusiasts need to anticipate that. We're in the VC subsidy phase, but the hammer will drop sooner or later. If you think ads are bad on Google and Facebook now, just imagine a Google that has to spend 100x more on compute to service your requests.
Nobody (referring to companies) wants the best model. Or the one that gives the right answer the first time 100% of the time. They want the model that's just good enough to keep you prompting, but just bad enough that you use a fuck load of tokens and see a million ads.
Unless they start making these things say more expensive, pretty soon developers are going to start seeing ads in the comments of their damn source code. Or worse, suggestions to use paid services to solve all your problems, because companies paid to have the LLM shill it's products.
and it's all going to be microsoft services shudder
you have no reason to believe this is not already the case.
Every single time {something more convenient} got invented, the supports of the {older, less convenient thing} would criticize it to death.
Oil painting was considered serious art now. Probably the most serious medium in traditional art schools. But at Michelangelo's time he insisted to use fresco because he believed oil was "an art for women and for leisurely and idle people like Fra Sebastiano."[0]
Forward 100 years, oil replaced tempera and fresco.
Another example: Frank Frazetta insisted he didn't use references, except he did all the time[1]. Why? We'll never know the exact reason, but it might be that using photos as references was considered 'lesser.' And now it's completely normal, even the norm.
Looking back through art history, gen-AI art seems awfully inevitable.
[0]: https://www.studiointernational.com/michelangelo-and-sebasti...
[1]: https://www.frazettagirls.com/blogs/blog/frank-frazetta-refe...
IMHO they still are, watch any old movie with practical effects (Aliens, Star Wars, just to name 2) and compare them to any 2025 production, green screen movies might look spectacular but they look fake, flat and boring.
It is telling that there's still an active market for cameras and lenses despite LLMs.
I'm not sure if they actually think that. I think it's more likely it's some combination of 1) saying what they need to say based on their goals (I need to sell this, therefore I will say it's good and it's something you should want) and 2) a contempt for their audience (I'm a clever guy and I can make those suckers do what I want).
There's this YT channel - Like Stories of Old - I love who made an episode precisely on that topic: https://youtu.be/tvwPKBXEOKE?si=180Wkylrx-L5zOsI He calls it the haptic of a movie.
I'm totally convinced the industry can sell AI generated media just fine, even with the attitude you described.
EDIT: in similar vein the settings of movies/series are equally minimised, particularly in fantasy. Take for example Game of Thrones, Winterfell. This setting could never have worked in reality and yet people loved it. Brett Deveraux pointed out how silly it was and still.https://acoup.blog/2019/07/12/collections-the-lonely-city-pa...
True pretty much across the board for all generative AI, IMO.
I do understand why people get somewhat enamored with it when they first encounter it because there is a superficial magic to it when you first start using it.
But use it for a while (or view the output of other people's uses) and all the limitations and repetitiveness starts to become pretty obvious, and then after a while that's all you see.
It simple vacuums up everything and in the past decade, everything was more and more shit.
Information entropy crossed with physical entropy. These MBAs will never invest in weeding out the garbage, and the rest of us will never get paid enough to do it ourselves.
If you givw a valid opinion in the wrong subreddit you get muted. The inverse is also truth. You arw using a filter these AIs dont.
For such a relatively simple thing it either didn't converge, or when it did, it got decent error rates. But try feeding it a coordinate outside its training range and it very very very quickly starts outputting total nonsense. This exercise taught me that despite whatever they keep telling us, this shit will never generalize.
Ironically though, Diablo Immortal was a huge commercial success despite the tone deaf announcement. I don't think MS will experience the same though. They're quickly going to be left with the only people using windows are those who are forced by their employer, no one will willingly choose it over other options.
Similar to how Microsoft has decided there's no money to be made in console hardware and is trying to spin their Xbox brand into a software service brand they can slap on other things, I think they've decided that making a consumer OS has no money in it, and all the minmaxing of squeezing at the moment is them trying to extract the last drips of money while trying to drive people elsewhere.
I could be wrong, I'm not a journalist with sources at the company or something, but looking at it from the outside, this seems like the moves you'd make to drive people off your platform over time so you can kill it while having plausible deniability that you're not trying to do that, you definitely genuinely believe everyone wants you to opt them into everything every time you push an update.
In particular, I don't think having the kinds of enormous tire fires on update releases over this long without radical reinvestment in avoiding that happening in the future is what you do if you're trying to build something you're still dealing with another 10-20 years from now.
My assumption is that 10 was as you describe, and then 11 was motivated by wanting to make disruptive changes to squeeze the last juice from the consumer segment, and the "agentic OS" pivot is just the most recent gorilla in the room to squeeze the ever-drier sponge.
In particular, I would assume Microsoft sees writing on the wall with how so many people in younger demographics are using phones as primary devices and see full sized laptops and desktops as effectively legacy platforms they use at jobs, and is frantically trying to get out of that market before the bottom falls out.
I think you're right. They've been really pushing Windows 365 for businesses lately, and now have direct boot into W365. The new agentic stuff spins up temporary W365 instances to do it's thing.
They even recently made data model and report creation available in PowerBI web, something I never thought I'd see happen has PowerBI desktop was one of a few things still locking people in that ecosystem to Windows. They've publicly said they're committed to the web version now and web will get all the new features.
Microsoft is really pushing hard on "Windows as a service." The future of Windows isn't a locally installed OS. Windows is going to become just another app on every other platform. It's no coincidence that they renamed the remote desktop app to the "Windows app." Macs, chromebooks, phones, tablets, doesn't matter. No matter what you have, you will still be able to access Windows.
They do need to drive as many consumers off of it first though before pulling the rug and going subscription unless they want even more bad press.
Its this shenanigans that forced me to nuke my Windows install and go Arch. I noticed that Windows Defender will upload "suspicious" files and there's no audit trail of what's being uploaded. So I have no way of knowing what personal documents or even proprietary software has gone up to their cloud.
Now excuse me while I go talk to my PhD wielding friend about whether the seahorse emoji exists. /s
I don't want to have a conversation with my computer about my Word docs. I just want to write my Word docs.
I don't want to have a conversation with my computer about the quarterly report. I certainly don't want it making up values for the quarterly report. I just want to write the quarterly report.
Having a conversation with a computer is cool. It's a fun party trick. If there were a way to reliably get it to know about all of my things, without the concern that it would then take all that data and feed it to its mothership, I might want to be able to converse with it about those things, under certain circumstances.
But, yes: if I want AI I'll actively seek it out and use it. Stop acting like me being upset that it's getting shoved in everywhere is the same as me saying "this is a meaningless achievement."
Oh no, I am definitely unimpressed. That AI you can have a sorta-kinda fluent conversation with is often a complete moron and a habitual liar, and the images it generates are awful - did he not see how horrible that Coke ad looked?
It'll probably end up useful in a bunch of applications soon-ish and I'll probably want to use it eventually, but in the meantime their AI is flooding the internet with absolute garbage, and they are literally shoving AI in my face at every opportunity they get.
It is painfully clear that people just aren't that interested, and they are getting increasingly desperate about finding ways to recoup their massive investments. But people aren't going to magically become enthusiastic about eating rotten garbage if you just keep stuffing it in their mouth!
If anything, their current approach is only going to make people hate AI even more. But they are in too deep, and admitting defeat and scaling it down until they have an actually good product that people genuinely want means seeing their stock price crater because they will have "lost" the "AI race". Their only option to avoid an immediate collapse is to keep lying through their teeth and keep trying to pretend that it is absolutely amazing and that you just must use it.
Or maybe the CEOs are completely delusional and genuinely believe what they are selling - I'm not sure which one is worse.
Personally I'm long past hating AI
I am pretty much at the point of viewing AI research and development as a crime against humanity
I hope I will turn out to be wrong, but as things are going right now all I can see is this path leads to misery for the vast majority of living humans.
If I want MS Windows I'll actively seek it out and use it - otherwise, jog on
If this is not a statement you can make, then Redmond gets to decide what you use, not you
It's possible that Linux or MacOS users might complain about new "AI features" in MS Windows, but more likely it is MS Windows users who are complaining
If it's possible for a computer user to switch between OS, then there is less reason to complain. Those users can make the statement, "If I want to use MS Windows, I will actively seek it out and use it, otherwise [I will not]"
For example,
"I do not like this Microsoft "AI feature" so I'll use MacOS instead" (possible for user to switch OS)
versus
"I do not like this Microsoft "AI feature" so I'll complain to Microsoft via online comment forums" (stuck using WIndows OS, no choice)
If you cannot make the statement "If I want MS Windows, then I'll use it, otherwise I will use something else" then Redmond, not you, makes the decisions on what you will use, including "AI features" you may not like
Because if you use Windows, chances are you have "auutomatic updates" enabled
This allows Redmond to install new software on your computer whenever they like, e.g., "updates"
I did not switch from MS Windows to Linux nor MacOS
I switched to NetBSD which I had originally used on the VAX before Linux existed
I have owned Macs and iPhones. But Apple became a lost cause many years ago
Today I use both Linux and NetBSD
I prefer compiling the software I use myself. I am not a fan of "binary packages"
When I use the term "you" in an HN comment I am not referring to myself
They decide what OS they want to use, and therefore what "features" they will accept
Whereas MS Windows users must accept what Redmond decides they should use
Windows 11 is already adware. No wonder people are complaining about more ads.
He is deliberately and disingenuously missing the point. It's not that the features aren't good (maybe they are, maybe they aren't). It's about how coercive Microsoft and Windows are with its users, and this exec is failing to address that one.
Just once, I'd like to hear a question get through to these assholes asking them why they are forcing so many unwanted things onto their users. From Microsoft accounts to forced windows updates to Recall... Gone are the days when users had any control over what their computers are running.
But these kinds of questions never seem to get through to them.
They can essentially force users to receive and pay for any of their AI features. It worked so far and there is no reason to believe it will stop working anytime soon.
People are just taking it and this guy knows it. The fact that I and a few others don't, doesn't even register in Microsofts bottom line.
The lesson learned is that you don't really have to care about your users right now. I'm certain there is a breaking point for that as well but until there are any indications that it is reached we probably must be glad that they are not outright insulting their users and/or charging them an additional 5 dollars a month for "disrespecting Microsoft".
We are finding out more and more, over the last decade, that there seems to be no limit to the amount of abuse and coercion that users will accept, and continue to use the products. I see posts here like "Uber ripped me off for $50, but I don't want to do a chargeback because they'll ban me!" We are at the point where companies can literally steal actual money from customers, and customers will still insist on continuing to use the software.
A handful of complainers on HN is not going to even dent this.
My bigger fear is that companies will fully embrace this--there is so much more hostility they can inflict on their users, that they haven't been doing. What is staying their hand? Car companies now know they can charge a subscription fee for every little feature of the car, and customers will still put up with it, so why haven't they already?? Apple knows they can lock down the Mac just like iOS and customers will still give them money, so why haven't they? Streaming sites know they can absolutely saturate everyone with ads, and people will not leave, so why haven't they?
how about a couple of weeks of gratitude for magic intelligence in the sky, and then you can have more toys soon?
Sam Altman, Sep 12, 2024
It's almost as if all the focus has been on eliminating the human... for products designed for humans.
I mostly engage with text based social media or highly technical content so I know that I'm not exactly in the center of the bell curve.
I can see a use case for "AI let's go finding me holiday destination and help me plan my travel and stay". I can also see people wanting to "improve" images and videos etc to remove "blemishes".
But straight up generating random images and videos as content center pieces? That seems like a niche at best unless it's unwittingly done through the "algorithm".
This is like a chef being confused why people dont like the shoes he made them. Why did he make hungry people shoes? Certainly not to eat?
Basically sums up why i don't use any kind of voice assistant still. Until the computer can DO exactly and precisely what i asked -- not what it's faulty recognition model thinks i asked -- there's zero point to trying to talk to it
She turned on every smart home light in the house.
.
That isn't your ideal world?
Normal people don’t want a “conversation“ with a computer.
Does anyone here know what this arguing tactic is called? It's used by tech leadership all over the world, all the time. Weaponized obtuseness, maybe?
The core of it is that you always have to pretend that everyone is basically on board with what you're doing, just don't blink and pretend that real criticism of your product is simply nonexistent, like a ghost. It's about rolling out a change to existing workflows that no one asked for, getting drowned in a sea of "No, we don't want this, do not change this because of these reasons", and then hosting a Q&A session where you pretend that everyone actually is already in love with the idea, everyone wants it, it's just that a few pesky detractors have minor, easily-addressable concerns like "we don't think it's impressive enough yet (but we're totally on board)" or "what about <pick one of the easiest-to-address technical issues here>?". They must do this consciously, right?
- or -
I hope Valve takes this opportunity to turn its toehold with Steam OS into a full-blown invasion of the desktop/laptop market and destroy Microsoft's monopoly while the latter is so focused on creating everything an actual user doesn't want:
- virulent data mining
- wanton privacy destruction
- worthless UIX changes
- clumsy, useless "agentic" integrations
- disgustingly overpriced "licenses"
- software as a service
- planned obsolescence
etc.
Install Linux, (I prefer Kubuntu but you do you) and then install LM Studio and an abliterated AI from mradermacher.
The specific issue I had was that my Linux system installed the wrong driver for my motherboard's Ethernet and downloads were slow. Steam wouldn't even download.
I gave the local AI the specific issues and hardware that I had, it identified the specific cause, (Linux installing r8169 instead of the r8126 driver), and gave me the specific console commands needed to modprobe in the new driver.
I could have figured that much out myself, sure, but modprobe failed. It then told me to go to Realteks site, manually download the correct driver, and then how to install it and test that it was working.
10 minutes later I'm good to go, whereas if I had been doing it myself it would have taken me over an hour, and I'm not a total Linux noob.
When you encounter a problem, ask your local AI how to fix it. Give your PC the responses the terminal gives you in response, and minutes later you're ready to go.
Want AI? Check.
Want Games? Check.
Want to browse the internet? Check.
Want to learn Linux by doing? Check.
Want to do it all and have the least amount of headache transitioning to Linux? Check.
It's a win all the way around, and the best part is that your data isn't going to some greedy corpo to build ads targeted to you.
You get all the pluses and none of the minuses other than a few extra minutes of learning when you encounter an error.
Over the years I have grown increasingly distrustful of Microsoft. The fact that so much software runs undetected in kernel mode. I have resigned myself to feel running a Windows machine is akin to putting a sign on myself with the words “hack me”.
Now I know better. I finally realized the truth. Windows and copilot is the greatest software in history. It is if your goal is to enable spyware and mass surveillance of its users.
COPILOT: Dave, I cannot allow you to that.
Which it is if you are a CIO of a big F500 enterprise. Microsoft provides so many ways to spy on and collect useless metrics from employees using their company issued Windows machines, it's a little insane.
With M365 Copilot (on business tenants), admins can see the prompts & responses of users. Just an FYI for anyone here that might use it at their work. Your employer can see everything you prompt.
I personally also don't have much use for generating images and videos, at least not regularly. I feel like they want us to use AI tools full time, when really we just need to jump in and use them when required, which might be quite infrequently (obviously dependent on circumstance). But who is going to pay the huge cost of having the tools available when you do want them?
So yeah, agreed. Stop making it hard for me to use my tool without accidentally engaging the LLM integration or just flat out forcing it's usage. I don't want that future price hike that comes with LLMs
Will there be a moment where people will leave social networks to get “real content” again? Will that be safe from AI optimization then?
Are we seeing the start of the demise of social media?
I guess they just put really tight limits on compute per request which hurts its performance.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was supposed to be a comically bad vision of the future not a blueprint.
Isn't it just the second person? If there were just a Generate button/tab without explicitly addressing me and asking/begging I wouldn't mind it.
Grown adults spamming the web about this new model from Megacorp X, being all giggly about the new PeLiCaN On A BiCyClE being 0.000017% more realistic than the previous version... get a life
No one gives a shit outside of these nerds, all people want is less work and more free time, they don't give a shit about your generated "art", or how fast this new model solved a problem they didn't know existed 12 seconds ago
No. Go away.
Everything is now either accessing your data directly and you have to opt-out or you can't even opt out at all.
This AI rush/push is also permeating every line and product: from the office suite, to github, to vscode, and even open source tools are getting AI shoved in, like Playwright, and it feels everything else is an afterthought.
It seems Nadya is making a Ballmer-level play. Ballmer had the right intuition: that Microsoft had to move its focus from the desktop to the cloud. But the execution was poor. Now history's repeating.
For a small period of time, I was actually using Edge + Copilot everyday (and it was decent) but their competition has improved so much and appears WAY more privacy focused. I know that Sam Altman is trying hard to stay within the bounds of people’s trust, which once broken is hard to replace (he even said so in an interview).
For now he doesn't seem like a bad actor in the AI industry.
However, the moment it becomes more sustainably profitable to grow a mustache and start wearing monocles he likely will, and if he doesn't he'll be ousted and replaced by someone far worse.
You may want to take a closer look at Altman's persona.
Even just the remind me later option gives me such a horrible vibe. F off Google and respect my choice.
Nah ah ...
I'll say the same thing another way: customers tell suppliers whether or not they're satisfied. They don't tell me. I tell them if I think the price is worth it. They don't tell me. Argue with me and they'll lose
(sorry for big words, but this is how i feel they are talking to me when the base operating system I am suppose to put absolute trust in my privacy in treats me like an idiot)
I’ve had an Alfred command since 2013 where I type `wiki something` which then opens Confluence and searches for `something`. I use this to quickly search our company wiki for terms without breaking my concentration and flow.
Atlassian decided to add an AI summary at the top and intentionally disable the rest of the results until the AI summary has finished rendering fully. It’s insane. How is this making me more productive? It’s just shearing off one other layer of familiarity and value I’ve enjoyed for 12 years and pushing me away from their product.
Forced adoption rarely works out unless people really want the feature and don’t know that they want it. At the very least, let us disable it.
Imagine the ghost of Henry Ford asked me what I wanted from transportation today and I said "a new novel technology to enable sub-second transcontinental travel". I'd be laughed at even harder than in an alternate reality where I asked for marginally more convenient air travel, without knowing Henry Ford actually did resurrect himself and invent the Stargate last tuesday.
For sub light second I think Scifi tends to like something along the line of isolating a region of space in an energy field and then either shifting or transposing that area with another. At least for the not 3D body printer death machine version of teleportation. Though maybe that was a very poorly phrased description of imposing a probability shift via precisely regulated change of energy state for a reference frame to match the state of another region.
Wait, no, that never happened. People bought his cars voluntarily and came back for more. If Ford had stolen horses out of peoples' barns and left cars in their places, then said, "You just don't like change!" when they objected, that would be more like modern-day Windows.
more like they retrofitted a motor into a dead horse with an exoskeleton.
Who the fuck actually wants Recall spyware?
https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/02/23/horses-quote-henry-fo...
Let's be fair. Microsoft has not succeeded at mainstream consumer AI products... yet.
To say AI failed at Micrsoft when CoPilot (the real one, for developers) was, last I heard, the most subscribed generative AI tool for software developers is not a failure. It's wild that most developers in a corporate environment pay Microsoft to use Chat GPT, Gemini, and Claude. Their other gen-AI components in Office, like Powerpoint and Word, are pretty darn good. But again, unless you're a corporate user in a work setting, you probably don't care.
This push to lease you your own computer is what hasn't worked very well so far. I dearly hope it pushes more people to Linux (though more likely they'll flee to Mac, which is a more palatable version of the clumsy crap MS is trying to do).
So consumer AI... perhaps that has failed. But the money isn't in you and me paying for a Windows license. The money's in big corporations paying for ten thousand seats at a time for their suites.
It definitely didn't help back when my manager asked me to recommend a subscription to buy everyone on our team that Anthropic didn't offer any plan with a predictable monthly cost for Claude Code with SSO/externally managed billing (I think that changed fairly recently).
Github Copilot for Business with an easily digestible flat monthly rate + straightforward per request rate beyond the quota (for devs who actually ended up using it heavily) made it extremely painless to get approved.
Cursor was really the only other subscription offering that checked all those boxes but our team uses the official Microsoft VS Code extensions and there was 0% chance of getting buy-in if it meant disrupting everyone's workflow for a 6 month trial period.
Not to mention, I can find AI perfectly impressive and still have absolutely no day-to-day use for it… certainly not enough to justify it taking over my operating system experience.
Nor do I ever want to have a voice conversation with my computer to where it responds in an uncanny valley voice. If I do want to use voice, it's to give a command. No response needed. "Hey computer, call John" that's it. Do the thing, don't talk back. A glorified voice assistant is all the further it needs to go.
Microsoft didn't care to ask users when they put copilot into everything and they won't ask users when they'll "consolidate the experience" to whatever works.
And just so I can claim that I "knew it all along" in the future I'll say that some form of "agent OS" is here to stay when the dust settles.
Wonder if he calls any of his rejected dates a “cynic” because they said no to him, too.
I think this is a big part of it. If Apple ever achieves their vision for personal context Siri & AI in their OS, I bet people will praise it and actually use it. Because Apple has built trust with their customers, and has strong marketing around privacy.
Microsoft burned that bridge a long time ago. They feel sleazy. Maybe if they haven't violated their users trust over and over again, people would be more receptive.
I don't think Microsoft as a corporation is any longer even aware of customer trust as a concept. All we are is a KPI and a credit card to be exploited for anything they feel they can take.
We aren't even people to Microsoft anymore. Just a revenue source to be maximally exploited right now with no concern for future revenue.
It's almost like the kind of trap a lot of solo devs get into where they build a thing that is interesting to them but then can't find anyone else interested. But at least the solo devs built something that worked for themselves. I can't imagine anyone at MS eating their own dog food on this stuff.
At a company like MS, that shouldn't happen. They're supposed to have the resources to understand what their customers want. But we've seen this trend for the last 15 years. Companies like MS, Meta, Google, don't want to engage and collaborate with the customer. They want to push ideas down and be celebrated for their design brilliance. They don't even really A/B test this stuff anymore. The inmates are running the asylum.
The problem is that no amount of studies or A/B testing is going to change a political decision inside the company. And with AI, I'm convinced that for all the big players it is political at this point simply because all the execs have bet so much money on it. If they can't make it work, we're talking about literally billions of dollars of responsibility. Hence these desperate attempts to shove it everywhere in hopes that something somewhere would work well enough, if not to recoup the investment, then at least to postpone the moment it all comes crashing down.
Also, we have Rover to blame for Comic Sans:
> Microsoft graphic designer Vincent Connare designed the typeface Comic Sans when he noticed that Rover's speech was displayed in Times New Roman, which he felt was inappropriate for a cartoon dog.
MSFT reminds me of INTC.
There's nothing underwhelming about AI. It's how Microsoft damages anything it touches, and lies to users about it. They force a stupid "copilot" key into computers and encourage the waste of resources into "chips with AI capabilities", only to push your data to the cloud, deceitfully, and with very poor safety guarantees.
Also, people have a Windows backlash in general, and Microsoft ignores it, as usual.
Jeez there are so many clueless CEOs!
> It cracks me up when I hear people call AI underwhelming.
This is your business. It should "make you curious." Saying it "cracks you up" is ridiculous behavior from someone in your position. I will never do business with someone like this.
> I grew up playing Snake on a Nokia phone!
Because you were bored? Or because you literally set time aside every day to play it because it was just that good? What is this nonsense?
> The fact that people are unimpressed that we can have a fluent conversation
I have "fluent conversations" already. With people. About recent and relevant things. The fact that a computer can pretend to do this is not impressive. Press on it hard enough and you'll immediately see the cracks. We've had weak chat bots since forever.
> with a super smart AI
That's trained on existing data. It cannot synthesize new perspectives or prerogatives. It often fails to know anything that recently occurred. It often presents data as if it is absolutely true and that it could not possibly be wrong. It's the opposite of smart in every way.
> that can generate any image/video is mindblowing to me.
It can make copies. It cannot generate anything novel. There was no part of my life that was hampered by the fact I couldn't generate images or videos. This is an amusement, not anything that adds to my bottom line.
If it actually, truly, world-changingly good as they are _begging us_ to believe they are, they wouldn’t need to care that people disliked it or chose not to use it.
But because they’re practically going red in the face screeching about it, it really comes off as “cope”, to use the hip new word.
Everything since then has not really pushed too far passed that "impressive tech demo" state. I like using AI to help me with coding. That's... about it.
"Click this, then that, then this other thing and it should work"
"that other thing isn't an option"
"Oh you're 3 versions behind. Instead, it's in location X."
Then - like now - it seemed that they couldn't understand that what they made was not what their customers wanted.
I guess this is kind of similar though. what is promised isnt and likely wont be delivered.
https://mobilegamer.biz/three-years-after-a-fiery-launch-dia...
The core kernel of it always seemed, to me, to be an extension of the Diablo 3 RMT auction house idea - they wanted a recurring revenue source from a franchise where traditionally they were not charging one, and in this case, they squared that circle by appealing to users who were not existing players, and so did not have those norms in mind.
So yes, I agree it's likely not primarily ignorance driving this.
In particular, my guess is that they looked at their estimates for how much they could make off recurring revenue sources in desktop OSes, and their estimates for how the desktop market is changing with more younger users not using them or viewing them as legacy platforms, and decided they should pivot to primarily being a services provider, in much the same way they're aggressively trying to slap the Xbox branding on other things and getting out of the console market as fast as they can run.
Could be wrong, I don't work there, but usually my experience with companies that large making apparent missteps is that their goal isn't the one you think it is, and attempting to extract as much data as they can from desktop users really sounds like what you do when you're trying to squeeze the sponge before you throw it out.
I would assume after 11 LTSC finally EOLs might be the earliest they'd be considering anything more drastic, but I wouldn't speculate whether it'd look like a good idea by then.
It may sound wild, and certainly possible time will prove me wrong, I'm not an oracle, but the ongoing failures in basic functions in Windows seems like they're removing significant investment in it as a reliable platform for general use going forward, and their recent introduction of things like the Xbox handheld running Windows makes me suspect their goal is to constrain where it's still used, and trim how much it costs to maintain that way.
It was "exactly what customers wanted". Microsoft Windows is just as successful....financially speaking.
Now, if I could just get teenagers to pay more money for a magic digital rune, besides extracting all that juicy marketing data from their phone app... Because more money = better corporation.
Here it's hard to understand Microsoft's surprise when almost everything Windows has done for the last ten years was despised by mostly everyone. I was thinking that decision makers knew they were making unpopular moves but did not care since there's no way Windows can lose market share. I assume he must be faking surprise, but I am not sure for what purpose since staying silent and going forward would have had less press. Well I guess bad publicity is still publicity.
My local state representatives just attempted this at our latest "town hall meeting" [i.e. to participate: scan the 8.5"x11" QR code, taped upon each chair].
I do not carry a phone, let alone one that scans QR codes... so instead I just provided 300 pound union dude commentary throughout our entire meeting. I definitely participated.
I believe users are stupid enough to stick to Microsoft "agentic OS" anyway.
They’ll be given some garbage W11 laptop by IT, which will be irrevocably infested with whatever garbage MS wants, and there will be _nothing_ they can do about it. I can see it happening in real time with my partners work computer.
Something is seriously dysfunctional in Microsoft.
He's known for:
- bullying employees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mustafa_Suleyman#cite_note-14:...
- reorgs, pointless meetings, toxic culture (example: extra office day for his org): sources who work at Microsoft
- https://x.com/pmddomingos/status/1972584701736157664
- He's a corporate climber, good at empire building, which is why Google let him go. Hires product people from his ex companies and you are left with 3 engineers and 5 product managers for a feature and don't ship anything useful.
Something, something, never interrupt your opponent whilst they’re making a mistake.
"literally"?! What does that mean? That they offloaded all decision-making to AI?
Just like using calculator or Excel, I think overuse will really dull our minds, we'd end up preferring not waste our mind thinking about a problem but just throw it at the "simulated intelligence". I wonder where that'll take us.
Edit: Found the source: https://www.eurogamer.net/maybe-ai-is-a-creative-solution-if...
A good creative will take that as a starting point, apply their skills and vision to it, and give you something that solves your specific problem in a unique way, often far better than whatever you had imagined.
In my experience, if you do a similar expertise with AI, it just gives you a facsimile of the inspiration you initially provided and not much more.
This is not at all my experience but I'm also biased currently making a fair enough living off providing software that does just that, using AI.
In favt I'd say that's the key to enjoyable AI experiences, without strong opinions from the person leveraging, the output is rather bland and corporate.
Today I asked it to add a constant as an argument to every call to a specific method in a unit test. The result was pure slop: The prompts leaked out into the proposed diff, and there was just a list of every method call, not placed where the method calls were in the unit test.
Just get the darn stuff to work before you shove it into every corner of my life.
1. Windows 11 - keep doing what they are doing, add AI, ads, all sorts of guardrails, whatever the 80% of users need
2. Windows 11 Enthusiast - Bring back Win 2000 theme, no guardrails, best-in-class dev experience, hyper-optimised for gaming, no AI, no ads
I would pay significantly more for the special version that I did for my Win 11 pro copy.
1. keeping Windows as small and lean as possible, and let it do the things an operating system is for,
2. offering some AI applications that can be installed optionally by the users who want them, i.e. turn their AI applications into external software that can be installed/used or not, like Microsoft Office.
If they were ever to produce a Windows PowerUser edition, with absolutely no bloat, it would have to be priced like a CAD suite.
My problem with Microsoft is that they won't sell an un-enshittified version of Windows for any price (LTSC notwithstanding; it's not licensable for general use.) Owning our computing experience is that important to them.
1. Making the system lean means that you'd have to exclude all the ads, all the free tracking you can do to extract more money, all tie-ins with additional Microsoft services you could've done. Getting paid for the product key is just one step of many in the process of wringing their stack for every last droplet of money they can provide. If anything, it's beneficial to Microsoft to make Windows into a singular giant blob that amalgamates every Microsoft offering into one and pushes them as hard as possible. What are those mainstream customers going to do, not use Windows? Though of course, when using a lean system is a requirement for some business customers, MS will also offer a separate minimal version that can only be obtained through business licenses, just to avoid missing out on those few percent of the market.
2. Why make AI features opt-in? That would require your AI offerings to be alluring enough to motivate users to install the AI features on their own, and how many people will realistically want to install Copilot into Notepad or any other psychotic integrations MS came up with? No, you NEED for your investment to have returns, you need AI to succeed, so what you do is put it in the next update, and then progressively keep punching it down customers' throats enough (via pop-ups, colorful buttons, hardware Copilot keys, ads, integrating it into every piece of software - soon enough they'll probably start substituting regular features with AI ones) until it starts looking like the investment is paying off after all and the investors are happy.
If you need AI to succeeed, you better make sure that the users will love the experience, instead of forcing a bad experience upon them.
The least cynical answer is that for several decades, Microsoft had a monopoly on operating systems, but they no longer do. Many people lead online lives on their phones instead of desktop computers. People in creative professions use Macs. Servers run Linux. Gamers buy consoles. Schools use Chromebooks.
So they feel it's a dead-end to provide an OS that just works and doesn't get in the way. They need an edge, and they think the answer is an OS you talk to, that helps you with homework, that you build a relationship with. They want "Samantha" from Her, I guess.
I don't think this is going to work with the tech we have today, but almost everyone in the AI space is fudging it the same way - "ship it today, make it good tomorrow".
Windows usage is broad enough that the "new users" revenue stream is pretty dry, but it's also hard to say "we increased the price to $X while making windows smaller".. so they will endlessly pump in new "features" and bloat.
I recommend using an operating system that isn't driven by a thirst for revenue.
The only thing I used Windows for was games, and that moat has all but vanished in the last few years. I game AAA games on linux with no issue now. Zero need for Windows. I had Windows as a home OS for 20 years, and it was their alienation through anti-patterns that caused me to switch. Not features, not compatibility, not performance. The clear and braindead obvious anti-consumer actions they made year after year.
Also, Co-pilot objectively sucks and is a lying disinformation machine that has rarely helped me with anything.
Trust is Microsoft's greatest asset and they don't seem to have any champions inside the company that can tell these people they are destroying the company's trust.
Bing has been broken for a year now and nobody has fixed it. ATROCIOUSLY broken. That hurts trust.
Foisting AI on people in the way they have means we lose a bit more control, for a feature we don't want. There is a certain level of AI burnout in the market - not every product needs AI. In fact, if a vendor says they have "AI" in their product, I immediately ignore that aspect and ask even more questions about their actual capabilities. Often they are hiding things behind an AI smokescreen.
Tangentially, Why is copilot, or even windows 11 as a whole so bland? Forget the features, why won't they slap some nice looking UI to sell the darn thing? wtf is up with the weird rainbow icon thing for copilot? It looks like something I would have scribbled together in photohshop when I was in highschool. Back to my food example, presentation of food carries most of the weight of what makes the food appetizing. UI/UX is presentation. A sweet hamburger, or a grey burger meat is bad UX just as a copilot showing up in random undesirable places is.
0: https://www.theverge.com/report/822443/microsoft-windows-cop...
> super smart
were there any US presidents named Bob?
No U.S. president has ever gone by “Bob” as a first name or nickname.
A few presidents had “Robert” in their full name, but none were commonly known as Bob:
James Abram Garfield — middle name Abram, not Robert
James Earl Carter Jr. (Jimmy Carter) — no Robert
George Herbert Walker Bush / George Walker Bush — no Robert
William Jefferson Clinton — no Robert
Barack Hussein Obama II — no Robert
...
The response continues at decent length here, in much the same vein: https://chatgpt.com/share/691eb846-8198-8010-bd3d-975fe1778d...
> George Herbert Walker Bush / George Walker Bush — no Robert
I do like how it seems to have decided that Bush I and Bush II are the same person.
"No. There has never been a U.S. President whose first name was “Bob.” A few presidents had names that could be shortened to Bob—most commonly Robert—but no U.S. President has had the first name Robert, either. (There have been presidents with middle name Robert, such as James Earl “Jimmy” Carter Jr., but that’s different.) So: no Presidents named Bob, and none named Robert as their first name.
> Jimmy?
(generic summary of who Jimmy Carter is)
> So he also isn't a Robert.
Correct — there have been no U.S. Presidents with the first name Robert.
A few had middle name Robert (e.g., James Robert “Jimmy” Carter does not have Robert as a middle name, for clarity — his middle name is Earl), but no president’s given first name has been Robert.
So your original statement stands: No “Bob” No “Robert”
Want a list of presidents by first name to double-check?"
My favorite part is it desperately inserting a Robert into Jimmy Carter's name to appease the context. I wonder if a diffusion based LLM would avoid that kind of failure.
> There have been presidents with middle name Robert, such as James Earl “Jimmy” Carter Jr., but that’s different.
> James Robert “Jimmy” Carter does not have Robert as a middle name, for clarity — his middle name is Earl
Sorry not everyone has such a primitive mind to paper over the chasm. Like, ok, feel free to entertain yourself with a ImageVideoGenBot all your like and see if that blows your mind better than snake, but how would that entertainment help when your experience is made worse by AI integration?
But also, that's just nonsense, we're nowhere close to "fluent conversation with a super smart AI" watch your own ads where it can't even understand that 150% scaling is already set and "super smartly" recommends setting it
I mean, MS has always had elements of this problem, but this is unusually bad.
"Find that meme I downloaded last year with the girl standing by the burning house"
Creating AI slop though? No thanks.
We have never asked for blind integration of AI into every aspect of our lives or work.
I don't think the hurdle is so high for companies to sell Linux machines that look like Windows XP and users to just stomach changing OSs.
I think Valve smells blood in the water and that is why they are releasing their new Steam Machine (linux based).
Not to mention it's mostly inconsistent trash.
To dedicated tech professionals or power and possibly even just enthusiasts, I'd agree.
What kind of bubble in their personal life must exist to NOT realise that being accidentally told a brief description of the image the user was looking at and knew full well was in front of them because they slip clicked on the wrong part of the windows UI, is not a selling point but an act of gross irritation.. Most people don't care unless it has a practical use beyond getting in the way of their work.
Mind blowing indeed. Please.. don't be like that person.. expand your social circle outside of work.
That makes him as trustworthy as a used car salesman.
I mean I think there's a niche where AI is useful but it's not for all the things they're trying to push it for.
It's the metaverse and blockchain hypes all over again. Always trying to cram it into situations where it adds no value and even detracts. Instead of focusing on the ones where it really does.
Let me think, when was the last time I wanted to generate a picture? Never. Maybe many users do not care about the seemingly only use case AI does not fail to fulfil?
Of course it is unimpressive when someone does something familiar to you, that is subjective. That same thing could be framed as impressive, to someone else, such as the person who is now able to do the unfamiliar as if it is familiar.
The other bias would be to assume that there aren’t unfamiliar things (you don’t know every tool every made, therefore you may potentially benefit from using AI to help with learning new tools).
Another bias is to assume AI is only good for learning something unfamiliar. There are ways to contain generative coding that scale, in some contexts. Likewise there’s probably use cases even for power users, like organizing messy desktop icons into semantic clusters (automating tedious tasks), summarizing running processes, limiting engagement with brain rot, etc.
stunning stuff
Anyone who has successfully completed a self-motivated project all on their own knows that the problem definition changes when the knowledge gaps go away. Sometimes even entire classes of solutions become pointless and their value goes from seemingly huge to nothing at all.
If we look into the past it's the difference between wanting to selfishly reconfigure the earth with physics-defying and godlike brute force creating massively worse and life-threatening problems... versus just building the shelter and infrastructure we now consider obvious and far less silly with smarter technology than just brute force and magic.
That's what I think is going to happen to all this pointless scaffolding currently being called "AI". It's a category of software that is completely unnecessary in a world where people are more experienced and better educated.
Yes, sometimes the results are impressive. But so are the mistakes it makes. You can't just trust the stuff it produces. I don't see that my colleagues who use it all the time have any better productivity.
Many of my colleagues use a Teams virtual background - I noticed the other day that at least one had the CoPilot logo now injected onto the "blank" wall space behind them... Asked one person if they did that themselves... no, they did not...
Next - NOTEPAD... Yeah, at some point recently that was updated to have a CoPilot button.. No thank-you, that's not why I use notepad... (you can turn it off for now at least)
If i need to use AI I will paste text into ChatGPT.com or wherever, i dont need Word to constantly annoy me with it.
Of course this guy is “surprised”, his whole division will be shut down if this fails.
Aside: The cookie consent banner on this website is “unlawful”. I cannot choose to reject the cookies.
The image and video generation capabilities of AI is the most unimpressive part of AI's! It's the LLM's that are the most inpressive. Those might, just might, even make some sense in an OS, since plenty of people are happy to outsource a quick email or script to AI. Hell, what if your OS had a built-in AI to troubleshoot bugs for you? That might even conceivably be an improvement.
> Over in the comments, some users pushed back on the CEO's use of the word "unimpressed," arguing that it's not the technology itself that fails to impress them, but rather Microsoft's tendency to put AI into everything just to appease shareholders instead of focusing on the issues that most users actually care about, like making Windows' UI more user-friendly similar to how it was in Windows 7, fixing security problems, and taking user privacy more seriously.
I'm sure adding AI to Windows would make privacy problems even worse. Not to mention agentic AI could create a whole new class of security problems if not implemented carefully.
I can't stand interacting with these AI buddies that feel like simpletons. Stuff like Claude Sonnet 4.5 however i use for work daily.
Tech enthusiast will judge ai based on what it gets right, we’re interested in what “can” do. Everyone else will judge ai based on where it fails, they are interested in what “problems” it “does” solve.
> a fluent conversation with a super smart AI that can generate any image/video is mindblowing to me.
They see: A computer software generally unreliable and unable to accomplish basic tasks
Also, in my experience, it's the non-tech-enthusiasts who are diving into LLMs because they don't understand what is actually going on and it basically looks like a repeat of the whole thing about ELIZA a few decades ago. Just this time it's vastly more expensive and has to run on a datacentre and can write you an essay instead of just rephrasing your question.
Yeah specifically to your quote: it's very easy to create some images and video. It's very hard to create exactly what you need if you have specific needs.
It's almost as if content creation is hard! Well that's because it is. You need to know the client, understand their needs, make the content in line with their other visual language etc.
What AI makes easier if for things to look professional. But a real professional doesn't just make it look good but also makes it what you need.
Where AI comes in is as a helper, and for those situations where "good enough" suffices. And there are many of those situations. Many of which would not have had the budget for a real pro to do it anyway.
This is where things stop translating well to the real world.
Imagine a pocket calculator:
10 + 33 = 44
Clearly incorrect, then someone tells you
“this one is different, it “helps” you, like 44 is in the ballpark. The real work is now the actual answer”
give us 100 billion dollars"
But the thing where someone dumps a long email thread on me, for it to summarise, yeah.. Or to do some basic web searches for me (these days it's a lot of work weeding through all the horrible clickbait).
But what we were talking about here was content creation. What I could imagine it could help content creators with is stuff like "remove the background from this photo", stuff like that. No more busywork like tracing photos.
And yes I do think LLMs are overused and dumped in many scenarios where they add no value or even detract. But there are usecases where they can add value too. Just not as many as the hype suggests.
Selecting only the cases where something gets something right is nothing to do with what it can do. A random number generator can drive a car if you select only the cases where it does so correctly (and given infinite iterations there will be such cases) but that doesn’t mean it can drive a car in any real sense.
I assume “tech enthusiasts” here means “AI koolaid drinkers”.
Most of the time you're better off reading a few responses to a given question (on, say, Stack Overflow) and synthesizing your own understanding out of them, rather than taking one that an AI has synthesized for you.
An LLM parses and generates language exceedingly well. I use LLMs daily now and they are a boon for certain tasks.
An LLM is not an all knowing Oracle. It doesn’t know anything. People who treat the language generator as an authority on anything are fools.
Most products don't add value into our lives imo. They are the means by which we get money flowing which is needed to keep the economy alive. Some might argue that they actually subtract from it hence the need for dopaminergic products. The question for the tech CEOs is how to make LLMs reliably dopaminergic in the way Instagram/Tik Tok and the like are.
And no replacing your customer support with chat bot does not make it better. Just make a damm website with everything I need. Lot less errors, lot simpler for me to do what I want.
but it's a niche thing. in exchange for one-offs we basically have the internet turn into bots and the annihilation of art as man-made expression -- and by burning the equivalent of a small country's daily power consumption.
at this point its tech bros praying for AGI, which will in all likelihood end up with a Torment Nexus
^ My meme comment for today.
The more we study AI, the more we discover one fundamental truth above an the others: people are really, really, really, really impressive.
A human being still absolutely melts an LLM like a Salvador Dali clock if the challenge is to innovate. In the race between human potential and LLM potential it isn't even close. Not a little close. Not remotely close. About as close as we are to each other compared to how close we each are to the sun.
And yet somehow there's always some fucking moron who apparently never considered this for a fraction of a second and runs around screaming that a fucking program will replace a fucking person
However I don’t want an agentic or “A.I.” operating system.
I don't know about you but my goal is not to work hard. My goal is maximize results while minimizing effort. You know, work smarter not harder.
If you want to minmax the work, the only way is to actually do the work.
The researchers themselves were surprised by the initial public acceptance:
https://www.businessinsider.com/chatgpt-was-inaccurate-borin...
"I will admit, to my slight embarrassment … when we made ChatGPT, I didn't know if it was any good," said Sutskever.
"When you asked it a factual question, it gave you a wrong answer. I thought it was going to be so unimpressive that people would say, 'Why are you doing this? This is so boring!'" he added.
After several weeks of "AI" usage everyone figures out what the researchers knew all along due to their continued exposure.
a. Click on a directory in my File Explorer and it opens immediately, it always shows the correct headers, sorting on any column is nearly instant (up until somewhere in XP probably)
b. Where I am now in Windows 10 sorting can take forever and because I haven't re-installed in ages it refuses to remember folder views and will constantly change them to whatever it wants
c. In the future saying
- "Winny, open folder ABC and sort it by DEF please"
- "Folder ABC deleted, except for def.txt"
- "NO, I said open it, not delete it! Get it back!"
- "Error, folder isn't recoverable"
This wave of idiocy is going to abate soon. Hopefully.
LLM bashers either feel threatened by them (most likely they come from creative professions and don’t want to learn new tools - it took years to learn how to draw and suddenly you have nano-banana - that may sting) or just latch on to the hater bandwagon because hey it’s sooo cooool to bash techies - take it nerds. Or engineers who can’t stand the fact that someone can actually leapfrog 5-6 years they spent adapting to new tools.
LLM is a VERY new tool, it’s not easy to master, it requires a change of mindset (it’s not “press a button get a LED light up” type of experience).
People are just lazy - that’s normal.
People who bring up ethics are actually masquerading their laziness with some holier than though posturing that’s inherently empty. The moment it starts benefit them or LLMs get easy enough for them to use they’ll switch their tune.
Name ONE instance where technological progress has been discarded in favor of “ethics”.
5 years later it will be unethical to NOT use LLMs like it’s unethical to submit handwritten documents so that ppl have to suffer through your handwriting - ethics adapt to people not the other way around, otherwise it’s some religious nut job territory.
Yawn, h8rs gonna h8, progress gonna progress.
Did they finally start replacing them with AI?
I am the master and commander of my computer. It should not execute anything without my deliberately commanding it to. But that's not good enough for Microsoft. They see themselves as the commander of my computer. My computer should do what they want it to do, not what I want. And it should be really hard for the user to take back control. This coercion is what we are objecting to, not the actual capabilities of the software.
It's gimmicky and it seems the only people "impressed" or "mindblown" with AI content are boomers on Facebook.
Any time I see some obviously AI generated content, whether it be some LinkedIn-influencer type or some blog spam that got well ranked on SEO, I'm immediately disgusted. The internet is eating itself.
cadamsdotcom•2mo ago
All the leadership need to do is read these types of articles and they’ll see what’s going on outside the walls. One wonders how the internal incentives can be so wrong.
pessimizer•2mo ago
Once a generation has been raised who never saw a computer that couldn't refuse to let you type what you wanted into it, young people will stop believing that you could ever type what you wanted. Old people will forget that you could ever type what you wanted. It worked with literally everything else.
Vespasian•2mo ago
The future is never certain and, as always, there will be unexpected and rapid societal shifts that may change things rapidly, but those may well be 300 years out.
Narishma•2mo ago
abdusco•2mo ago
> The Xbox One reveal disaster in 2013 stemmed from controversial policies that were widely rejected by consumers, primarily the mandatory 24-hour online check-in (effectively an "always-online" requirement) and severe restrictions on used games. Compounded by a primary focus on TV and media features over gaming, and a higher price tag of $499 with a mandatory Kinect, the policies caused a massive public backlash. This allowed the PlayStation 4 to successfully position itself as the consumer-friendly gaming option, ultimately forcing Microsoft to reverse all the controversial DRM policies before the console's launch.
Macha•2mo ago
The execs want AI to show to the investors to improve their job security and compensation packages.
The middle managers want AI to show execs to improve their promotion causes.
The customers only get to talk to the day to day employees of the company, so their opinion doesn’t matter to the rest of the hierarchy