Microsoft set to unveil its vision for AI PCs | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft set to unveil its vision for AI PCs

cnbc.com

28 pointsbelter53 comments

The "AI" isn't even good. Please don't force integrate more bad features. I don't need an unavoidable assistant that hallucinates, ignores me, and otherwise can't follow instructions.

How about first making a serious adult home OS in 2024 that isn't a data mining farm, security nightmare, and enthusiastic surveillance portal. What we now have is clownish outside of MacOS, server OSs, or a lot of finagling. The lack of true options at this late date is unreal.

I thought that was the point of windows, since 7ish and very obviously since 10? It exists to echo interesting information about the users back to microsoft who then profit from that. I hear the security model is getting better of late, perhaps because the information is less valuable if it's available outside of microsoft.

Or if you're less cynical, stream information back to microsoft so they can improve the product in other ways.

Yeah I tried copilot and it actually tried to gaslight me into changing the subject. If I want that I would speak to humans.

Incidentally I am 100% macOS now. Not because it’s good but because it’s least shit.

Eh. It forbids me from uninstalling a bunch of useless apps that come bundled. That's pretty shit.

…what on earth do you find you’re not able to remove?

MacOS is pretty clownish, if you think Apple isn’t using your data for advertisers when you use their services on their OS I have a bridge to sell you. MacOS also has things like Gatekeeper that play off of FUD as a security feature. The fact that Apple will gladly send your iCloud backups to the feds as well I wouldn’t call it a platform that is exclusive to modern bs.

People love to find every any any cracks in Apple. Apple notes right on their site what data they share: https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/#accordion-label-5.... If Apple was lying, and sharing any additional data to advertisers, with privacy a pillar of their whole company, people who have uncovered that, and would be breaking news on every single news site. In regards to to "glady" sharing backups to the feds, I assume you mean, "when legally required" like any company, as Apple has been the one notably fighting against law enforcement when possible and fighting for encryption and releasing new options such as, "Advanced Data Protection for iCloud" for those who especially strong security needs who don't want their iCloud data accessible, but ok with the downsides of such security.

People love to talk down to you as if the cracks you find don’t matter. Just because Apple discloses that they sell, share, and give access to your data doesn’t mean it’s not bad that they’re doing so.

And as far as “when legally required” that is to cover Apple’s butt when they do it. When legally required reasons can be stretched so thin with modern erosion and national surveillance. They just renewed FISA just got renewed which makes all data technically available when legally required.

Apple only applies enough security to make everyone happy enough to pour money into their bank account, often at the expense of the user and citing that this is best for everyone. It’s not.

People like to ignore the fact that Apple has just as much a monopoly as Microsoft and exploits it just as often.

Making your fealty to a monopoly a proud point of personality is a distinctly modern affect.

The cult is impressively strong, any criticism is met with mostly silent passive aggressive response. Regardless of the truth of the criticism.

to "use" macos and ios you hit Agree on so many agreements that it's hard to even keep track. so i will doubt a single page covers them all.

All true. The difference is mostly that at least Apple's compromises are more predictable and marginally more buttoned up. Apple is marginally qualitatively better than Windows in the categories of privacy and security. With the single exception of the fact that it is possible to avoid using a personal account for Windows.

That being said, marginal qualitative difference really the story with all possible options except the most locked down, inconvenient, and all but unusable. No one serious thinks that they have privacy because they use a linux distro, for example. No matter which one.

I really am looking forward to this particular fad being over, at this point. Yes, let’s just shove LLMs into absolutely bloody everything, why not?

They’re still advertising crypto “investments” at the airport.

Language models are gonna be here a while for better or worse

The current trend is butt-in driven operations.

For every action you are already familiar with, and have performed several times, copilot butts in to show you an annoying way to do it with copilot. But first create a Microsoft account.

This reminds of google plus. When Google was pushing really hard for it, if you clicked 7 times on the internet, you will find that you just created a google+ account.

So, I haven’t had the pleasure of using the thing, but, kind of sounds like the revenge of the dread talking paperclip.

I'm sure there are great applications for LLMs, really. But can we stop just putting minimal wrappers around ChatGPT and trying to cram it into everything?

A one time tax write off for bad AI investments is required. Otherwise, Microsoft has billions of dollars locked up in this premature idea, and out of shareholder embarrassment has to attempt to recoup that in some meaningful way.

> can we stop

it is difficult to persuade a person whose income depends on not caring

My experience in big tech is that the product managers, engineers, and designers behind these things do actually care, but what they care about is "making impact" so they can get promoted. Right now, generative AI features == "impact."

I'm not usually one to sing with the the Big Tech Hate Choir, but Microsoft's own actions have convinced me that they have no "vision" for anything beyond a more efficient ad funnel. Things users might actually want come a distant second, if even that.

I wish MS would set to unveil its vision for a not shitty high power Windows laptop for work, even the basics barely work: https://x.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1791925515281899810

Dedicated nvidia GPUs in laptops have been a death sentence for decades. It used to be lead-free solder having poor fatigue properties combined with the GPU going through a lot of hot/cold cycles, probably combined with laptop cooling (with dust in the fins).

Annoyingly the market for "very fast CPU with lots of ram and no GPU" seems to be too small to sell to, even before the current AI everywhere movement. Right now there are 16 core ryzen chips out there (e.g. the 7945HX) but I can't find a laptop with one that doesn't also have an nvidia chip burning a hole through the chassis.

(the above probably holds for dedicated gpus by other vendors, though I can't remember ever seeing one in real life)

At this point, Microsoft is obsessed with AI. They think they missed the chance to be the first with internet and mobile, and trying hard to be the forefront of AI fad until it lasts. Force upselling enterprise is their old strategy and and it seems to be working in their favor. And the stock market like AI buzz too. More times you say AI, is better.

Whatever they’re doing, it’s crazy successful. So keep at it.

There's no need to force upsell, customers can't shut up about it.

Edit: ... Down voters, do you work in sales? Every time I open my mouth to say "well AI isn't really necessary to accomplish this" they say "but we need it anyways!!!"

I want Microsoft Azure Bing Copilot everywhere. In start, in browser, in command prompt, in Excel, in XBox Live

Yes and it is crucial that it be integrated and enabled at a hardware level so that I can never opt out in any meaningful sense.

They’re sort of doing that already - MS says an “AI PC” must have a Copilot button. Not a generic AI button that can be mapped to competitors as well, but a Copilot specific button.

Contrastively, if the computer has no dedicated copilot button then it’s not at “AI PC”. Makes it simple to avoid the undesirable product lines.

Granted!

Yes, I think we should replace all right click context menu with Copilot too. And if you need the old one just ask the AI to open it for you!

It would be fun to use in an Excel cell '=COPILOT("Percentage of profits variability of this asset knowing YoY price changes on raw materials analysed in sheet 'Materials costs'"), and watching it converting in a complex formula

Microsoft Azure Bing Copilot Enterprise Premium Plus Live 2.0*

No 365?

The current qualcomm arm laptops seem to be slower than x64 with worse power consumption. I'm not totally clear what went wrong there, some articles thought scaling mobile phone chips up to laptop wattage was harder than expected. There doesn't seem to be anyone else (other than apple) attempting it, maybe this will be the year.

I'm excited about the next set of APU chips from AMD, curious to see if they get much attention at the event.

The reason they’re slower is they’re not really “scaled up” in any meaningful way just yet.

They’re still currently just the Snapdragon 8cx processors which are marginal boosts to the Snapdragon 8 mobile series.

The Snapdragon X series should push them into more competitive territory against x86_64, though it lags considerably behind Apple’s latest offering.

Slower seems totally legitimate, it's slower with worse power consumption that seems out of place. Taking a CPU from a phone totally unchanged and connecting it to a much larger battery in a laptop should be good for multiple days of life, yet somehow that's not at all what exists on the market.

If the vision isn’t “stop bundling our offerings in windows or making our things the default and embrace fair competition“, the FTC needs to come down hard.

You'd think they'd learned their lessons with clippy, but I guess not.

Is anyone else just tired?

That’s exactly it.

Nothing really improves my life in this fad. The promises are not matching with reality and the sacrifices made everywhere else (quality, reliability, security) is where we are paying.

I work for Microsoft and obviously my opinions are my own, but I am pretty underwhelmed by all the Copilots. Besides Teams meeting summarization, they are all pretty worthless. I’ve never understood text generation in Word or Outlook. Anything worth saying requires a ton of detail that you have to type into the prompt and then lose in the context of generation.

Ah, but you wrote a comment that was cogent.

My colleague who can't do that due to dyslexia is relieved when the AI can rephrase him to sound "fancy". As kids move their communication from keyboards to touch keyboards, I think this will become more common.

Yes please take my comment with a huge grain of salt. I’ve seen massive communication benefits for people with disabilities and people who are not native speakers

> Besides Teams meeting summarization, they are all pretty worthless.

Wait, does that actually work? I’ve only experienced the Zoom one, which, while occasionally quite _funny_, is not what you’d call useful.

I am very impressed with Team’s summaries. Obviously it’s a summary, so you won’t get all the details. Also it’s great at listing action items that were declared in the meeting.

I think it's weird that folks in this thread don't like the idea of having local AI features on laptops.

This seems like a great opportunity to control one's own data and continue leveraging open source AI models.

I've used Linux laptops for the past ~20 years almost and this seems like something that'll compete well with MacBooks.

Only drawback is that all the ARM-based ecosystems seem less open but I can see Qualcomm is engaging with folks like Canonical and I'm optimistic I can get a Linux version of one of these.

I have ollama set up on a beefy desktop and it's a neat toy, but it's definitely not yet to the point of being useful enough that I'd want it bundled with the OS, and that's with the latest and greatest open source models running on a gaming rig. The kind of models Microsoft can reliably run locally on a typical PC are going to be pretty poor.

From what I understand, the NSP on these SoCs performs better on inferences than any other mobile GPU/neural engine. But yeah probably some very significant limitations when it comes to LLMs for this generation anyway.

Forget about whatever models Microsoft ships, put whatever ones you want on there.

To do what with them? How about not putting any of them on there? Doesn't chatting with bots get boring very quickly?

I think it's weird that folx find anything useful about these gimmicky toy "AI's" that make up nonsense and get in the way of using your computer; why would you want these things injected into every nook and cranny of your operating system?

Trying to milk the AI for profit sounds like a huge suspect in regards to ever trusting it.

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