Microsoft is integrating Copilot into Windows 11 | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft is integrating Copilot into Windows 11

engadget.com

29 pointsagomez31425 comments

This was announced and somewhat discussed yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36045526

Microsoft is pushing all these trashy tabloid articles everywhere on Windows now, I think they can start generating them by GPT-4, they will save money for the news companies and people won't tell the difference anyway

My first thought was also: unfiltered marketing crap, and completely over the top. Starting with the sideswipe on Meta. Gentle reminder: Meta gives away LLaMa and Galactica under quite liberal non commercial license, OPT is even under MIT license if I recall correctly.

I’m not a fan of either company btw.

The big question is if this will be a net positive or just adds more bloat.

They tried the same with Bing and failed. Bing did not see any uptick even with the new AI features:

https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/deskto...

My takeaway is that users are not as stupid and lazy as Microsoft thinks they are. They want a clean UI. And if they have to sign up for ChatGPT to get it, they will. ChatGPT already gained as many users as Bing has. With a clean UI, Bing might have already doubled it's userbase.

Why doesn't Microsft just remove all the clutter from Bing and enjoy the benefits of having their search engine being the default on all the Windows tablets and laptops out there? Why waste it all and make every user change their search engine to Google?

Microsoft as a UI company historically has been absolutely god awful: Probably one of the main reasons Apple stayed in business before the iPhone. I wouldn't expect them to wake up one day and start making clean UIs.

I assume a few hundred project managers have jockeyed to get their stupid widget on the page and whoever is in charge now holds onto their team’s widget as their only real visible contribution to the company.

I don't think regular people know that Bing has added AI features. Even if they knew, why would they not just use ChatGPT? ChatGPT also benefits from a fresh, cool brand name that Bing will never have.

Answer: Bing provides GPT4 for free with integrated search to ground the response. It’s a totally different experience than free ChatGPT that some people would prefer.

Maybe I'm holding it wrong, but I tried Bing with GPT4 and I got really useless answers. Maybe I'm just used to the chatGPT interface.

Edit: I found the bing interface confusing. I couldn't really distinguish between the AI bit and just searching. When I asked how to write some code that did X, I got a bunch of links to stack overflow or whatever. I wanted the ai to write some code for me.

ChatGPT's knowledge only goes up to 2021. BingChat, meanwhile, can access the Internet and try to look things up.

How is this not the biggest deal in the PC world? I've long been looking for a reason to switch from Mac, but two things kept me in Apple's ecosystem:

1. M1 + iPhone integration (the half-assed hands-off feature)

2. Shitty UI+UX on Windows + Ads

At the same time, I have come to realize that our interaction with computers is going to get more and more natural thanks to large language models. If Windows Copilot doesn't get neutered just like Bing AI did, I'm seriously going to consider switching back to Windows.

I get that Apple has different priorities, but I can't justify their inaction in this area over the past several years.

From the security point of view I will stay with macOS. Windows is a "telemetry" mess and the product is unfinished from the UX point of view.

I don't particularly fancy either, but to do some real work I'd stick to Linux and Windows. MacOS nowadays looks like a toy OS, and gets too much in the way.

I wonder how it feels like a toy OS. I just recently return to Apple after my initial experience with Apple II ;-) for general development I prefer Linux but greatly appreciate .NET framework and programming languages such as C# and F#.

Why should it be the biggest deal in the PC world? To me this sounds like clippy and other personal helpers all over again.

Listen, neither of the two platforms are better or worse for general purpose use. I've had both and felt plenty comfortable with both and experienced issues on both like you will with any computer.

Be platform agnostic.

If you're interested, we're building Co-pilot for Mac. https://embra.app

Looks neat, but I would only want a privacy preserving offline version of this.

I'm a huge proponent for generative AI, and this seems very interesting - especially with support for plugins - but a lot of the use cases for this kind of thing (specifically OS level integration) is still very fuzzy for me.

I see value for less technically inclined users to be able to trigger actions they would be unable to find / adjust themselves - I'm very excited to be proven wrong though.

And yes shame on Apple for being so far behind in this.

I guess that's one way to get around the labyrinth that is the new and improved windows UI.

It will start off with pre-defined registry tweaks/powershell scripts, but it will continue expanding. My money is on less than 6 months before we hear about it deleting all of a users data or being tricked into ransomware.

> How is this not the biggest deal in the PC world?

Because it's marketing hype BS?

Seriously?

I agree. This is game changing. I've spent 30 years doing the same kind of operations manually over and over in windows file manager, cursing every time that the machine should know what I'm doing by now..

This seems neat, but is taking a lot of control away from the user and is a privacy nightmare.

I would love to see open source and offline alternatives with the same purpose, as well as perhaps a Mac OS counterpart to this.

Depending on your use case and willingness to hack, there are plenty of alternatives. E.g. take a look at this list: https://archive.is/x5K4o

Reply on news.ycombinator.com