“We think we’re on the cusp of the next evolution, where AI happens not just in that chatbot and gets naturally integrated into the hundreds of millions of experiences that people use every day,” says Yusuf Mehdi, executive vice president and consumer chief marketing officer at Microsoft, in a briefing with The Verge. “The vision that we have is: let’s rewrite the entire operating system around AI, and build essentially what becomes truly the AI PC.”
…yikes
How can a company grow so out of touch with its customers?
Assuming you are just a regular person using Windows, you are not their customer, at best you’re a handy side revenue stream and data source. Their actual customers are giant enterprises who are actively trying to fire people and smaller business locked into their ecosystem by needeing to interact with other businesses (who are also locked into their ecosystem).
Its customers want their sheeple base to only use computers via full MITM of a networked (or at least with undecipherable functionality, like a local LLM) agent, that predicts what you want from what you say, so that god forbid you’d never do direct computation.
I mean, an LLM model is literally a program whose logic is hidden in weights. A way to thoroughly obfuscate functionality.
And those customers you might consider smart, with such power, but in fact just like with everything else they are not, just in the right place in the structures of power to have their wishes tried first.
I’ll repeat, they are not as smart as one would expect. But if your asshole gets torn while playing superhero, it’s your problem and of those who did it. If their asshole gets torn while playing superhero, it’s a problem of everyone in the street, town, district, country, continent, ethnicity, maybe even statistical bucket of those who did it.
And they do think they are some sort of superheroes.
Though when the AI bubble bursts, and we’ll have plenty of cheap hardware suited for this technology, who says there won’t be plenty of more specific applications and even toolkits based on LLMs? And then they’ll get their wish, not in the sense of agents, but in the sense of programs far more resistant to reverse-engineering than normal binaries being popularized.
Not even talking about the scenario where all that cheap hardware is bought by parties which can use it to their normal goals, unlike most real commercial activity. That is, by nation states with their surveillance needs.
So perhaps those people are smart enough.
OK, maybe it’s just another BAD psychosis.
You aren’t its customer, businesses are.
You are not their customer, you are their product.
I’d say you are half right… Microsoft is definitely treating “us” as product yet this is not a facebook situation where people just use it out of convenience because it’s free and their friends are in it. MS still depends on sales of licenses and they seem to be further on the ledge there.
One of the pillars that cement MS in the corporate world was that everyone basically already knew how to use it… but that is eroding further and further as well… and I for one, constantly complain to my company’s “security” team about the constant bombardment of ads and prompts to “upgrade” in enterprise level software
It’s not 2014, their business was selling cloud Linux and opensource since 2018 if I remember correctly.
The point is they are still selling licenses… it’s not a free service people use by default
Well they are pretty open on that you should not use it.
#AI