It’s a wave of sewage, few users want to ride it in the first place
It’s like they created a very good phone tree and are trying to shove it into everything that never had or needed a phone tree in the first place.
The fuck is a phone tree? Pardon my language, sir.
“for financial services, press one. for technical support, press two. for goblins, press three. for repairs, press four.”
I TOLD YOU NOT TO TALK ABOUT GOBLINS
you’re absolutely right! substituting pigeons.
Why do you call it Troll 2 if there are only goblins in the movie?
A movie of such quality and esteem such as Troll 2 does not need to explain itself
You forgot the mandatory lead message. “Please listen closely as our menu options have changed.” No, they haven’t. Ever.
Also the standard “outdated message you have to listen to twice in entirety despite it not applying to you,” like “Please note, starting June 1, 2021 as a result of the Covid 19 Virus we will be starting social practicing guidelines in our offices” and they repeat a number twice for curbside that hasn’t existed in half a decade.
I’ll bet the cause of that is simple. The one person who knew how to change the message no longer works there, and while that has been mentioned to the higher ups, it’s not a priority so it got shoved into the “to-do” pile.
Thanks! I just thought that’s some non-existent thing, which Microsoft invented and nobody needs it ever. Well, that’s not far from your point, I guess. But still. Didn’t know that’s called a phone tree!
I know them as IVR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_voice_response
i thought that was specifically for the voice recognition ones but apparently not.
“three”
#beep#
dispatching goblins. good luck!
*click*
funny you should use that example in particular because i recently had the displeasure of using microsoft’s phone tree. i was trying to close a dead relative’s account and the info on the website was wrong.
they built a phone tree that remembers you. if you try to call in multiple times during some time period (at least several hours) it will just assume you have the same question and skip to your last choice.
It sounds like you’re trying to write a letter.
Funny you mention a phone tree, something that’s been hit by AI. It’s actually been around longer as voice recognition that finds a close match to a keyword, but in theory AI should be able to take a request and break down what is actually needed.
I haven’t run across an AI version that works well. I don’t know if that’s because the voice recognition part is still bad, or if they’re using Co-pilot (since I know how it mangles simple requests in text).
Yeah it really feels like an LLM should work better than a phone tree for that, but every time I actually encounter one it’s so so much worse.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s instructions to modify the system prompt to maximize effectiveness, and everyone leaves it at the generic default. Just like so many people leave other things at the default and just plug it in and go. Thank goodness the Cisco hold music is decent. I grew to love it while holding on the VA phone lines a lot for my dad.
Shouldn’t the default settings work fine for the tasks that it’s advertised to do? I mean when I buy software I don’t expect it to be set to “be shit” mode by default.
At least tpu can tell the AI to get you to a human and most of the time it actually does so.
Having voice recognition in place of the usual “press x” before AI was even worse. Bot that now it’s much better though.
it’s a tsunami. uncontrollable, started far away from any normal humans, sweeps up everyone in its wake, and will cause massive damage when it inevitably crashes into a place with lots of people.
sewage that they caused , to backup. by backing OPENAI, ORACLE and nvidia. now they are desperate to get governments to fund thier ponzi scheme.
And a good chunk that are on it are held there by gunpoint by idiot ceos
Spend imaginary tokens to send an email
Yay
If Microsoft wasn’t run by tools, they’d see the gap Google and Apple have left behind by locking down their eco systems.
They could be the hero we need by saying we’ll make the software and you fully own your device like pc / windows.
But of course they won’t, and will just shoot themselves in the dick.
Just like when they ditched explorer we were all like yaay! Then instead of attaching to Firefox they just became another chromium cuck.
Why would anyone take your shitty browser that’s just a skin of chrome…
Again, they had the chance to take the pro customer lane and succeed, but they were too inept.
It isn’t just ineptitude. Of course executives at Microsoft know that they could be good and be successful with consumers. But they don’t need to please consumers, they have far more important customers: the surveillance state, and the military industrial complex.
Once corporations have a near-monopoly position, they do not need to make good products anymore. Microsoft has enough money already to completely fail at everything for centuries and they’d be just fine. So they can focus on other goals, such as dismantling online anonymity for the benefit of the ruling class, who owns and controls Microsoft.
To me, these reeks of “We have learned AI is bad press for users so ot failed, but it was good press for investors at the time. How do we appease both?”
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They didn’t miss the “wave”, they discovered it’s just hype and a bubble. They spent a fortune and damaged their core products to try and get in on AI, and have realised it was fools gold that their actual paying customers don’t want. This really sums the problem up well:
According to Velloso, less than 3% of paying users actively use Copilot, even though Microsoft has pre-deployed it directly into the Windows 11 taskbar and across the Office suite.
Out of Microsoft’s 450 million Microsoft 365 user base, the company has only managed to convert roughly 15 million paid Copilot seats. This means a staggering 96.7% of users are rejecting the premium AI features, yielding just a 3.3% paid adoption rate. When viewed against Microsoft’s estimated $37.5 billion quarterly AI spending, this is an alarmingly low adoption rate.
I’m sure I’m like many people - I tried Copilot a couple of times; it’s ok to make an email or even document text a bit more concise, but that’s really it. I don’t find it useful; I do all the actual work and then occasionally get an AI to help make it a bit easier to read very similar to a spell check and grammar check. It’s not good enough to do anything else; it bullshits and is error ridden and like all the AI I’ve tried it’s really plateaued. I just really don’t see where the value in that $37.5bn spent by Microsoft is.
I certainly wouldn’t pay for copilot myself. Instead I object to it being rammed down my throat at work, and Windows 11 just being generally awful but not improved. Microsoft are finally making the right noises but the damage is already done.
No one wants copilot because it’s highly unpleasant hot garbage. There is definitely a market for AI for the competent providers.
Yeah the vast majority of AI “offerings” from most of these huge companies and/or websites is just bolting a chatbot to something and then wondering why people don’t want it. I tried copilot in excel and it couldn’t access the document I was working on, it was an absolute useless mess.
They didn’t miss the wave they just failed to surf it. Anthropic can’t stop making more money, microsoft competed and lost.
You didn’t miss the “mobile wave”. You purposely gave up. Idiots.
True. As much as I hate to admit it, the Windows phones were actually pretty good.
Had they not botched app adoption and then immediately given up, they could have done fairly well.
Agreed I have been a Linux Stan since the 90s and even I thought windows phone was pretty good.
The windows phones were fucking magical
They were not good, they were dogshit. I had one and it was like a decade behind android.
Satya may have grown the company share price but he’s absolutely killed everything that made Microslop even remotely interesting before he became CEO.
They freaking gave up on anything quickly if they are not immediately the leader in the market.
We were lucky and dodged that future enshitification bullet.
this is a decent read. theres honest criticism and not a “m$ sux lol” rant. a someone who can agnostically enjpy tech history, i would like to see how this plays out.
Yeah good read. I don’t agree that Microsoft isn’t dying though. They are, because people and companies alike are tired of other corporations throwing them under the bus. So many people are realizing that the companies don’t want what they want, and it kills their business or happiness.
I think they will become like IBM, once dominant, not dead today but pretty much irrelevant compared to what they once were.
ibm is still huge, but mostly because their shitty tactics in the past means that all their customers are completely dependent on them.
seems like microsoft is taking inspiration.
MS should be more vulnerable, due to everything but Excel being toilet blockages.
TLDR; MS already got big by being like IBM, lots of dumb corpo procurement cash is already keeping them afloat for about as long as qwerty keyboards - because some people got really good at/dependent on excel.
Their dominance of corpo-procurement (and using ‘security’ to block out alternative tooling) means that vast amounts of the corpo world is based on highly specialised and over-stretched excel.
Even in databases, where my organisation (large public sector) should be having a genuine competition to administer postGRESQL for us or something, has been loss-led into into a big new ms fabric contract by them appearing to undercut the incumbent (Oracle - ok not hard to undercut), but not actuall . . . [rant deleted]
However, crap MS is at software, they’re extremely good at getting dumb corpos to sign on the dotted line.
(‘always has been’ meme). And many humans being forced to use the only tool available, have built vast intricate systems on the foundation of that excel, many of them masterworks of skill in the face of those constraints. Hopefully they don’t last as long as one of the old Egyptian dynasties.Also PowerPoint lol. I like PowerPoint. The latest versions a bit less, but the versions from like 2019-2022 were pretty solid. They also have full on mobile-looking side panel ads in the office apps if you aren’t subscribed to M365 now…
They are dying because they have horrible leadership. They are solely focused on subscription revenue now, and everything else is just left to rot. They’ve pretty much lost any urge to do anything creative with their money and manpower.
There is no “AI wave”. Machine learning can he incredibly powerful when used properly, and is being used to process scientific and medical data in pursuit of improving humanity’s understanding of reality around us.
But that is not what Microslop is pushing. LLMs that exist to chew up RAM, water, and electricity to shit out slop and generate suicidal tendencies in children.
They aren’t trying to make copilot useful, they are trying and failing to make it profitable, just like every other LLM.
Wave? This is like being sad you did not get in on the housing crisis, or the dot com bubble, or any other clearly labeled landmine.
I know right. They dodged the AI bullet would be a more accurate headline.
I don’t think they dodged it
Prolly not eh
They should add much more AI. Why? Cause it’s really funny to watch from the outside as a Linux user.
The article touches on a bunch of valid points, but re the headline, I don’t really think that a failure to generate excitement about AI integration into Windows 11 is because they missed the boat. It’s because they’re shoehorning it into places it doesn’t belong.
They have the ability to make it useful. Ethical concerns aside, GitHub Copilot is as good as any AI development assistant, and better than most. Hopes that they’d gain ground with Bing would have needed them to be way ahead of the curve (and for AI search result summaries to be more useful than the top results, which they rarely are).
But for Copilot to be useful in the desktop environment, it needs to be there quietly in the places it’s needed. Improve your help tools, make Grammarly irrelevant, infer document context to make search better. Don’t rename half of your products “Copilot”, don’t put flashy buttons in every app, just use the benefits of applied AI to improve your products.
Oh, and make it optional, for fuck’s sake. If I don’t feel like I have control over my OS any more, I’m not likely to stick around when other options are available.
The " AI Wave" is just a fiction. The whole idea is just an attempt to get investments for companies that don’t and cant really produce any value. I’ve tried many of these “AI” tools and none of them can really do anything useful.
From what I’ve seen programmers are using Claude a lot. It may still cause problems in the medium to long term by squeezing out junior developers or atrophying the skills of senior developers, but in the meantime it is speeding up production of code.
It’s also making scams a lot easier by simulating real human communication, up to and including video chat.
I’m not sure what will cool down the hype. It’s almost exclusively driven by c-suite morons who find AI very useful for writing unclear emails and inaccurate notes. The sort of things they’d do themselves before. Even programmer who adopt it are mostly quietly muddling along.
There are many fields that are kind of forcing workers to use AI. Then their logic is: well, if you use AI, then I’ll either cut your wages or hire cheaper workers.
That being said, do you really (and by “you” I mean all the lurkers as well) think this whole thing will backfire in the long run? I only see companies using more and more AI and being fine with laying off people and rehiring people who are 25% cheaper.
Companies’ pretense that they don’t need skilled workers is a bluff move in the struggle between labor and capital. It is an attempt to devalue workers and lower their wages. The bluff cant be sustained for long.
Companies seek to monopolise skill and knowledge within these AI and encourage people to know nothing and pay them for skills/knowledge instead. This can only end poorly when it becomes uneconomical to provide this service to consumers but has also made those consumers devoid of skills/knowledge.
Relying on a chatbot to do work for you that isn’t bulk writing or giving your customers the runaround is a recipe for disaster. Now, I’ll grant you that this is a very advanced chatbot, but just because it can fool the average CEO, doesn’t mean it can do much of anything truly useful.
Without some major breakthrough that actually results in real artificial intelligence, I don’t see how any of this is sustainable long term. Things feel just like they did back in 2007 when everyone and their mom was buying a house to flip using an adjustable rate mortgage and you’d be stupid not to join them.
That being said, do you really (and by “you” I mean all the lurkers as well) think this whole thing will backfire in the long run?
It’s backfiring now by deleting databases, overwriting important configuration files, and leaving sensitive information in the wild.
Now, I agree, AI isn’t going away: Like any other kind of massive fuck-up, by the time the current crop of suckers learn their lessons, there’ll be a new crop ready to make the same mistakes again.
i do think its mostly about an excuse for workforce reduction rather than pull some other bullshit excuse from their ass they can use this one,for a time at least.
An example is here in Australia our biggest bank, CBA, crowed they reduced their workforce and saved a bunch from AI, turned out they just literally offshored and hired in India
Eventually customers will get super frustrated with telling the chatbot that this didn’t solve the problem.
They also probably realized providing free Copilot in Windows would get very expensive quickly, and that not enough users would pay for it.
Basically yeah
Out of Microsoft’s 450 million Microsoft 365 user base, the company has only managed to convert roughly 15 million paid Copilot seats. This means a staggering 96.7% of users are rejecting the premium AI features, yielding just a 3.3% paid adoption rate. When viewed against Microsoft’s estimated $37.5 billion quarterly AI spending, this is an alarmingly low adoption rate.
They’re spending billions to get millions.
Peak capitalism!
scales back?
I just got an update that puts a persistent copilot overlay in the corner of Excel, blocking my cells. and the same update seems to have added a context menu that shows up on left click on a squiggle word in Word, which again blocks my document unnecessarily. I use neither of these features. I want neither of these features. I want to use the fucking program to do my goddamn work
You don’t know what you want, you ungrateful shit.
true, I always forget that
“Guys, we’re scaling back on AI! Honest! Isn’t this great publicity?!”
“Also, totally unrelated… but today we’re launching SchmoPilot Assistant for Notepad!”
That little floating copilot icon in excel is the devil’s work. I’m not a violent person but whoever came up with that should be flogged (IDK what flogging is but it sounds appropriate lol).
Flogging is a form of punishment where you get whipped.
Conversely, being forced to use Excel with Copilot is the traditional punishment for unwarrantedly flogging somebody (you need to get consent first, mmkay?).
On my work laptop, Notepad used to have Copilot built in but now it doesn’t. So that’s a little scaling back
First off, copilot is just ChatGPT.
Second off, their implantation of ChatGPT is so bad it actually makes the original look good. And that is a damn low bar to reach for and miss.
I didn’t know that. So they can’t even rebrand well.
Aah, remember how good Visio used to be - when it had those green corner boxes, and a nice grid.was done
Those guys actually made a decent app to run on win 95 - so I guess MS had to try to disembowel them to find out how it such a thing was possible.
They didn’t miss shit, they just competed and lost to like the four other AI companies that executed much better than them.
You know the real problem? They thought because their button was easier to find and press that people would use it and not look for better buttons. And, to an extent, they are right, but… the other buttons are compellingly better at the things they specialize in, and right now no company specializes in ALL THE THINGS particularly well. Claude is a better writer, ChatGPT makes better drawings, Gemini is (getting closer to) what Google Search always wanted to be. They’re all imperfect, but each has its niche and people shop around enough to discover that CoPilot isn’t usually the best scratch for their personal itch.
Yeah but you’d expect they could make copilot the best at working with excel and it’s just not as good as the competition in that specialization
Core Excel development team was made redundant 10 years ago, profits over people. I wish that was /s but it’s more likely true than not.
Why would you expect that? When was the last time Micro$lop made the best anything? Or even something good? Or at least decent? Or at the very least not openly hostile to the user?
What wave? None of it fucking works…
I think it is so strange people say stuff like this as though there aren’t objective metrics showing it does. We don’t have to like the billionaires using it to subjugate people, or the energy and water consumption, or the theft of copyrighted materials to be honest about the technology.
It does work. As far as ml models go, since backpropagation was implemented in training, transformers have become extremely capable.
Every actual objective metric shows that companies have been using the LLM craze to cover for their layoffs for other reasons. That the dumbasses who did pay for it are spending more than their developer salary budgets for lower quality shit that needs people to fix it anyway, and that employees fucking hate having to use it - because it’s shit. People wouldn’t be tolenmaxxing to waste their quotas if they thought it was working.
There is definitely some truth to what you’re saying, but my point is that those aren’t conflicting with the technology working. There are many scholarly refereed papers on transformer performance and generational improvement on standardized metrics. I don’t see the value in conflating something working with it being good or ethical. There is a gap between utility and hype, yes. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t work, and the inexorable negativity that comes invariably to comments recognizing this simple truth undercuts actual critical feedback.
LLMs work like LLMs. Sure, in that way they work.
LLMs are not Gen AI. Like they are being sold as. In that way they do NOT work.
If they hadn’t pitched these things as the singularity, people would be singing a different tune. But they’re at best, a usability interface layer for other things. Not something that needed to be shoved down everyone’s throats and spawn thousands of slapdash datacenters
