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Why MSFT Copilot+ and AI PCs are the final nail in the coffin of open computing
- sys_64738 2y agoAre these Copilot+PC mean "(Copilot) + (PC)" or is it "(Copilot+) (PC)"? It was never clear what the heck it even means. Figured it was AI with a PC bolted on but you never know.
- johnea 2y agoWindows was a "bastion of open computing"? This is obviously crap/inaccurate/a misrepresentation, windows has always been a completely closed prorietary s/w platform. The only "openness" (since we're not allowed to say "free software" on HN) has been the ability to load unverified binaries from unknown developers. In other words, a complete security nightmare of a s/w platform. "Enterprise" has been "beholden" to M$ for decades. I would expect the M$U graduates in IT everywhere to embrace this abomination like they've embraced all the ones that came before it, that is with gusto 8-)
- RunSet 2y ago"Intel Management Engine 2: The Sequel"
- zeroonetwothree 2y agoPhones were never upgradable so I don’t see how they are evidence of computing becoming more closed. I can still build a PC and run Linux on it just as I did 25 years ago.
- _mlbt 2y agoYou can’t deny that the momentum is moving in the direction of system on a chip designs. Apple showed the industry how beneficial this design is for performance and power efficiency. Plus it’s better for their bottom line. It’s a win for nearly everyone except for those who care about custom builds or component upgrades.
- merb 2y agoYou can’t install the newest Linux on a 25 year old machine.
- hddherman 2y agoI recently installed Debian 12 running XFCE desktop environment on a ThinkPad T40 for fun. The T40 was released 21 years ago, so not quite 25 but close enough. I could load my blog with it on a modern version of Firefox. It was not fast, but I could still do it!
- mrits 2y agoIt is really odd to me that people put any value on current AI platforms. Not only is the field advancing so fast that next year ChatGPT might be worthless we also have the ability to train from existing model for a fraction of the cost.
- sidkshatriya 2y agoAs the field advances, so will ChatGPT, Copilot, gemini etc. They will upgrade as the field upgrades. Just like people instinctively go to google for a search due good experiences with their search results in the past, new habits will be formed and people will use gemini, chatgpt, copilot etc. So I wouldn't say any of these new AI platforms will be rendered worthless due to advancements in the field.
- ethbr1 2y agoThe LLM/compute is the least interesting part, IMHO. Enterprise knowledge context and a platform to currate that and feed it to LLMs, on the other hand...
- fbdab103 2y agoMicrosoft's offerings are rarely the best, but they can be sold bundled together, have long support contracts, and a wealth of integrations tying it all together. Teams is not winning due to technical competence. It is Good Enough and bundled with the other Office products a corporation is already going to license.
- mrits 2y agoIf your point is ChatGPT might share the same fate as Teams I suppose I don't disagree
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago> But there’s a catch: the advanced capabilities of these NPUs are tightly tethered to Microsoft’s cloud ecosystem. Why? If anything, hardware acceleration should make it easier to run AI locally.
- ethbr1 2y agoHow many years old are open source GPU drivers, again?
- kcb 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesa_(computer_graphics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesa_(computer_graphics) > February 1995
- wmf 2y agoThe article is about Windows, a proprietary OS with proprietary drivers. Open source isn't the topic here.
- rnd0 2y agoIt is the topic, you're right. Open Source is the appropriate reply to the topic.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y agoIt can be both: * You can of course run Microsoft's AI on Windows on this hardware. * But I'll bet you can also use the NPU and the drivers that Windows has with different AI software. * And sooner or later, I'm very interested to see Linux drivers for these NPUs so we can have nice hardware-accelerated AI without needing any proprietary software. So I'd say that FOSS is an appropriate reply, but there is room for a continuum of answers.
- wmf 2y agoHonestly no. When you say "if you want privacy just use Linux" you're throwing billions of people under the bus. If they were willing to use Linux they would have already switched. Everyone deserves privacy including Windows "lusers".
- bitwize 2y agoEnterprises are going to LOVE being (even more) beholden to Microsoft for this. Recall is going to give them a scrubbable, searchable timeline of nearly everything every employee does with their PC, making goldbrickers and troublemakers even easier to identify and punish. Don't think this will happen? Microsoft Office already has bossware built in, with nice dashboards and reports available to your manager showing what you're doing with Microsoft Office for how long. Building this in at the OS level will make Fred Taylor cum in his grave.
- AtlasBarfed 2y agoAIs are going to be used in so many ways to profile employees. Productivity, trustworthiness, viability of hiring, ease of termination, and all the things that a state level entity will (only vaguely theoretically) be restricted from (again, but not really practically), corporations will have writ large to implement. Employees are going to have to start being very reticent to communicate in electronic form, likely will need to counter deploy AIs to generate communication and "work" that maximizes their appearance of productivity. All of this with a magic handwave to absolve away any AI racial profiling or other HR exposures the business may have. "The great AI god said so" will be cover for any and all malfeasance. AI is a deep war on labor by management. Not just in automation, which is what everyone is concerned with currently. That at least has positive efficiency/economics associated with it. The true war on labor will be a totalitarian one, and with it, everything necessary to do it at the state level at the drop of a hat, or a Gulf of Tonkin.
- wmf 2y agoThis article deserves a huge [citation needed] since Microsoft said these features are provided locally. I understand that in general Windows 11 loves phoning home but that's not enough to condemn the new Copilot features.
- byteknight 2y agoProcessing and sending are two separate unrelated things. You can process entirely on device and still send the base data or results. Both things can be true at the same time.
- wmf 2y agoSure, but I still want to see specifics.
- AlexandrB 2y agoIt's like Charlie Brown with the football. Maybe this time she won't pull it away from me at the last moment.
- bitwize 2y agoIn enterprise deployments, Microsoft Office -- the end user killer app for Windows systems -- already reports on you to your boss, even if you use the binaries and not the cloud versions. Your boss getting a copy of your Recall timeline is a thing that can't not happen. It's too valuable. It may be the strongest value prop of the feature.
- Animats 2y agoWhat's Linux going to have to equal this?
- nik282000 2y agoSoftware that works offline, respects your privacy, and runs on nearly all hardware back to the 90s?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y agoOllama, llama.cpp, whisper, assorted frontends over those backends, and an actual history of respecting user choice and privacy. (I do grant, we might need to get NPU drivers in good shape; not sure what the state of that is right now.)
- abrichr 2y agoWe have Linux support on the roadmap in https://github.com/OpenAdaptAI/OpenAdapt https://github.com/OpenAdaptAI/OpenAdapt. OpenAdapt has similar functionality, except: - it's open source - it only records when you explicitly tell it to - it has multiple PII/PHI scrubbing providers built in (see https://github.com/OpenAdaptAI/OpenAdapt?tab=readme-ov-file#industry-leading-privacy-piiphi-scrubbing-via-aws-comprehend-microsoft-presidio-and-private-ai https://github.com/OpenAdaptAI/OpenAdapt?tab=readme-ov-file#...) - the purpose for recording is to automate tasks in desktop apps - it's cross platform (Mac and Windows now, Linux coming soon) Full disclosure: I'm the primary author. Contributions and feedback welcome!
- kornhole 2y agoI don't know of anything yet on desktop, but I have my own Nextcloud server that is advancing its local AI models quickly. You can run Nextcloud on just about anything, but to take advantage of the full AI capabilities, you need HW capable.
- partiallypro 2y agoI like the idea of "Recall" but surely it will have some controls on what apps it is allowed to track? I don't think it is a great idea to have something like this if you're working on a sensitive project; or at just doing something you don't want others to know about in general. Suddenly if someone has your PC, they have your entire history. Not just browsing, but of -everything.- They did something similar with Windows "Timeline," but I never used it because I had absolutely no control over what it tracked. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvTJ8kGRi18 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvTJ8kGRi18) Apparently, this is done all on-device, with no phone home, but that's only one concern addressed.
- wmf 2y agoThey said it doesn't record DRMed content (of course) or incognito browser windows.
- partiallypro 2y agoYeah, that's not enough though. You should be able to toggle in settings what apps (or even documents/websites) it is allowed to look at. Otherwise, most people are never going to use it for their personal lives. Even as a business, I wouldn't trust it without those controls.
- AlexandrB 2y agoIncognito Edge windows. There was no specific mentions of it ignoring incognito windows of other browsers.
- extr 2y agoThis article ironically sounds a lot like it was written with AI assistance.
- throwaway984393 2y ago[dead]
- gmuslera 2y agoIt seem to be an active, coordinated campaign against AIs bringing out of proportion the wrong things. Microsoft, Google, Apple, didn’t need AI to take control of our devices and information. With the Scarlet Johansson voice seem to be the same, too much noise in too much media at once for something that should had been obvious from the start, and it is not even the start of it. It may or not be the next step in a progression? Ok. That increases what players are in the game? Maybe. But the game was already set, and with the main players of today. There are more things to be scared about, with AIs and those players (and some that play the elephant in the room role), but that is not what they are pointing out.
- throwaway4good 2y agoI am not so optimistic. I think LLMs and massive AI processing might be the last hurrah before a long early-2000s desert walk for big tech. Essentially we are at peak personal computing: End-users are just as well served by the laptop they had 10 years ago and the mobile phone they had 5 years ago, as they ones they have today. Don't get me wrong; LLMs are useful and exciting and so are other forever upcoming things from CS - say microkernels ... but that doesn't mean they can justify an arbitrary large valuation. Ultimately these things are worth no more than the value they can generate for their end-users. Right now big tech is betting it all on LLMs. It's a perfect match for big tech - requires massive amounts of capital and just a tiny number of highly paid specialists. But after having spent billions and their best minds. This is what they come up with: An app running on your PC that takes a screenshot of your desktop every n seconds and feeds that into an LLM that you then can interact with. Requiring completely new hardware and massive amounts of computing resources. So that you can go - "I looked at a brown leather bag earlier - what website was it at?" and similar. All has value I am sure, but also probably limited value. And could have been supported much more straight forward and with much less computing power through traditional software.
- pjmlp 2y agoThing is the "The openness and modularity of PCs allowed users to customize their machines, create what they wanted without restrictions and maintain control over their digital experience. However, this open spirit that once defined the PC era has been gradually eroding, giving way to a new age of closed, tightly controlled computing." was only due to a mistake on IBM's part. IBM never imagined the PC would be taken away from them, the vertical integration market we have been slowly going back to, was the common way of selling 8 and 16 bit computers, until PC's came to be, and Compaq took advantage of it. The thin razor margins of PC components, the commoditization of computing, are most likely the main drivers for going back to that model.
- lakomen 2y agoI wish laptops would be component based, you know what I mean, don't twist my words. They would be less expensive and you could upgrade then too over the years. Why spend 3k on a new one when all you need is a new GPU for 700. But regarding the article or rather M$ PC"+", my 14900k has AI features, apparently. A NPU can come bundled with the CPU, doesn't have to be a separate component. I don't think the article is correct, it's just trying to ride the announcement. Category spam.
- drbig 2y agoFramework laptops? https://frame.work/ https://frame.work/ (I'm neither affiliated nor a user/client).