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How are they able to sustain keeping this free? Or is the idea that it's a demo for now and they try to charge for this later?
by politelemon 2y ago
How are they able to sustain keeping this free? Or is the idea that it's a demo for now and they try to charge for this later?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- rchaud 2y agoWindows 11 has ads in the Start Menu now.
- maximus-decimus 2y agoI honestly don't mind that as much as them searching the whole web when I'm searching for a local file.
- Mo3 2y agoBrother all of this upcoming AI integration in Windows opens a whole new era of siphoning off valuable user data, that little stable diffusion on MS Paint there could be written off as a small PR and marketing position. In any case it runs locally.
- wredue 2y agoI have absolutely no idea what data they’re even getting out of this. I am probably more privacy oriented than the next guy, and I’m just not really seeing the pitch here.
- TeMPOraL 2y agoAn incentive to stay on Windows and/or update to their new "AI-enabled" Surface line? Most regular users will just parse this as "oh that cool generative art AI thing comes built into Windows!". EDIT: I mean, you don't need to look far to see this effect; see e.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40447474 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40447474.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- zamadatix 2y agoThe e.g. image generation AI feature is using DALL-E externally and this kind of thing isn't free. The one time cost of a Windows license doesn't seem worth it, especially with the prices OEMs pay for them. There's gotta be other long term revenue generation goals driving it.
- TeMPOraL 2y agoMicrosoft all but owns OpenAI at this point; using DALL-E isn't free, but they're almost certainly running it on their own infrastructure, and were kind of already giving access to it away for free, with Bing Chat and now Copilot. Also, if DALL-E is anything like Stable Diffusion, it's effectively free to run. For comparison, my 5+ years old machine that I recently put a 4070 Ti in, can generate images with SD all day long without breaking sweat, and does it faster than even paid on-line services I've interacted with so far. That same machine chokes on any LLM above 8-10 billion parameters; it can handle that much with full GPU offload, but try anything larger and it becomes just an elaborate space heater. (I tried running 8x7b Mixtral on it once, and managed to OOM and crash the system :/).
- al_borland 2y agoNot this specifically, but for thier recall feature they are going to constantly take screenshots of what a user is doing, then then AI will analyze it and keep track of it all. They say it’s all local. Maybe that’s true. Maybe for now. Will it be forever? Is the recall local, but insights are collected? Time will tell. I certainly won’t be signing up to be part of the experiment.
- deelowe 2y agoI think the strategy is to sell the OS and hardware required to run this.
- croes 2y agoUser data is more valuable. LLMs need lots of input
- olalonde 2y ago> User data is more valuable. If that was true, there would be a free laptop by now.
- jajko 2y agoWasnt there some effort from facebook to give all 3rd world free laptops? Their whole worth is basically just user data so that makes sense. Not sure why it didnt pan out.
- deelowe 2y agoI'm just going off what Microsoft has actually announced which is a new line of surface hardware and an updated OS.
- numpad0 2y agoYeah, probably that and seeing untapped potential in inexplicable omission of specific combination of "Dungeons" and "Dragons" in mobile junk game markets despite popularity of each respective words.
- simonw 2y agoIt runs locally, so there's no need for them to spend money on a server-side inference layer.
- klyrs 2y agoThe AI won't let you draw a penguin smashing the windows logo anymore, so this is partly funded by the anticompetition department. (the above is technically parody and not precisely serious)
- ADeerAppeared 2y agoIt's not sustainable. Copilot+ runs locally, but has the quality of 2 years ago, it's basically useless for anything but shitposts and spam. The cloud AI tools all burn hideous amounts of money, all ran at a loss. AGI is a red herring, and will not happen. The architecture of generative-AI systems simply doesn't permit the required logic and reasoning capability. Even the "Actually, Indians" concept of outsourcing the tertiary sector to the developing world by way of having low-skill workers clean up AI generated trash is unviable. (It both doesn't work, and is politically doomed.) What's going on here is that tech companies are tearing up everything to pump their stock prices after the covid-tech-boom and ZIRP ended. Burn down their core products to keep the bubble going just a bit longer.
- fnordpiglet 2y agoI’m not sure why you think cloud AI runs at a loss. This is simply not true. The cloud providers are public companies and they’re definitely not losing money in AI. The bigger AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are not losing money in their monetized APIs. Nvidia isn’t selling GPUs at a loss. Every place I’ve worked is absolutely reducing costs and doing new / more business as a result of their LLM use. So I’m not entirely sure my first hand experience and the economics in actual reality jibe with your opinion.
- victor106 2y agoI agree Nvidia is for sure making money. For the other companies in your list and more specifically the ones that are developing LLM's they are investing billions of dollars in the hope that they will make all of those back and then some in the future. Meta for example said they invested $10bn into AI just last quarter alone.
- fnordpiglet 2y agoNote I didn’t discuss the fully loaded costs I discussed the inference costs. At this point I see training costs as basic research and R&D, partially and not entirely oriented at -making training scale- and cost optimization for next generations of foundational and fine tuned models. For example Falcon is literally basic research funding. That’s relevant because if they stopped with say Claude Opus and 4o and did no more training they would be handsomely profitable indefinitely because the product is that useful. However it’s an arms race and the limit of effectiveness hasn’t been reached as training costs fall dramatically. So it’s not the right time to stop because whoever stops first loses everything to whoever doesn’t stop. More they’re feeding off each other in a virtuous cycle. Once diminishing returns kill the race whoever is left in the race will have a handsome business indefinitely as the moat to build such a return diminished model is probably enormous. But if inference optimizations keep going as they’re going it’ll be crazy cheap to operate. The second layer market of tools that constrain, optimize, and effectively apply the models in effective ways will be the first to really turn a profit. Many hype wagon AI companies are already being snapped up by larger companies to bootstrap their internal work.
- croes 2y agoThey try to kill the competition, make people dependent on AI and then they can put a price tag on it.
- freeone3000 2y agoIt runs locally! You’re the one paying for the compute by virtue of having the computer it runs on.
- galaxyLogic 2y agoWhen users are not using AI in the Cloud but AI on their PC they are benefitting about as much as such a service online would cost. MS is then able to somehow take part of that saved money, perhaps by selling users more high-end apps which can run local-only on users' PC, and thus save users money they would otherwise spend on data-center services. Parts of that saved money must trickle to MS, because its software is what is producing that value.
- TowerTall 2y agoEventually it will tied to o365 subscription (or windows license subscription) is my guess. For now they just swallow the cost to get access to all data and use that data to improve Azure and GPT. Bing didn't make a profit for many years for example
- CatWChainsaw 2y agoMicrosoft is the company that is most obviously pursuing computers as a service. (perpetual OS rental, at least.)