Microsoft’s AI CEO, Mustafa Suleyman, has shared his opinion after recent pushback from users online that are becoming frustrated with Copilot and AI on Windows. In a post on X, Suleyman says he’s mind blown by the fact that people are unimpressed with the ability to talk fluently with an AI computer.
His post comes after Windows president Pavan Davuluri was recently met with major backlash from users online for posting about Windows evolving into an agentic OS. His post was so negatively received that he was forced to turn off replies, though Davuluri did later respond to reassure customers that the company was aware of the feedback.
I dunno if I’d say I’m “unimpressed” with AI. I certainly find the technology itself fascinating. I worked with machine learning for years before consumer generative AI became mainstream and it’s profoundly impressive what decades of research and development have yielded. I genuinely do admire the painstaking work that underappreciated computer scientists have put in to make such things possible.
That said, “AI” is the new “blockchain” insofar as virtually every company on the S&P 500 has decided this is the new be-all-end-all feature that must be integrated into every aspect of every project. I don’t need AI to be part of my OS. I will open a new tab in my web browser if I decide I have a task for it. Granted, I am not a representative sample of a typical computer user (I use GNU/Linux btw).
To say nothing of the unethical manner in which these models are trained, using works produced by actual writers, artists, programmers, etc. Obviously profiting from their works while offering zero compensation (and actively taking work away from them by offering AI as an alternative to their craft).
It’s impressive, just not particularly useful, and certainly not something most people consider a priority.
Windows still takes forever to delete files, has a search indexer that makes laptops too hot to touch, steals focus while you’re typing in a password, takes much longer than Linux to open a web browser, turns apps white and “Not responding” for no apparent reason, has an ugly and slow Start menu that doesn’t foreground the things you want, pops up needless crap like stock tickers and news stories while you’re trying to get on with other things, sneakily turns on settings you deliberately turned off, and hassles you continually to agree to things you already said no to. And it spies on you.
Microsoft, if you’re looking to please users, those are all higher priorities for real users than any AI. But you’re not looking to please users, are you? Because Windows is for Microsoft, not for users.
I will have to disagree with this. I have found LLMs to be remarkably useful in a variety of circumstances because they are pretty good at regurgitating API documentation and man pages in a relatively small context (effectively making them a very efficient google search).
For example, last week I accidentally deleted a partition from a USB drive. I asked an LLM how I might recover my data using GNU/Linux tools and it pointed me in the direction of ddrescue (and subsequently, gddrescue) and showed me how I could use the recovered disk image to recover my lost files.
I was already aware of ‘dd’ as a tool for disk management, but was wholly ignorant of ddrescue or gddrescue because I haven’t had a data recovery use case in over 15 years. It was a fairly simple affair, and it was much easier than asking StackOverflow.
I agree that they are useful for this. In fact, as a programmer I find them quite useful whenever I need a bit of a guided start on something that otherwise I’d have to trawl the internet to find. Once the LLM has given a pointer it’s easier to follow up with appropriate resources. And the LLM is useful for writing code when the code is predictable and you know reasonably precisely what you need, where the LLM really just saves you some typing and you know how to review it for correctness. Outside of these cases you have to be pretty careful how you use them.
But I don’t think LLMs are as useful a tool as the business people want them to be. Programming is unusual in that it involves very predictable patterns, and the aim is to find the most appropriate pattern for the task. And software documentation too follows very predictable patterns. Where an LLM has seen the exact same pattern many times, it will be good at producing it on demand. So programming and explaining software is a good use case for LLMs. But not many areas of activity are like this, and when you get out into all the nuance and complexity of other less formal domains, LLMs are so prone to slipping up that they’re much less useful.
I’ve tried getting LLMs to summarize notes for talks on complex topics, and they are not good at it. I’ve tried getting them to tidy documents and they’re not good at it. I’ve tried getting them to explain complex topics for someone who knows nothing, and they can be good at it but they can also be misleading, and you don’t know which one you’re getting unless you go to other sources you could have checked in the first place.
So I think they’re most useful for a quick orientation on a topic that points you to further sources, or for very highly formalized activities like programming. But they can’t be trusted for math or physics or law or medicine or literature or philosophy or complex decision making or psychology or any number of other areas.
Yeah. It technically very impressive and and can have very impressive results if used properly. But all of the excellent uses and technical marvels get vastly overshadowed non-technical management going “what if you could have a chat with your toaster as it toasts your bread? Genius.” The people at the top have no fucking idea what they have and thus they have no idea how to use it which is why they throw everything at it to see what sticks.