> I grew up playing Snake on a Nokia phone! The fact that people are unimpressed that we can have a fluent conversation with a super smart AI that can generate any image/video is mindblowing to me.
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
> The fact that people are unimpressed that we can have a fluent conversation with a super smart AI that can generate any image/video is mindblowing to me.
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.
It’s partly that, but it’s also partly that the quality SUCKS. I’m frustrated with AI blogspam because it doesn’t in any way help me figure out whatever I’m researching. It’s such low quality. What I want and need is higher quality primary sources — in depth research, investigation, presented in an engaging way. Or with movies and shows, I want something genuine. With a genuine story that feels real, characters that feel real and motivated.
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.
> 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.
I mean, it gives product recommendations when you ask it to, so it's already doing that, I'm sure. It might not be making money by giving specific recommendations; but I bet it's at least getting money off Amazon referral links.
I experimented with some ai generated political spam on YouTube. The reality is a lot of people can’t tell the difference or don’t care. Given the demographic this site selects for, it’s easy to forget how many dumb people there are in the world.
I know people who get confused and consume AI content but when you point out that it's AI they're embarrassed they were fooled and upset. I've never heard the response "I don't care that it's AI." The tech bros will say that it's a "revealed preference" for AI, but it's really just tricking people into engaging.
I caught my mom watching a bunch of AI impersonations of musicians on Youtube singing slop that rarely rhymed or had any kind of message in the lyrics and with super formulaic arrangements. I asked her what she liked about them and it was like "they seem well made" and I showed her how easy Suno is to use and then showed her some of the bad missed rhymes and transcribed the lyrics to where she could see there wasn't any there there to any part of it (and how easy it is to get LLMs to generate better). It seemed to have been an antidote.
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).
The issue is that one could reasonably argue that about 95% of pop music is was already formulaic slop. Not just pejoratively, but much of it was even made by the same people. Everybody from Britney Spears to Taylor Swift and more modern acts are all being driven by one guy - 'Max Martin'. [1]
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.
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:
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.
> AI is fake, it feels fake, and it’s obvious. It’s mind blowing to me that executives think people want fake crap.
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).
Ironically, AI blogspam, because it’s disingenuous and because Google’s PageRank has been fully defeated by spam (and Search ruined further by Google’s ads) in general, has ruined the web for research. It means that you are usually better off now asking a flagship model your research questions. Let it search and provide sources. You can always tell it the sorts of sources you consider reliable.
CGI and Photoshop filters were 'fake' too. Until they weren't.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 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.
This is where a lot of people are. In my case, every time I open a PDF in Google Drive, it forces an AI summary of the doc with no way for me to switch it off. I try to close it mid-generation, but I suspect not fast enough to keep it from getting counted in the usage stats, which is probably what some product manager is trying to maximize and demonstrate ("X number of PDF summarizations this quarter").
It's also not very good at any of those things, if you ask it to generate something far enough outside of the mainstream, or something particular, or something consistent, or-
But, yeah, the insistence that we deprecate every other even remotely-connected resource (including other people) in order to supplicate ourselves to corporate desires is aggravating. You got a lot of the same pushback with VR. VR is really, really cool. Having your reality mediated by large corporations with a history of user-hostile behavior is not. Them not taking no for an answer feels violating.
Sex is great, but if you constabtly try to force it on me, sneak it into deals we make, or while i sleep etc. it will leave me quite hostile towards the topic, and that's where we are at. Consent is important in all things, no less here.
> 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.
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?
Maybe a subtle form of gaslighting with features of victim blaming and argument from authority? Microsoft treats its users and customers with utter contempt.
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:
Such hubris, seeing everything from HIS perspective, without taking into account the users. It is no wonder Microsoft keeps shipping crap - you can convince and push down B2B products to enterprise's throats, when their user's salaries are dependent on bosses who just care about image, with open budgets to fund whatever is sold to them to increase the bottom line. This is less effective on consumers.
This is the fundamental misunderstanding that the AI techies have. Normal people don’t want a “conversation“ with a computer. Conversations happen between people. Computers, at best, receive orders and carry them out. They are tools, not companions, and they should do nothing unless explicitly told to do it.
I wouldnt mind if the conversations actually were smart, not sycophantic, or were otherwise useful. I find more often than not it creates more work for me than it saves me, and even if i were to break even on time invested i lose massively on comprehension/understanding.
I think this is a super important point. Working on ai I’m really wondering where this will actually end in the case of our media consumption, AI is being used to generate more engaging content, this will imply ai will be almost a requirement to stay visible, so more ai will be used. In the end little to no “real content” will make it through.
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?
What a gaslighting king this CEO is, the concern isn't how functional the AI is, the concern is AI just downloading any and all PERSONAL AND PRIVATE files on a whim, with no guard rails. What if I have photographs of my kids I've never uploaded anywhere EVER because I don't want them anywhere outside of MY DEVICE, does Microsoft just magically get to suck in those files and own them? Wild.
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.
The fact that people are unimpressed that we can have a fluid gameplay experience of the latest entry in the Diablo franchise in the palm of our hands was mindblowing to someone as well. "Don't you people have phones?"
Well, Blizzard is Microsoft now so I guess they belong together.
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.
Instead of "pushing back" I wish he'd actually listen to and address his critics' points.
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 only understand one thing: shareholder value. This dude's panicking because he knows how bad the next quarterly report looks when this strategy resulted in a hemorrhaging userbase. This is an expression of a stage of grief.
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".
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.
> If anything, their current approach is only going to make people hate AI even more
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.
A fluent conversation was a great party trick but the novelty has worn thin. It had some value but overall having to have a conversation with a tool to get something done is frustrating. Like tasking a junior employee on their first day with advanced tasks and wondering why they keep missing the mark. I want a tool not an opinionated support unit, and often will stop that conversational experience by prompting it away. Having to do that is annoying.
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
Exactly. It's not that everyone is saying "AI is completely worthless, get rid of it." It has it's use cases, I certainly benefit from LLMs in my job every day.
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.
Exactly. Even if we grant what he says (I don't fully agree)—that doesn't warrant putting that kind of "conversational engine" in Windows as a first-class citizen.
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."
"we can have a fluent conversation with a super smart AIwe can have a fluent conversation with a super smart AI"
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.
LLMs are severely overhyped, have many problems, and I don't want them in my face anymore than the average person. But we're not in 2023 anymore. These kinds of comments just come off ignorant.
I dunno, I'm not fully anti-LLM, but almost every interaction I have with an LLM-augmented system still at some point involves it confidently asserting plainly false things, and I don't think the parent is that far off base.
Agreed, some days I code for 4-6 hours with agentic tools but 2025 or not I still can't stomach using any of the big three LLMs for all but the most superficial research questions (and I currently pay/get access to all three paid chatbots).
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.
I have never in my entire life wanted to "generate an image or video". I like taking photographs and recording videos because they represent the reality of my life. Who would ever want to "generate" fake images as a matter of normal daily activities?
That is indeed a really weird statement from them.
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".
I use AI everyday and it’s now integral to my workflow. However, even I still hate the hype train and having it constantly stuffed down my throat. Nevermind AI slop.
Windows 11 is already adware. No wonder people are complaining about more ads.
I am unimpressed with it. If I wanted to steal code off stack overflow I can do that myself. Another layer of indirection has negative value.
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 Microsoft response reminds me of the 2018 Blizzcon event, where the Diablo Immortal developer challenged the audience with "Do you guys not have phones?" when the audience asked if the game was coming to PC.
Then - like now - it seemed that they couldn't understand that what they made was not what their customers wanted.
Don't forget the audience member who literally asked if it was a joke - and got cheers and applause from the rest of the audience. It was probably one of the biggest PR disasters in gaming history - and it does seem like the AI CEOs have been taking quite a bit of inspiration from it.
I think the intent is to provide a sense of pride and accomplishment when rivaling the same monetary dedication on the mobile platform comparable to the PC counterpart. You think you want bread, but you don’t: we are making subscription-based cake available which is better in every way.
My thought exactly. From hindsight, Diablo immortal is not a bad game, but that moment was really…not great. I guess the guy knew that phone games were getting momentum but unfortunately that specific group of users in Blizzcon didn’t want a phone game.
I actually think that 2018 was about the time when phone games had very much lost momentum and now are much less exciting than they were circa 2013. By 2018, both the potential and the limitations of phone games were very much understood by the audience. I'd argue that the top of the hype cycle of "maybe phone games will actually become really good" was 2010's Infinity Blade. Clash of Clans came out in 2012, and by 2018 phone games were fully devoid of momentum.
I think if they'd teased a phone game it would have been well received. From memory, the problem was they teased something much larger/exiting (new diablo, not a chinese arpg reskin) so when the reveal hit everyone was massively let down.
I guess this is kind of similar though. what is promised isnt and likely wont be delivered.
That’s a great quote —- when you hire a “creative” to do a job (ie photographer, designer, etc) in area where you aren’t an expert, the conversation of what you want usually starts with similar existing work that you like.
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.
But why integrate AI so deeply into Windows instead of
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.
They do neither of those things because, unlike you, they don't care about improving the user experience. They care about making money through any possible means.
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.
> 1. keeping Windows as small and lean as possible, and let it do the things an operating system is for,
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 is not a general purpose operating system. It's a platform for monetizing businesses via licensing and cloud services, and a platform for monetizing private users by way of advertising and data mining.
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.
AI failed at Microsoft because they already lost the consumer trust. I doubt they would have this issue with AI integration if people didn’t feel that installing windows is a hostile corporate takeover of your computer.
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's wild that most developers in a corporate environment pay Microsoft to use Chat GPT, Gemini, and Claude
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.
Dear mr microsoft AI CEO, why dont you pass my message to the higher ups will ya? Make a decent operating system that runs on modern hardware with me the end user in full control of what gets installed and what doesnt. make a single scrollable screen that is 100 pages long for all i care where i get to choose what programs are installed, what permissions are required by each program, what telemetry options are enabled by default for each program and give me the ability to turn everything off if I must. I must be able to uninstall notepad and the Edge browser or even prevent them from being installed in the first place. After you get this much done, why dont we talk about your little AI features then?
We need to see actual improvements to our day to day lives if we want to see support for AI.
At the moment, people are seeing improvements in technology, but they're feeling the decline of the welfare of those around them, they're feeling food insecurity, they're feeling uncertain about job security.
"AI" is not a machine for improving the lives of people, it's a tool for consolidating power and wealth at the top. Declining welfare and access to basic human needs shows that decision makers are getting better at min/maxing the economy.
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.
Look, GPT-3 was pretty magical. DALL-E was amazing.
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.
it's pretty good at highly specific questions about software support, from my experience. I'll say what program I'm using, what I'm trying to do, and what errors I keep hitting.
"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."
Imagine mcdonald's CEO saying "But it has so much calorie density for the price! and the bigmac tastes so sweet". People don't necessarily want calorie density just the same as they don't want their burgers tasting like sweet pie, not the right flavor for the context. Similarly, most people aren't necessarily trying to be productive, and they want features in the right context, and when desirable.
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.
The endgame is obvious: make people train agents and models that will replace them. Executives at MS must think this is subtle and a genius move, but it is obvious and low effort. They don't see that making crappy products in the short term will strengthen their competition, even from small contenders, which might disrupt their core. I doubt MS will out execute others in this race. Let's wait and see :)
- 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.
My biggest issue with “users choosing to stick with it” is the inordinate number of users in corporate environments who simply won’t be given a choice.
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.
Garbage software loaded on a corporate laptop is nothing new. That it comes directly from Microsoft instead of a third party security company does not meaningfully move the needle. I have long assumed that a work machine has literal keyloggers.
> 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 weren’t so tiring having to wade through all the ai slop they add to products I’m forced to use, the fact that leadership in the field are getting petty and childish about how not everyone thinks their toy is shiny is a real “telling on themselves” moment.
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.
> it's hard to believe we're going to see a version of Windows that isn't bloated with AI functionality most people didn't ask for.
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.
Because they're right. They'll all collude to make sure that you can't install a non-"smart" OS, just like you can't buy an non-"smart" tv, and the public will be well-trained to mumble something about the "market" and call you names ("luddite," "techie," "boomer," whatever...) when you complain about it.
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.
Yeah it worked everytime so despite complaints so they have all the reason to believe it will work this time either.
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.
At least those things felt like a sincere attempt to move HCI forward. Perhaps not very well tested to understand how all the parts work together, but at least sincere. MS' Copilot brand is a broken solution in search of a problem.
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.
It wasn't even ten years ago when I was participating in user studies as a developer at MS. And it was the real deal: we had a bunch of people, specifically selected to give a diverse cross-cut of the user base (so varying backgrounds, experience level etc), sit down and try to do some simple tasks with our product, while devs and PMs watched over a camera. And, crucially, you couldn't ask questions or provide guidance during that time - only after they were done. That was incredibly informative, much more so than any telemetry I've seen before or after, and I wish that was the norm in all companies; but, in any case, Microsoft definitely had both the resources and the inclination to do that.
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.
It’s not that people are unimpressed with ai, it’s that they are unimpressed with what it can even on windows and forcing us to interact with it. Like I can’t even change basic settings with it. If it were good, you don’t need to tell me to used it!
He seems to be intentionally missing the point of most of the complaints in order to direct away from his core area. The many legitimate criticisms of windows poor user experience lately will eventually drive change, but long will that take?
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.
Heck, I Do have day-to-day use for it, and I still don't want it to completely take over how I use and interact with my OS.
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.
I would simply urge that its important to listen to your end users. Microsoft has a grip on enterprise customers, but everyone else has at least two other options. The third option is not having a PC at all, and I bet a lot of people are totally happy with that given how powerful phones and tablets are now.
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.
Windows has just become too bloated trying to do to many things. I like CoPilot, but all the “Clippy” style integrations of crap in Windows directly is just poor design. Microsoft also doesn’t have user trust in the way Apple does, so everyone just assumes MSFT is going bad things with the data.
It's not even a question of trust or loyalty. Microsoft has explicitly told us they're doing bad things with the data.
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.
> Microsoft also doesn’t have user trust in the way Apple does, so everyone just assumes MSFT is going bad things with the data.
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.
It's a shame that society is just devolving and we're just seeing it happen in real time. Inhuman opportunists are enacting an increasingly aggressive hostile takeover in every single industry and ruining it in the process. What's going to happen in the next 10 years?
At this particular moment in time, the old quote about "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" feels relevant on a couple of levels. I keep waiting for the bubble to burst and for these executives to be forced into finally confronting the realities of this technology, but it is taking a very long time indeed.
Copilot in Visual Studio is so hit or miss that frequently it's not worth using.
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.
I will never be able to square the circle of c suites pushing both RTO and AI at the same time. You can't seriously believe in the "power" of face-to-face meetings while simultaneously forcing your employees to work with chat bots all day.
But when people told him his cars sucked and they wanted their horses back, he didn-
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.
1.6% of GDP wasn't poured into the model T. And even if it was there was a definite market and a clear path to profitability. These fundamentals are missing, have been missing for many years, from AI. No matter how much money gets poured in there is still no way to make it profitable. It is entirely a game of wealthy spending money to consolidate power.
I hate that quote. Whenever I see it brought up, it makes me wonder what people think it's supposed to represent. The hypothetical person asks for faster horses because they know they'll be dismissed if they ask for something they think is even more impossible than faster horses.
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.
Wasn't there something about the wormhole that required it connect two relatively large gravitational bodies rather than a single one? I also remember 'harmonics' related to having more than one Stargate on a planet, even if the other was unusable.
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.
I was surprised when Microsoft hired him. He always seemed to be the cofounder to Demis Hassabis who took on a philosophical tangent rather than the hard engineering needed to build transformative technologies and user experiences. I feel Microsoft lost a gem when Panos Panay left them. He really did some great work on the Surface product line. Surface Studio in particular.
Strawmanning, trying to distort the narrative and gaslight us by attacking a made-up perspective instead of the real arguments/feelings of the opposition. We aren't so much unimpressed, we're wary of our MOST PRIVATE data being stolen, then sold to the highest bidder or further stolen by hackers yet again. We have a bad taste in our mouth from ONEDRIVE. BEING. LITERALLY. IMPOSSIBLE. TO. TURN. OFF. (Unless you switch to Linux which is I guess the only choice now.) And the fact that they have shown they don't care about consumer preferences and will always continue to push their juggernaut of bad decisions on us out of monopolistic hubris. I thought this guy was smart but I guess he's just another AI-assist tool.
Microsoft is a multi-trillion dollar company. Is it too much to ask for them to develop and maintain two separate Windows flavors with different focus?
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.
When Microsoft updated office.com to immediately bring up a copilot prompt, and made it harder for me to find the menu items, I was pretty annoyed.
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.
The technology is amazing, but Microsoft has no imagination in the way they try to make use of it. It's sad. It also legitimately hurts society that they are further blurring the line between what is an offline and online experience in Windows, which I fully and openly reject in the strongest of terms.
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.
I'll be impressed when they manage to fix Windows 11! There are still many regressions compared to Windows XP through 10. They can add all this AI nonsense to the taskbar, yet they can't reinstate the features people have been asking for.
Meanwhile we get a react native web app for a start menu, and you can't even move the taskbar's location on the screen. A feature that has existed in Windows since 95.
Something is seriously dysfunctional in Microsoft.
"Why aren't you impressed we installed a real live trained dancing grizzly bear in your bathroom!? Yes, I know nobody asked for that bear. Yes, I know the toilet still doesn't flush. Yes, I know the bear sometimes eats people trying to take a shower. Don't you understand?! I grew up using an OUTHOUSE! Have you seen the bear's colorful hat? That bear literally dances the macarena, you ingrates!"
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.
On the topic of grammar errors. I have seriously considered leaving several grammar and spelling errors in my posts in order to provide a signal that this post was written by a human. And then I get several sorts of depressed at what this implies for our future.
I came across an article the other day, I wish I saved it, that had sentences which said things like “insert short sentence here” and “spacer sentence here”
> I grew up playing Snake on a Nokia phone! The fact that people are unimpressed that we can have a fluent conversation with a super smart AI that can generate any image/video is mindblowing to me.
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
> The fact that people are unimpressed that we can have a fluent conversation with a super smart AI that can generate any image/video is mindblowing to me.
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.
It’s partly that, but it’s also partly that the quality SUCKS. I’m frustrated with AI blogspam because it doesn’t in any way help me figure out whatever I’m researching. It’s such low quality. What I want and need is higher quality primary sources — in depth research, investigation, presented in an engaging way. Or with movies and shows, I want something genuine. With a genuine story that feels real, characters that feel real and motivated.
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.
The thing is, for us normal consumers AI only has downsides. AI blogspam is made to serve you ads and make you buy stuff.
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 $.
> 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.
I mean, it gives product recommendations when you ask it to, so it's already doing that, I'm sure. It might not be making money by giving specific recommendations; but I bet it's at least getting money off Amazon referral links.
I experimented with some ai generated political spam on YouTube. The reality is a lot of people can’t tell the difference or don’t care. Given the demographic this site selects for, it’s easy to forget how many dumb people there are in the world.
Remember that even ELIZA fooled people.
That doesn't make it useful, unless you think fooling people is itself a goal.
I know people who get confused and consume AI content but when you point out that it's AI they're embarrassed they were fooled and upset. I've never heard the response "I don't care that it's AI." The tech bros will say that it's a "revealed preference" for AI, but it's really just tricking people into engaging.
I caught my mom watching a bunch of AI impersonations of musicians on Youtube singing slop that rarely rhymed or had any kind of message in the lyrics and with super formulaic arrangements. I asked her what she liked about them and it was like "they seem well made" and I showed her how easy Suno is to use and then showed her some of the bad missed rhymes and transcribed the lyrics to where she could see there wasn't any there there to any part of it (and how easy it is to get LLMs to generate better). It seemed to have been an antidote.
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).
The issue is that one could reasonably argue that about 95% of pop music is was already formulaic slop. Not just pejoratively, but much of it was even made by the same people. Everybody from Britney Spears to Taylor Swift and more modern acts are all being driven by one guy - 'Max Martin'. [1]
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.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Martin
Max Martin is considered incredibly good at what he does.
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.
> The issue is that one could reasonably argue that about 95% of pop music is was already formulaic slop.
The existence of some handmade slop does not justify vast qualities of even lower quality automated slop.
Said handmade slop dominating Billboard does.
Also since autotune technology got good, a lot of them can’t even sing.
I do argue that, actually. I mostly avoid manufactured corpo-pop.
> AI is fake, it feels fake, and it’s obvious. It’s mind blowing to me that executives think people want fake crap.
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).
Ironically, AI blogspam, because it’s disingenuous and because Google’s PageRank has been fully defeated by spam (and Search ruined further by Google’s ads) in general, has ruined the web for research. It means that you are usually better off now asking a flagship model your research questions. Let it search and provide sources. You can always tell it the sorts of sources you consider reliable.
CGI and Photoshop filters were 'fake' too. Until they weren't.
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...
> sneaking its way into where it's not wanted
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.
> 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.
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 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
> 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.
This is where a lot of people are. In my case, every time I open a PDF in Google Drive, it forces an AI summary of the doc with no way for me to switch it off. I try to close it mid-generation, but I suspect not fast enough to keep it from getting counted in the usage stats, which is probably what some product manager is trying to maximize and demonstrate ("X number of PDF summarizations this quarter").
It's also not very good at any of those things, if you ask it to generate something far enough outside of the mainstream, or something particular, or something consistent, or- But, yeah, the insistence that we deprecate every other even remotely-connected resource (including other people) in order to supplicate ourselves to corporate desires is aggravating. You got a lot of the same pushback with VR. VR is really, really cool. Having your reality mediated by large corporations with a history of user-hostile behavior is not. Them not taking no for an answer feels violating.
Sex is great, but if you constabtly try to force it on me, sneak it into deals we make, or while i sleep etc. it will leave me quite hostile towards the topic, and that's where we are at. Consent is important in all things, no less here.
> 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.
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?
"A lie told often enough becomes the truth." - Vladimir Lenin
- or -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect
"strategic deflection through nuanced framing" or simply "deflective reframing" perhaps.
Maybe a subtle form of gaslighting with features of victim blaming and argument from authority? Microsoft treats its users and customers with utter contempt.
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.
Such hubris, seeing everything from HIS perspective, without taking into account the users. It is no wonder Microsoft keeps shipping crap - you can convince and push down B2B products to enterprise's throats, when their user's salaries are dependent on bosses who just care about image, with open budgets to fund whatever is sold to them to increase the bottom line. This is less effective on consumers.
This is the fundamental misunderstanding that the AI techies have. Normal people don’t want a “conversation“ with a computer. Conversations happen between people. Computers, at best, receive orders and carry them out. They are tools, not companions, and they should do nothing unless explicitly told to do it.
I wouldnt mind if the conversations actually were smart, not sycophantic, or were otherwise useful. I find more often than not it creates more work for me than it saves me, and even if i were to break even on time invested i lose massively on comprehension/understanding.
Reminds me of the classic in the genre:
https://xcancel.com/sama/status/1834351981881950234?lang=enI think this is a super important point. Working on ai I’m really wondering where this will actually end in the case of our media consumption, AI is being used to generate more engaging content, this will imply ai will be almost a requirement to stay visible, so more ai will be used. In the end little to no “real content” will make it through.
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?
What a gaslighting king this CEO is, the concern isn't how functional the AI is, the concern is AI just downloading any and all PERSONAL AND PRIVATE files on a whim, with no guard rails. What if I have photographs of my kids I've never uploaded anywhere EVER because I don't want them anywhere outside of MY DEVICE, does Microsoft just magically get to suck in those files and own them? Wild.
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.
The fact that people are unimpressed that we can have a fluid gameplay experience of the latest entry in the Diablo franchise in the palm of our hands was mindblowing to someone as well. "Don't you people have phones?"
Well, Blizzard is Microsoft now so I guess they belong together.
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.
Instead of "pushing back" I wish he'd actually listen to and address his critics' points.
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 only understand one thing: shareholder value. This dude's panicking because he knows how bad the next quarterly report looks when this strategy resulted in a hemorrhaging userbase. This is an expression of a stage of grief.
But it won't will it?
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".
It’s a lost cause. Just stop using Windows. That’s the only message that will be heard.
I would be impressed if AI was actually 'super smart' but what we have now is not.
But Sam promised us the gpt5 was a PhD level intelligence!
Now excuse me while I go talk to my PhD wielding friend about whether the seahorse emoji exists. /s
> It's not that people are unimpressed with AI
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.
It's just Eliza. Once you toy with it and see the patterns it is just Eliza with more power behind it.
> If anything, their current approach is only going to make people hate AI even more
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.
A fluent conversation was a great party trick but the novelty has worn thin. It had some value but overall having to have a conversation with a tool to get something done is frustrating. Like tasking a junior employee on their first day with advanced tasks and wondering why they keep missing the mark. I want a tool not an opinionated support unit, and often will stop that conversational experience by prompting it away. Having to do that is annoying.
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
Exactly. It's not that everyone is saying "AI is completely worthless, get rid of it." It has it's use cases, I certainly benefit from LLMs in my job every day.
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.
Exactly. Even if we grant what he says (I don't fully agree)—that doesn't warrant putting that kind of "conversational engine" in Windows as a first-class citizen.
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."
It sounds like a terrible friend that you can't trust but also can't expel from your life.
"we can have a fluent conversation with a super smart AIwe can have a fluent conversation with a super smart AI"
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.
LLMs are severely overhyped, have many problems, and I don't want them in my face anymore than the average person. But we're not in 2023 anymore. These kinds of comments just come off ignorant.
I dunno, I'm not fully anti-LLM, but almost every interaction I have with an LLM-augmented system still at some point involves it confidently asserting plainly false things, and I don't think the parent is that far off base.
Agreed, some days I code for 4-6 hours with agentic tools but 2025 or not I still can't stomach using any of the big three LLMs for all but the most superficial research questions (and I currently pay/get access to all three paid chatbots).
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.
You seem severely confused about how low the probability of being “accidentally correct” is for almost any real life task that you can imagine.
I have never in my entire life wanted to "generate an image or video". I like taking photographs and recording videos because they represent the reality of my life. Who would ever want to "generate" fake images as a matter of normal daily activities?
That is indeed a really weird statement from them.
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".
Management, marketing, HR. People who want to send a message without having any kind of responsibility for it.
When have i ever wanted my os to “generate any image i want!”
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?
I use AI everyday and it’s now integral to my workflow. However, even I still hate the hype train and having it constantly stuffed down my throat. Nevermind AI slop.
Windows 11 is already adware. No wonder people are complaining about more ads.
I am unimpressed with it. If I wanted to steal code off stack overflow I can do that myself. Another layer of indirection has negative value.
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.
Well, and companies are papering over usability problems with AI. LLMs are not a substitute for good human-centric design.
It's almost as if all the focus has been on eliminating the human... for products designed for humans.
"If I want AI I'll actively seek it out and use it - otherwise, jog on."
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
Linux and Mac users would disagree.
If you cannot choose another OS besides Windows, then you are stuck with whatever Redmond decides
This Microsoft response reminds me of the 2018 Blizzcon event, where the Diablo Immortal developer challenged the audience with "Do you guys not have phones?" when the audience asked if the game was coming to PC.
Then - like now - it seemed that they couldn't understand that what they made was not what their customers wanted.
Don't forget the audience member who literally asked if it was a joke - and got cheers and applause from the rest of the audience. It was probably one of the biggest PR disasters in gaming history - and it does seem like the AI CEOs have been taking quite a bit of inspiration from it.
I think the intent is to provide a sense of pride and accomplishment when rivaling the same monetary dedication on the mobile platform comparable to the PC counterpart. You think you want bread, but you don’t: we are making subscription-based cake available which is better in every way.
Brawndo has what plants crave!
My thought exactly. From hindsight, Diablo immortal is not a bad game, but that moment was really…not great. I guess the guy knew that phone games were getting momentum but unfortunately that specific group of users in Blizzcon didn’t want a phone game.
I actually think that 2018 was about the time when phone games had very much lost momentum and now are much less exciting than they were circa 2013. By 2018, both the potential and the limitations of phone games were very much understood by the audience. I'd argue that the top of the hype cycle of "maybe phone games will actually become really good" was 2010's Infinity Blade. Clash of Clans came out in 2012, and by 2018 phone games were fully devoid of momentum.
I think if they'd teased a phone game it would have been well received. From memory, the problem was they teased something much larger/exiting (new diablo, not a chinese arpg reskin) so when the reveal hit everyone was massively let down.
I guess this is kind of similar though. what is promised isnt and likely wont be delivered.
A quote I saw today: "Maybe AI seems like a creative solution, if you aren't a creative person.", seems to explain a lot of this maybe.
Edit: Found the source: https://www.eurogamer.net/maybe-ai-is-a-creative-solution-if...
That’s a great quote —- when you hire a “creative” to do a job (ie photographer, designer, etc) in area where you aren’t an expert, the conversation of what you want usually starts with similar existing work that you like.
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.
I'd love to read more wherever this came from if you could link the source
But why integrate AI so deeply into Windows instead of
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.
They do neither of those things because, unlike you, they don't care about improving the user experience. They care about making money through any possible means.
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.
> 1. keeping Windows as small and lean as possible, and let it do the things an operating system is for,
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 is not a general purpose operating system. It's a platform for monetizing businesses via licensing and cloud services, and a platform for monetizing private users by way of advertising and data mining.
If they were ever to produce a Windows PowerUser edition, with absolutely no bloat, it would have to be priced like a CAD suite.
Fine, price it like a CAD suite, then.
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.
AI failed at Microsoft because they already lost the consumer trust. I doubt they would have this issue with AI integration if people didn’t feel that installing windows is a hostile corporate takeover of your computer.
> AI failed at Microsoft...
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's wild that most developers in a corporate environment pay Microsoft to use Chat GPT, Gemini, and Claude
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.
The thing that our management likes about co-pilot is that the data stays with us. We can't say that about ChatGPT.
Dear mr microsoft AI CEO, why dont you pass my message to the higher ups will ya? Make a decent operating system that runs on modern hardware with me the end user in full control of what gets installed and what doesnt. make a single scrollable screen that is 100 pages long for all i care where i get to choose what programs are installed, what permissions are required by each program, what telemetry options are enabled by default for each program and give me the ability to turn everything off if I must. I must be able to uninstall notepad and the Edge browser or even prevent them from being installed in the first place. After you get this much done, why dont we talk about your little AI features then?
> But with Microsoft literally becoming an AI company in the last year ...
"literally"?! What does that mean? That they offloaded all decision-making to AI?
We need to see actual improvements to our day to day lives if we want to see support for AI. At the moment, people are seeing improvements in technology, but they're feeling the decline of the welfare of those around them, they're feeling food insecurity, they're feeling uncertain about job security.
"AI" is not a machine for improving the lives of people, it's a tool for consolidating power and wealth at the top. Declining welfare and access to basic human needs shows that decision makers are getting better at min/maxing the economy.
The CEO asks: if they have no bread then why don't they eat cake?
Where does this guy get his information from?
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.
This is pretty damning: [0] Talking to Windows’ Copilot AI makes a computer feel incompetent
0: https://www.theverge.com/report/822443/microsoft-windows-cop...
Look, GPT-3 was pretty magical. DALL-E was amazing.
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.
it's pretty good at highly specific questions about software support, from my experience. I'll say what program I'm using, what I'm trying to do, and what errors I keep hitting.
"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."
Imagine mcdonald's CEO saying "But it has so much calorie density for the price! and the bigmac tastes so sweet". People don't necessarily want calorie density just the same as they don't want their burgers tasting like sweet pie, not the right flavor for the context. Similarly, most people aren't necessarily trying to be productive, and they want features in the right context, and when desirable.
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.
The endgame is obvious: make people train agents and models that will replace them. Executives at MS must think this is subtle and a genius move, but it is obvious and low effort. They don't see that making crappy products in the short term will strengthen their competition, even from small contenders, which might disrupt their core. I doubt MS will out execute others in this race. Let's wait and see :)
Microsoft management may be succeeding with building the cloud business, but they've wrecked Windows.
This is one thing that I miss from Balmer days.
> people are unimpressed that we can have a fluent conversation with a super smart AI that can generate any image/video
> 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...
This genius probably doesn't use Windows as his daily driver so of course he's not bothered by it.
Mustafa Suleyman (Microsoft AI CEO) is a grifter. He dropped out at 19 and later ran "product" for Deepmind, riding the coattails of Demis Hassabis.
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.
Seems like a perfect match for a product that is a computer that lies.
I mean, if they want to put a grifter and a con artist in charge of their division and torpedo themselves, I say let them go for it!
Something, something, never interrupt your opponent whilst they’re making a mistake.
This is Microsoft's "Do you guys not have phones?" moment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqjVdPtB9lU
Considering Diablo Immortal generated a ton of money, I hope you are wrong.
I believe users are stupid enough to stick to Microsoft "agentic OS" anyway.
My biggest issue with “users choosing to stick with it” is the inordinate number of users in corporate environments who simply won’t be given a choice.
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.
Garbage software loaded on a corporate laptop is nothing new. That it comes directly from Microsoft instead of a third party security company does not meaningfully move the needle. I have long assumed that a work machine has literal keyloggers.
> Jeez there so many cynics!
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 weren’t so tiring having to wade through all the ai slop they add to products I’m forced to use, the fact that leadership in the field are getting petty and childish about how not everyone thinks their toy is shiny is a real “telling on themselves” moment.
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.
> it's hard to believe we're going to see a version of Windows that isn't bloated with AI functionality most people didn't ask for.
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.
Reminds me of the Xbox One reveal disaster.
Because they're right. They'll all collude to make sure that you can't install a non-"smart" OS, just like you can't buy an non-"smart" tv, and the public will be well-trained to mumble something about the "market" and call you names ("luddite," "techie," "boomer," whatever...) when you complain about it.
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.
Yeah it worked everytime so despite complaints so they have all the reason to believe it will work this time either.
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.
Ai basically kills human creativity.
For me it’s the opposite. AI has enabled me to write songs and create pictures. I can’t draw but AI helped me to implement ideas I had.
have you considered not all ideas are good and maybe they shouldn't see the light of day?
People think Windows sucks. People think AI sucks. Combine the two, ??? Still sucks
It is going to be the next Windows Me, Vista, Windows 8, and while I usually do pro-Windows comments, I also don't want an agentic OS Microsoft style.
I'll take Charms, mouse gestures, and the Start Screen over Copilot any day.
At least those things felt like a sincere attempt to move HCI forward. Perhaps not very well tested to understand how all the parts work together, but at least sincere. MS' Copilot brand is a broken solution in search of a problem.
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.
It wasn't even ten years ago when I was participating in user studies as a developer at MS. And it was the real deal: we had a bunch of people, specifically selected to give a diverse cross-cut of the user base (so varying backgrounds, experience level etc), sit down and try to do some simple tasks with our product, while devs and PMs watched over a camera. And, crucially, you couldn't ask questions or provide guidance during that time - only after they were done. That was incredibly informative, much more so than any telemetry I've seen before or after, and I wish that was the norm in all companies; but, in any case, Microsoft definitely had both the resources and the inclination to do that.
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.
It’s not that people are unimpressed with ai, it’s that they are unimpressed with what it can even on windows and forcing us to interact with it. Like I can’t even change basic settings with it. If it were good, you don’t need to tell me to used it!
He seems to be intentionally missing the point of most of the complaints in order to direct away from his core area. The many legitimate criticisms of windows poor user experience lately will eventually drive change, but long will that take?
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.
Heck, I Do have day-to-day use for it, and I still don't want it to completely take over how I use and interact with my OS.
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.
I would simply urge that its important to listen to your end users. Microsoft has a grip on enterprise customers, but everyone else has at least two other options. The third option is not having a PC at all, and I bet a lot of people are totally happy with that given how powerful phones and tablets are now.
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.
Smart AI? You mean probability based token generator?
The best way I've heard this described today is "he's high on his own supply".
Windows has just become too bloated trying to do to many things. I like CoPilot, but all the “Clippy” style integrations of crap in Windows directly is just poor design. Microsoft also doesn’t have user trust in the way Apple does, so everyone just assumes MSFT is going bad things with the data.
It's not even a question of trust or loyalty. Microsoft has explicitly told us they're doing bad things with the data.
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.
> Microsoft also doesn’t have user trust in the way Apple does, so everyone just assumes MSFT is going bad things with the data.
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.
Is this super smart AI in the room with us right now?
It's a shame that society is just devolving and we're just seeing it happen in real time. Inhuman opportunists are enacting an increasingly aggressive hostile takeover in every single industry and ruining it in the process. What's going to happen in the next 10 years?
At this particular moment in time, the old quote about "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" feels relevant on a couple of levels. I keep waiting for the bubble to burst and for these executives to be forced into finally confronting the realities of this technology, but it is taking a very long time indeed.
Copilot in Visual Studio is so hit or miss that frequently it's not worth using.
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.
I will never be able to square the circle of c suites pushing both RTO and AI at the same time. You can't seriously believe in the "power" of face-to-face meetings while simultaneously forcing your employees to work with chat bots all day.
What did I just read? Microsoft has employed this person? They are paying him a salary?
With this attitude I'm worried about GitHub and VSCode..
Microsoft has been pushing AI features into both VS Code and GitHub for quite some time
"It must be the customers who are wrong," said no successful businessperson ever.
This made me think of Henry Ford's quote about people wanting a faster horse. Granted, he was an extreme outlier, which is why he's worth quoting
But when people told him his cars sucked and they wanted their horses back, he didn-
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.
I just don’t get the sense that we are at the model T stage yet. This feels more like the Cugnot Steamer era, not the Model-T era.
1.6% of GDP wasn't poured into the model T. And even if it was there was a definite market and a clear path to profitability. These fundamentals are missing, have been missing for many years, from AI. No matter how much money gets poured in there is still no way to make it profitable. It is entirely a game of wealthy spending money to consolidate power.
Is AI-windows really the car though?
more like they retrofitted a motor into a dead horse with an exoskeleton.
Who the fuck actually wants Recall spyware?
I hate that quote. Whenever I see it brought up, it makes me wonder what people think it's supposed to represent. The hypothetical person asks for faster horses because they know they'll be dismissed if they ask for something they think is even more impossible than faster horses.
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.
Wasn't there something about the wormhole that required it connect two relatively large gravitational bodies rather than a single one? I also remember 'harmonics' related to having more than one Stargate on a planet, even if the other was unusable.
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.
Oh, I’m a “cynic” because I’m upset at Microsoft continuing to violate my consent over and over again, huh.
Wonder if he calls any of his rejected dates a “cynic” because they said no to him, too.
I'd bet good money that he thinks all his exes are "crazy"
A real "Don't you people have phones?" moment.
I'm glad I switched to MacOS 3 years ago.
Microsoft AI CEO thinks AI is cool. Film at eleven.
If Elon musk bent over and sucked shit from his own ass and Tesla stock went up, every CEO would start stretching.
I was surprised when Microsoft hired him. He always seemed to be the cofounder to Demis Hassabis who took on a philosophical tangent rather than the hard engineering needed to build transformative technologies and user experiences. I feel Microsoft lost a gem when Panos Panay left them. He really did some great work on the Surface product line. Surface Studio in particular.
Strawmanning, trying to distort the narrative and gaslight us by attacking a made-up perspective instead of the real arguments/feelings of the opposition. We aren't so much unimpressed, we're wary of our MOST PRIVATE data being stolen, then sold to the highest bidder or further stolen by hackers yet again. We have a bad taste in our mouth from ONEDRIVE. BEING. LITERALLY. IMPOSSIBLE. TO. TURN. OFF. (Unless you switch to Linux which is I guess the only choice now.) And the fact that they have shown they don't care about consumer preferences and will always continue to push their juggernaut of bad decisions on us out of monopolistic hubris. I thought this guy was smart but I guess he's just another AI-assist tool.
Microsoft is a multi-trillion dollar company. Is it too much to ask for them to develop and maintain two separate Windows flavors with different focus?
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.
When Microsoft updated office.com to immediately bring up a copilot prompt, and made it harder for me to find the menu items, I was pretty annoyed.
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.
Microsoft is using AI as an excuse to slurp all your personal files and documents. I'd take them to small claims court if I ran Windows
The technology is amazing, but Microsoft has no imagination in the way they try to make use of it. It's sad. It also legitimately hurts society that they are further blurring the line between what is an offline and online experience in Windows, which I fully and openly reject in the strongest of terms.
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.
I guess silicon valley truly makes you tone deaf.
I'll be impressed when they manage to fix Windows 11! There are still many regressions compared to Windows XP through 10. They can add all this AI nonsense to the taskbar, yet they can't reinstate the features people have been asking for.
Unfortunately Apple seems to be gong the same way. On Mac and iPhone I am seeing more things that don’t work well.
Meanwhile we get a react native web app for a start menu, and you can't even move the taskbar's location on the screen. A feature that has existed in Windows since 95.
Something is seriously dysfunctional in Microsoft.
Windows 11 is great once your strip out everything like their app store and Copilot and create an offline account (Windows Pro required).
"Why aren't you impressed we installed a real live trained dancing grizzly bear in your bathroom!? Yes, I know nobody asked for that bear. Yes, I know the toilet still doesn't flush. Yes, I know the bear sometimes eats people trying to take a shower. Don't you understand?! I grew up using an OUTHOUSE! Have you seen the bear's colorful hat? That bear literally dances the macarena, you ingrates!"
The ONLY thing keeping people in WIndows anymore, is propietary software, that is how TERRIBLE Microsoft has become.
Yet another salesman clown at the head of a multibillion dollar corporation.
MSFT reminds me of INTC.
They spent billions of dollars on compute costs and they need to pump the PKIs to justify it. That is the only explanation.
It is the same reason every app (be they web or mobile) gets a redesign every year.
That's gotta be it.
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.
I don’t know much about him, but I’m immediately put off by his post with obvious grammar errors. And I’m not even a native speaker!
On the topic of grammar errors. I have seriously considered leaving several grammar and spelling errors in my posts in order to provide a signal that this post was written by a human. And then I get several sorts of depressed at what this implies for our future.
I came across an article the other day, I wish I saved it, that had sentences which said things like “insert short sentence here” and “spacer sentence here”
As a published article.
He grew up in Britain so he's most likely a native speaker.
It's a Twitter post, not an English essay that's about to be graded.
He's also a CEO addressing a vital issue for the company. Do you really think “dudee so many haters!!” is a response befitting the position?
Seems like he should've used Copilot, is own freaking product, to make the post for him.
or gemini.
I'm a Brit and the grammar seems ok to me. I would have put a comma after the jeez. Not sure about the content though.
Other than missing the word "are", are there other grammar issues with the post I'm missing?