How a Windows shake-up could position Microsoft to capitalize on AI PCs | Hacker News Reader

How a Windows shake-up could position Microsoft to capitalize on AI PCs

theverge.com

19 pointsthunderbong26 comments

> Microsoft has been gradually unveiling more AI-powered features in Windows, and pushing the need for “AI PCs” with neural processing units, but it hasn’t coherently explained why any of this matters.

That sounds like a pretty strong signal that "AI PC" is just a marketing term.

It isn't just a marketing term, it is also a brand new button on your keyboard.

The Windows and Web Experiences team that Parakhin briefly oversaw also developed the malware-like Bing pop-ups we’ve seen appear in Windows recently. Microsoft has also been aggressively pushing Edge in Windows, with lots of tricks to get users to move away from Chrome or use Edge’s shopping and AI features.

As recently as 2 years ago, I was generally supportive Windows. Now I increasingly see it as collaborating with a hostile and adversarial marketing giant.

I've recently taken to moving small biz onto domains - specifically so I can better deploy countermeasures to Bing/CoPilot intrusions and remove unneeded crapware.

> Now I increasingly see it as collaborating with a hostile and adversarial marketing giant.

I'm genuinely stunned that they're still getting away with it: flooding the user with "switch to Edge!"[0] popups at every opportunity is begging for legal trouble; they are very clearly using the presence of their OS to boost Edge market share.

I'm sure you're aware, but that's just one of the ways they force Edge on the end-user. As of now, they've made it harder to change browsers[1] (which was then reverted), forced Search[2] and Settings (among others) links to open in Edge with Bing, deliberately broke software that undoes this[3] (EdgeDeflector was later abandoned[6]), added full-screen interstitial adverts for Edge[4] and plenty more.

Once the media gets wind of the new changes, the most common backpedal is that "this feature is just being tested for Insiders". If they weren't intent upon rolling it out, why would they write the code for the Insiders branch in the first place? A very poor excuse. This is not to mention that most nags are in stable now.

All this is monopolistic at best, and downright illegal at worst.

With a bit more time, I could probably find more of these. I definitely remember the occassional Edge popup nag when you were using Firefox or Chrome, wherein the nag would proudly proclaim that Edge is much lighter on resources. EDIT: Found it[5].

[0]: https://news.thewindowsclub.com/windows-10-warns-users-to-us...

[0.1]: https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-says-its-own-edge-brow...

[0.2]: https://www.gadgets360.com/laptops/news/microsoft-windows-10...

[0.3]: https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/15/chrome_bing_microsoft...

[0.4]: https://www.theverge.com/23935029/microsoft-edge-forced-wind... (List of just some nags.)

[0.5]: https://old.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/f0psu6/this_must... (Inline advert for Edge in Search.)

[0.6]: https://imgur.com/vgrZaEp (Image of a different popup in Windows Search encouraging a switch to Edge.)

[0.7]: https://www.windowslatest.com/2020/09/30/windows-search-noti...

[1]: https://www.howtogeek.com/744102/windows-11-makes-it-hard-to...

[1.1]: https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/3/22815209/microsoft-window...

[2]: https://superuser.com/questions/1338909/how-to-change-the-br...

[3]: https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/15/22782802/microsoft-block...

[3.1]: https://www.ghacks.net/2021/11/16/this-simple-script-will-ma...

[4]: https://www.techradar.com/news/think-youre-annoying-windows-... (A full-screen advert to switch to Edge. I believe this was after an update restarted the machine.)

[5]: https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/windows-10-anti-chrome-al... (Popup of Windows 10 claiming Edge saves battery-life; this is shown when Google Chrome is open.)

[6]: https://github.com/da2x/EdgeDeflector (Abandoned on Mar 23, 2022.)

(Apologies for the link farm, but I believe it's important to remember what they've done so far.)

> they are very clearly using the presence of their OS to boost Edge market share.

They went through an antitrust trial for this in the 1990s, so they can't get in trouble again - it would be double jeopardy.

They didn't go through a trial in the 1990s for their anticompetitive conduct in the 2020s. They can be tried now for what they're doing now. The previous trial is not a "get out of jail free forevermore" card for the repeating the same conduct.

That's not how double jeopardy works. You don't get to rob a a store second time because you did jail time the first time you robbed it.

I wonder if, in a decade or two, we'll witness the emergence of a new OS built entirely upon LLMs from the ground up. Today's Gen-Z predominantly enjoy Chromebooks, smartphones, and iPads, all of which offer heavy abstraction in comparison to traditional desktop OS environments. Future generations are likely to exhibit significantly reduced inclination towards manual interaction with individual apps, folders, and settings.

This shift could resemble the philosophical distinction between macOS and iOS today, but amplified exponentially. At that point, existing platforms such as Windows, iOS, macOS, and Android may face obsolescence, sharing a fate akin to that of Windows Mobile, Symbian OS, and BlackBerry OS following the advent of the iPhone—unless one of Microsoft, Google, or Apple venture into this uncharted territory.

I can type quicker than I can talk and I can read quicker than I can listen to someone talking.

But it would be nice if MS could fix their 30 year old taskbar auto-hide bugs in the next 20 years..

Traditional operating systems are extremely abstracted as well. To book a flight online right now, you click a series of coloured rectangles on your screen with a cursor that you control by dragging a mouse about on your desk, or rubbing your finger on a piece of glass. Compare this to what would happen in real life, which is you talked to a person and they would write your name on a flight list.

I don't think so? The files and folders are still there on Chromebooks and Android smartphones, and there is even a stock file manager app, but I find it very rarely used. And individual apps have been dying for many years already with everything moving to the web - for example I have only 3 apps I use daily (web browser, mail client, terminal), and many people only use the browser.

This leaves only general "browsing", that could be described as:

- There is a virtual document which can be big or small

- This document may consist of text, images or videos

- At any given time, a portion of the document is displayed on the screen. Navigation commands (keyboard, mouse, special hardware, gestures, etc...) could be used to choose which portion of the document is shown.

- Some parts of document can be interacted with (using mouse, or light pen or fingers): then some action happens or a different document is shown

This model has been unchanged for at least 50 years - first Smalltalks worked like that, and today's browsers work the same. Sure, there are more colors and images are much higher quality, but the essential interactions are the same.

So I am not sure what would exactly LLMs bring to that picture.. sure the search bar may get replaced by a natural-language query, but that won't need the new OS, it's just an incremental improvement of existing status quo.

> he would have been a CEO, reporting to the Microsoft AI CEO, who reports to the actual Microsoft CEO

Now that’s some serious title inflation

Your AI PC will perform local analysis of your data and what you're doing, to save the NSA money from having to upload it to their datacenter and do it themselves.

This is unfair. When it works, local AI features are absolutely brilliant -- take Google's Now Playing[0] (and plenty more of their local AI features) for instance: they're able to enhance the user experience without draconian data collection.

Personally, I'm absolutely fine with local AIs, even if they're proprietary. That is, of course, assuming the AI layer is able to perform the task without storing its inputs and then re-uploading PII (or any data, depending on the feature).

Of course, if any data is being sent for training, then that should always be made clear to the user when they are enabling the feature (and they should be able to disable it at any time).

[0]: https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/7535326?hl=en#z...

Unfair? Eh.

That doesn't sound very useful to me. You can just ask the person playing, or enjoy the ephemeral moment in ignorance. If it's really important you can record it and then find out later what it was.

Also that feature seems to be a good fit for phones. I don't think it would be useful on a laptop or desktop PC.

This could be said for thousands of features.

For instance, you can also control your central heating / AC with a rocker switch, but most people opt for thermostats. If something can be made easier and more enjoyable (which ultimately enhances the experience), why not? In the case of Now Playing, spend 5 minutes online and you'll see that people absolutely love it (I too, before I opted for a custom ROM).

Then again, I believe we're both missing the point here: this is just one feature (out of thousands!) that can be pulled off with on-device AI. It shouldn't be used as a deciding factor for AI in general.

> This is unfair. When it works, local AI features are absolutely brilliant

To best represent your position: Are you asserting that CoPilot is where Microsoft draws the line at sharing user data with third parties?

To clarify, when I say "local AI" I mean things which primarily function offline (although in the case of federated learning, auxiliary data / testing / better models can happen while online, but this is not required for the current model to provide usefulness).

I use "local AI" as a phrase to describe a model which doesn't need to wait for HTTP 200 to actually provide any usefulness (so where the model is local). Perhaps "on-device" is a more descriptive identifier?

As far as I understand, "CoPilot" is just a reskin of ChatGPT, so it's not "local AI".

Edit: now you mention it, I'm not really aware of any real local AI on Windows. Perhaps someone more familiar with Windows can offer some examples (I use Linux).

> To clarify, when I say "local AI" I mean things which can function offline

Understood. We'll reconcile your area of discussion with the topic at hand.

(rising to your edit!)

Let's say you found a local MS AI product in front of you. Do you have confidence it would not be a meaningful part of collecting user data?

> Do you feel that local Microsoft AI offerings will not be a meaningful part of collecting user data?

This ultimately depends on how Microsoft implements the AI -- if they use well-understood techniques such as federated learning[0] and differential privacy[1], there's a strong chance for Microsoft to offer useful features without the user sacrificing privacy.

Of course, the elephant in the room is that, since 10, privacy on Windows has taken a nosedive. I'm really not sure if they'd even want to spend the R&D work on doing things The Right Way.

> Or if you allow that they could, do you believe that MS will be steadfast in not sharing it?

There are good techniques for ensuring local AI (or "on-device AI"?) is private as of now, so I'm not sure.

EDIT: (Rising to yours, too!)

> Let's say you found a local MS AI product in front of you. Do you have confidence it would not be a meaningful part of collecting user data?

With the history of privacy on Windows, I would be very hesitant that it would preserve privacy without doing some serious in-depth analysis on it, to be honest.

[0]: https://federated.withgoogle.com/#top

[0.1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federated_learning

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy

Oh hey. Look what I found on page 2.

Intel, Microsoft discuss plans to run Copilot locally on PCs instead of in the cloud

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39852166

Oh yeah! I totally forgot about Intel's on-chip AI acceleration[1]. I'm not sure how well it works, but I know that it exists and nothing major is currently taking advantage of it AFAIK.

Local Copilot sounds interesting, but I'd imagine it would be akin to the old Siri on iPhones where its use would be limited to controlling on-device settings. I've heard and read quite a lot about the dangers of that, though: with prompt injections being an issue with Copilot[0] (and Bing Chat frequently going crazy[2]), I can understand why Microsoft are very hesitant to give it any real control over the system.

[0]: https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2024/whoami-conditional...

[0.1]: https://kai-greshake.de/posts/llm-malware/

[1]: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-details-meteor-lakes...

[1.1]: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/intel-announces-an-int... (hard to find a good explanation of these accelerators)

[2]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2023/02/16/bing-ch...

> This is unfair. When it works, local AI features are absolutely brilliant -

How about make it opt-in instead and also permanently disableable for user who do not want these features running in the background.

Of course, I completely agree that AI should not be forced upon users in any context, whether on-device or cloud-based (urgh).

Perhaps more accurate to say it will be shared with selective 3rd parties. They, in turn, will forge robust relationships with some of the many data brokers who sell private data.

Tom Warren is the author, no wonder

Reply on news.ycombinator.com