this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 20 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (11 children)

So LLM-based AI is apparently such a dead end as far as non-spam and non-party trick use cases are concerned that they are straight up rolling out anti-features that nobody asked or wanted just to convince shareholders that ground breaking stuff is still going on, and somewhat justify the ocean of money they are diverting that way.

At least it's only supposed to work on PCs that incorporate so-called neural processor units, which if I understand correctly is going to be its own thing under a Windows PC branding.

edit: Yud must love that instead of his very smart and very implementable idea of the government enforcing strict regulations on who gets to own GPUs and bombing non-compliants we seem to instead be trending towards having special deep learning facilitating hardware integrated in every new device, or whatever NPUs actually are, starting with iPhones and so-called Windows PCs.

edit edit: the branding appears to be "Copilot+ PCs" not windows pcs.

[–] gnomicutterance@awful.systems 11 points 5 months ago (8 children)

Since this isn’t really even related to GenAI at all, in our house the theory is:

  • MS has been trying and failing to push ARM in PCs for a while
  • Now they take one with an NPU and rebrand it as Copilot+™️®️ PCs
  • They have market research that says initial sales are going to be soft and they panic because early soft sales create a bad vibe
  • So, without doing any of the usual build up of exciting the tech press, without hyping trade show buzz, they rush an unfinished, insecure, unwanted product to market in the hope it will be the killer app at last for high-battery life ARM on Windows.
  • They use lot of AI hype language to capitalize off the hype cycle, even though besides the OCR it seems to be pretty limited in its relationship to anything machine learning at all.
[–] gerikson@awful.systems 6 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (5 children)

This might be the case, but at least the first I heard about the Copilot+ launch was that it was finally a "Macbook Air" killer - which I suspect would already be a strong selling point (at least if MSFT solved the backwards compatibility issue). Yet right after they announced the Recall stuff, and at least from what I have read it was received very negatively. So now they have the story that if you want the latest fast, efficient windows machine, you need to allow it to spy on your screen. Not the best marketing imo.

[–] gnomicutterance@awful.systems 8 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Yeah but they’ve been marketing Windows on ARM as a Macbook Air killer for a few years now. This is more of a rebrand of that effort.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 7 points 5 months ago

OK, I didn't know that (mslty because I don't follow PC news, it's aggressively boring). FWIW the only tech podcast I do follow (all mac people) did single out this release as "this time MSFT proabbly got it right" - but they're mostly interested in Apple getting some competition.

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