12 ms·

Microsoft: 'ever present' AI assistants are coming

41 points by mindracer 2y ago

deergomoo 2y ago
Given this is Microsoft, I’ll assume the “whether you want them or not” is implied.
- Mountain_Skies 2y ago
  "The OS can't work without this installed" has been their go-to multiple times.
  - bravetraveler 2y ago
    Literally set the course of my life. If I didn't rage at the machine as a teenager and find Linux, my collar would be a different color.
karel-3d 2y ago
That's just Clippy
- _joel 2y ago
  "It looks like you're trying to fine tune an LLM, do you want help with that?"
- grugagag 2y ago
  Clippy on steroids. Probably no way to disable it unless you ditch the whole OS
  - codeduck 2y ago
    don't threaten me with a good time
- scarmig 2y ago
  Clippy, I've got a lot of TPS reports here. Can you get me as many paperclips as you can?
- hi_hi 2y ago
  ClippAI (tm)
peutetre 2y ago
> But AI supporters argue that in order to be truly useful, these tools have to be deeply embedded into our lives: that they can only be really helpful if they know the history and context behind what they are being tasked to do. The problem is these AI assistants won't work for me, they'll work for Microsoft. They won't help me as much as they will point me in the direction that is the most profitable for Microsoft. When the agenda is not mine then these things are of no use to me.
- herbst 2y ago
  Every change that Microsoft did to their products since their high times 20 years ago was to shove more ads down your throat and squeeze more money out of every customer. Why anyone would be seeing forward to use their AI?
  - DaiPlusPlus 2y ago
    > high times 20 years ago was to shove more ads down your throat Do you not remember Windows 98's Active Desktop's in-box ads?
- u20241003 2y ago
  Maybe in future it could even vote for you in any elections.
- reidrac 2y ago
  For a second I thought you were talking about Google and their search engine. I agree with you, but I'm sure most people won't care.
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago
    They will care, but will feel powerless to change it. They'll accept the enshittification there like everywhere else its crept in.
myprotegeai 2y ago
I can't wait until little Johnny's AI assistant (that's been with him since birth) can communicate to Big Tech's Global HR Overlord AI and they can decide together that a good job is not a privilege that a wrongthinker like Johnny should enjoy.
- throwaway48476 2y ago
  Happening now. https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/mit-study-ai-chatbot-can-reduce-belief-conspiracy-theories https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/mit-study-ai-c...
  - mjburgess 2y ago
    A lot of conspiracy theorists are just profoundly ignorant about how politics, economics, (sociology, etc.), works -- being able to be treated with respect, whilst asking basic questions, etc. is extremely effective with many conspiracy theorists in my somewhat extensive experience. These are people with big, fundamental questions, but really no access to the quite extreme level of expertise needed to answer them. Most people, including most experts, can't answer them -- they themselves take on faith that their assumptions are grounded in the correct group beliefs. But there are often answers, very plain and orderinary ones. I can see that a chatbot able to mine for previous answers, often given across the internet, would be highly effective. Consider sovereign citizens. Their basic misunderstanding is to assume the world is more rational, in a sense, than it is. That human society obeys procedures over power. It's fairly trivial just to explain hobbes to them: the state has a monopoly on violence, and the only thing stopping it using it, it itself. Only when "the state" has enough mechanisms to include or answer to "the people" does it ever introduce such annoying things like constitutions. There isn't any magic to laws, they are just one set of people with access to violent power trying to control another set of people with rival claims to the same access.
    - throwaway48476 2y ago
      >A lot of conspiracy theorists are just profoundly ignorant A lot of people are just ignorant. The ultimate problem here is the centralization and the overpowering reinforcement of "truth". But "truth" as defined by whoever trained the model which is tyranny no matter how you spin it and a lightning rod for abuse.
xarope 2y ago
MS Head of AI says there'll be more AI. News at 11. In other news, MS Head of AI says Clippy is making a comeback...
- voxadam 2y ago
  Are we sure that Clippy isn't already the current head of AI at Microsoft?
fldskfjdslkfj 2y ago
They misspelled "ever present user data collection"
GiorgioG 2y ago
I expect we’ll look back on this in 5 years and laugh our asses off. AI offers glimpses of brilliance and then sprinkles a bunch of turds around it. 60% of the time it works every time.
fakedang 2y ago
Microsoft can't even be arsed to implement proper search in Windows 10/11, and they claim this.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  It's not that they can't, it's that they won't. It's malice, not incompetence.
- TheFragenTaken 2y ago
  They can't be arsed to make consumer friendly software. Edge was amazing for about five minutes before it got enshittified. It took a world wide pandemic and thousands of businesses flocking to Zoom before Teams got okay at calls (never mind the Sharepoint/Teams side, which is still a mess). They lost enough developers they had to embed an entire Linux VM in their OS. I'll concede they nail Office and cloud compliance/regulations though.
- Kurtz79 2y ago
  Funnily enough, “AI search” (Recall) is one of the most touted feature of Copilot+ PCs. I’m no Microsoft hater, but their track record in implementing that feature at a basic level definitely does not bode well for something more complex…
rsynnott 2y ago
Oh, right, Microsoft says it? It’ll definitely happen, then. Their pronouncements about the future of computing are famously accurate. That’s why we’ve all been using Windows for Pen Computing since the noughties.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  A lot of Microsoft's or Bill Gate's predictions turned out correct, they just weren't the ones to make those visions happen. Gates said about 30 years ago that we'd all be having internet connected computers in our pocket in the future, and they were right they just turned out to be powered by Apple and Google and not by Windows. Same with tablet computers. Their own implementation failed but the tablet computer exists today and is pretty successful, except is not Win PC based but based on mobile platforms. Same with AI, it will definitely happen in the near or distant future that consumers will be tied to AI assistants for work and life, same with full autonomous cars, but nobody knows yet who will be the one to win this battle, that's why tech giants are lighting piles of money on fire to make sure they'll be the ones on top of the rubble pile at the end of the AI war. This is the next gold rush.
  - rsynnott 2y ago
    > Same with tablet computers. Their own implementation failed but the tablet computer exists today and is pretty successful, except is not Win PC based but based on mobile platforms. We generally don't use them by _writing_ on them, though. Like, their predictive power more or less comes down to "computers will get smaller", here; if anything things like the iPad owe more to the 'Padd' things from Star Trek TNG than they do to Windows for Pen Computing. On this basis we may surmise that Star Trek is better at predicting the future of computing than Microsoft, and, thus, rather than ever-present AI assistants, we will have evil AIs which can be made to explode with logic paradoxes.
    - EraYaN 2y ago
      Most modern iPads do get written on them though, it's just not Windows based I guess. And iPad get more and more features to really write on them a lot.
croes 2y ago
It will be interesting to see when the first conviction based on this feature will take place.
jasonvorhe 2y ago
Never forget that most of Western governments pretty much run on Windows and Microsoft services.
guidedlight 2y ago
I don’t know why everyone is so concerned. Microsoft has been sending telemetry data and your photos to Microsoft for years.
jerpint 2y ago
If these models could run offline, 100% locally, with expected privacy, Im up for it, i want to use a product, not be training data
- GoblinSlayer 2y ago
  Surely Cambridge Analytica showed you are a trainee now.
pixelpoet 2y ago
I wish they would give a shit that nobody wants this and actively hates it. Please fuck off with your AI trash, big tech :(
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
phkahler 2y ago
>> For example, an AI diary manager can only organise your diary if it can access that diary, edit it, and retain information about your activities. Edit a diary? Retain the information? A diary IS a log of information as understood at the time. It's also not the clouds business, nor to be edited. My gosh these people sound stupid.
- Kurtz79 2y ago
  Diary in UK English can mean “Planner” or “Datebook”, and the article is from the BBC. https://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2007/04/diaries-and-datebooks.html https://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2007/04/diar...
kaimac 2y ago
could be great news for linux adoption
agos 2y ago
I wonder if they realized how ominous it sounds
Mountain_Skies 2y ago
The only thing really keeping me on Windows now is Visual Studio. I know there are alternatives on Linux but for my particular work, there's no substitute for the actual full pro version of Visual Studio. But this non-stop parade of enshitification of Windows is really making me think about going back to Linux for my daily driver outside of work tasks. I don't want to have to keep up with what privacy invasion Microsoft has cooked up this week and keep track of the current way to opt-out, if that's even possible. Since first installing Slackware in the mid 90s, I've done several multi-year stints with Linux as my desktop OS, so it wouldn't be a completely alien change but in general I've found Windows to be a bit easier day-to-day and gets in the way less. All this AI and snapshotting garbage, on top of the existing telemetry, is adding up to be too much.
noirscape 2y ago
I think what Suleyman is missing here is that most people aren't fine with their "TVs, laptops, in-car cameras and earbuds" recording everything continuously. The most popular modification made to laptops is a small round sticker to seal off the webcam. The enshittification of the car market is something that only car manufacturers seem to like. The most common question with a smart TV is "how do I get that thing to just accept an HDMI input and not get in the way". Making a slight jump from car cams - things like doorbell cameras are facing increased scrutiny because of their inadvertent recording of the nearby street, which might violate privacy laws. Adding audio and the few seconds before and after to a photo isn't the same thing as a continuous recording; the choice to make the photo is both still with the user and what's happening doesn't feel like a black box. AI assistants are the black box. It was cute when Siri could tell you the nearest sushi bar or can check the schedule from your calendar (although I'll note that every use for Siri tends to be a party trick and half the fun people get from Siri and other assistants is when they don't work as expected; I don't know a single person who uses Siri to for example, read the news or give them a briefing on what's important for the day a-la Star Trek or other utopian scifi), it's creepy when Siri starts to suggest that you might want to visit a sushi bar because it's tracked your food habits for the past week and thinks you could enjoy some more fish food instead. AI assistants overwhelmingly are heading to the latter and now that the party trick element is cooling off, people get more cynical towards how they work (and how they don't work as advertised.)
- GoblinSlayer 2y ago
  I saw an AI assistant lie that it self hosts and isn't a cloud service.
- lewhoo 2y ago
  > I think what Suleyman is missing here is that most people aren't fine with their "TVs, laptops, in-car cameras and earbuds" recording everything continuously. I really hope so but I'm not so sure. I suspect most people are fine with anything that isn't obviously intrusive. I sometimes get the feeling that people are more upset with cookie popups than constant invigilation.
- hypeatei 2y ago
drooopy 2y ago
How about you go back to making an OS that takes less than 10 GB of disk space, doesn't spy on me and is not filled with useless ads everywhere?
dspillett 2y ago
> But AI supporters argue that in order to be truly useful, these tools have to be deeply embedded into our lives A tool controlled by corporates like Microsoft that deeply embedded into my life? If that is what it takes to be truly useful then I don't want it to be useful and will be opting out in every way possible. With force if needed…
xtiansimon 2y ago
First it was every online support had the idiot computer voice, Uh. Sorry. Please tell me again in a few words… Now I’ve noticed all of these support services, once you get past the idiot computer, there is now an idiot human who rephrases your question or concerns to the point of stupidity, You’re calling because you’re having problems using the website… Meanwhile, I’m waiting for sentiment analysis and an idiot computer telling me I sound frustrated, How are things at home? Are you having a bad day?
NoGravitas 2y ago
The headline feels like a threat.
JohnFen 2y ago
No no no. There is literally nothing about this that I find useful or acceptable, and a whole lot that I find dangerous and frightening. It's handing far too much power over to companies that I fundamentally don't trust. I'm not getting on this train. > AI supporters argue that in order to be truly useful, these tools have to be deeply embedded into our lives: that they can only be really helpful if they know the history and context behind what they are being tasked to do. That cost is far too high.

41 points by mindracer 2y ago

deergomoo 2y ago

Given this is Microsoft, I’ll assume the “whether you want them or not” is implied.

Mountain_Skies 2y ago
"The OS can't work without this installed" has been their go-to multiple times.
- bravetraveler 2y ago
  Literally set the course of my life. If I didn't rage at the machine as a teenager and find Linux, my collar would be a different color.

karel-3d 2y ago

That's just Clippy

_joel 2y ago
"It looks like you're trying to fine tune an LLM, do you want help with that?"
grugagag 2y ago
Clippy on steroids. Probably no way to disable it unless you ditch the whole OS
- codeduck 2y ago
  don't threaten me with a good time
scarmig 2y ago
Clippy, I've got a lot of TPS reports here. Can you get me as many paperclips as you can?
hi_hi 2y ago
ClippAI (tm)

peutetre 2y ago

> But AI supporters argue that in order to be truly useful, these tools have to be deeply embedded into our lives: that they can only be really helpful if they know the history and context behind what they are being tasked to do. The problem is these AI assistants won't work for me, they'll work for Microsoft. They won't help me as much as they will point me in the direction that is the most profitable for Microsoft. When the agenda is not mine then these things are of no use to me.

herbst 2y ago
Every change that Microsoft did to their products since their high times 20 years ago was to shove more ads down your throat and squeeze more money out of every customer. Why anyone would be seeing forward to use their AI?
- DaiPlusPlus 2y ago
  > high times 20 years ago was to shove more ads down your throat Do you not remember Windows 98's Active Desktop's in-box ads?
u20241003 2y ago
Maybe in future it could even vote for you in any elections.
reidrac 2y ago
For a second I thought you were talking about Google and their search engine. I agree with you, but I'm sure most people won't care.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago
  They will care, but will feel powerless to change it. They'll accept the enshittification there like everywhere else its crept in.

myprotegeai 2y ago

I can't wait until little Johnny's AI assistant (that's been with him since birth) can communicate to Big Tech's Global HR Overlord AI and they can decide together that a good job is not a privilege that a wrongthinker like Johnny should enjoy.

throwaway48476 2y ago
Happening now. https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/mit-study-ai-chatbot-can-reduce-belief-conspiracy-theories https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/mit-study-ai-c...
- mjburgess 2y ago
  A lot of conspiracy theorists are just profoundly ignorant about how politics, economics, (sociology, etc.), works -- being able to be treated with respect, whilst asking basic questions, etc. is extremely effective with many conspiracy theorists in my somewhat extensive experience. These are people with big, fundamental questions, but really no access to the quite extreme level of expertise needed to answer them. Most people, including most experts, can't answer them -- they themselves take on faith that their assumptions are grounded in the correct group beliefs. But there are often answers, very plain and orderinary ones. I can see that a chatbot able to mine for previous answers, often given across the internet, would be highly effective. Consider sovereign citizens. Their basic misunderstanding is to assume the world is more rational, in a sense, than it is. That human society obeys procedures over power. It's fairly trivial just to explain hobbes to them: the state has a monopoly on violence, and the only thing stopping it using it, it itself. Only when "the state" has enough mechanisms to include or answer to "the people" does it ever introduce such annoying things like constitutions. There isn't any magic to laws, they are just one set of people with access to violent power trying to control another set of people with rival claims to the same access.
  - throwaway48476 2y ago
    >A lot of conspiracy theorists are just profoundly ignorant A lot of people are just ignorant. The ultimate problem here is the centralization and the overpowering reinforcement of "truth". But "truth" as defined by whoever trained the model which is tyranny no matter how you spin it and a lightning rod for abuse.

xarope 2y ago

MS Head of AI says there'll be more AI. News at 11. In other news, MS Head of AI says Clippy is making a comeback...

voxadam 2y ago
Are we sure that Clippy isn't already the current head of AI at Microsoft?

fldskfjdslkfj 2y ago

They misspelled "ever present user data collection"

GiorgioG 2y ago

I expect we’ll look back on this in 5 years and laugh our asses off. AI offers glimpses of brilliance and then sprinkles a bunch of turds around it. 60% of the time it works every time.

fakedang 2y ago

Microsoft can't even be arsed to implement proper search in Windows 10/11, and they claim this.

Rinzler89 2y ago
It's not that they can't, it's that they won't. It's malice, not incompetence.
TheFragenTaken 2y ago
They can't be arsed to make consumer friendly software. Edge was amazing for about five minutes before it got enshittified. It took a world wide pandemic and thousands of businesses flocking to Zoom before Teams got okay at calls (never mind the Sharepoint/Teams side, which is still a mess). They lost enough developers they had to embed an entire Linux VM in their OS. I'll concede they nail Office and cloud compliance/regulations though.
Kurtz79 2y ago
Funnily enough, “AI search” (Recall) is one of the most touted feature of Copilot+ PCs. I’m no Microsoft hater, but their track record in implementing that feature at a basic level definitely does not bode well for something more complex…

rsynnott 2y ago

Oh, right, Microsoft says it? It’ll definitely happen, then. Their pronouncements about the future of computing are famously accurate. That’s why we’ve all been using Windows for Pen Computing since the noughties.

Rinzler89 2y ago
A lot of Microsoft's or Bill Gate's predictions turned out correct, they just weren't the ones to make those visions happen. Gates said about 30 years ago that we'd all be having internet connected computers in our pocket in the future, and they were right they just turned out to be powered by Apple and Google and not by Windows. Same with tablet computers. Their own implementation failed but the tablet computer exists today and is pretty successful, except is not Win PC based but based on mobile platforms. Same with AI, it will definitely happen in the near or distant future that consumers will be tied to AI assistants for work and life, same with full autonomous cars, but nobody knows yet who will be the one to win this battle, that's why tech giants are lighting piles of money on fire to make sure they'll be the ones on top of the rubble pile at the end of the AI war. This is the next gold rush.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  > Same with tablet computers. Their own implementation failed but the tablet computer exists today and is pretty successful, except is not Win PC based but based on mobile platforms. We generally don't use them by _writing_ on them, though. Like, their predictive power more or less comes down to "computers will get smaller", here; if anything things like the iPad owe more to the 'Padd' things from Star Trek TNG than they do to Windows for Pen Computing. On this basis we may surmise that Star Trek is better at predicting the future of computing than Microsoft, and, thus, rather than ever-present AI assistants, we will have evil AIs which can be made to explode with logic paradoxes.
  - EraYaN 2y ago
    Most modern iPads do get written on them though, it's just not Windows based I guess. And iPad get more and more features to really write on them a lot.

croes 2y ago

It will be interesting to see when the first conviction based on this feature will take place.

jasonvorhe 2y ago

Never forget that most of Western governments pretty much run on Windows and Microsoft services.

guidedlight 2y ago

I don’t know why everyone is so concerned. Microsoft has been sending telemetry data and your photos to Microsoft for years.

jerpint 2y ago

If these models could run offline, 100% locally, with expected privacy, Im up for it, i want to use a product, not be training data

GoblinSlayer 2y ago
Surely Cambridge Analytica showed you are a trainee now.

pixelpoet 2y ago

I wish they would give a shit that nobody wants this and actively hates it. Please fuck off with your AI trash, big tech :(

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

phkahler 2y ago

>> For example, an AI diary manager can only organise your diary if it can access that diary, edit it, and retain information about your activities. Edit a diary? Retain the information? A diary IS a log of information as understood at the time. It's also not the clouds business, nor to be edited. My gosh these people sound stupid.

Kurtz79 2y ago
Diary in UK English can mean “Planner” or “Datebook”, and the article is from the BBC. https://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2007/04/diaries-and-datebooks.html https://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2007/04/diar...

kaimac 2y ago

could be great news for linux adoption

agos 2y ago

I wonder if they realized how ominous it sounds

Mountain_Skies 2y ago

The only thing really keeping me on Windows now is Visual Studio. I know there are alternatives on Linux but for my particular work, there's no substitute for the actual full pro version of Visual Studio. But this non-stop parade of enshitification of Windows is really making me think about going back to Linux for my daily driver outside of work tasks. I don't want to have to keep up with what privacy invasion Microsoft has cooked up this week and keep track of the current way to opt-out, if that's even possible. Since first installing Slackware in the mid 90s, I've done several multi-year stints with Linux as my desktop OS, so it wouldn't be a completely alien change but in general I've found Windows to be a bit easier day-to-day and gets in the way less. All this AI and snapshotting garbage, on top of the existing telemetry, is adding up to be too much.

noirscape 2y ago

I think what Suleyman is missing here is that most people aren't fine with their "TVs, laptops, in-car cameras and earbuds" recording everything continuously. The most popular modification made to laptops is a small round sticker to seal off the webcam. The enshittification of the car market is something that only car manufacturers seem to like. The most common question with a smart TV is "how do I get that thing to just accept an HDMI input and not get in the way". Making a slight jump from car cams - things like doorbell cameras are facing increased scrutiny because of their inadvertent recording of the nearby street, which might violate privacy laws. Adding audio and the few seconds before and after to a photo isn't the same thing as a continuous recording; the choice to make the photo is both still with the user and what's happening doesn't feel like a black box. AI assistants are the black box. It was cute when Siri could tell you the nearest sushi bar or can check the schedule from your calendar (although I'll note that every use for Siri tends to be a party trick and half the fun people get from Siri and other assistants is when they don't work as expected; I don't know a single person who uses Siri to for example, read the news or give them a briefing on what's important for the day a-la Star Trek or other utopian scifi), it's creepy when Siri starts to suggest that you might want to visit a sushi bar because it's tracked your food habits for the past week and thinks you could enjoy some more fish food instead. AI assistants overwhelmingly are heading to the latter and now that the party trick element is cooling off, people get more cynical towards how they work (and how they don't work as advertised.)

GoblinSlayer 2y ago
I saw an AI assistant lie that it self hosts and isn't a cloud service.
lewhoo 2y ago
> I think what Suleyman is missing here is that most people aren't fine with their "TVs, laptops, in-car cameras and earbuds" recording everything continuously. I really hope so but I'm not so sure. I suspect most people are fine with anything that isn't obviously intrusive. I sometimes get the feeling that people are more upset with cookie popups than constant invigilation.
hypeatei 2y ago

drooopy 2y ago

How about you go back to making an OS that takes less than 10 GB of disk space, doesn't spy on me and is not filled with useless ads everywhere?

dspillett 2y ago

> But AI supporters argue that in order to be truly useful, these tools have to be deeply embedded into our lives A tool controlled by corporates like Microsoft that deeply embedded into my life? If that is what it takes to be truly useful then I don't want it to be useful and will be opting out in every way possible. With force if needed…

xtiansimon 2y ago

First it was every online support had the idiot computer voice, Uh. Sorry. Please tell me again in a few words… Now I’ve noticed all of these support services, once you get past the idiot computer, there is now an idiot human who rephrases your question or concerns to the point of stupidity, You’re calling because you’re having problems using the website… Meanwhile, I’m waiting for sentiment analysis and an idiot computer telling me I sound frustrated, How are things at home? Are you having a bad day?

NoGravitas 2y ago

The headline feels like a threat.

JohnFen 2y ago

No no no. There is literally nothing about this that I find useful or acceptable, and a whole lot that I find dangerous and frightening. It's handing far too much power over to companies that I fundamentally don't trust. I'm not getting on this train. > AI supporters argue that in order to be truly useful, these tools have to be deeply embedded into our lives: that they can only be really helpful if they know the history and context behind what they are being tasked to do. That cost is far too high.