An AI company who is completely dependent on mining every bit of data out there, copyright be dammed had another company who also is completely dependent on mining every bit of data, copyright be dammed violate their terms of service?

How awful.

No, wait, that's completely expected. It's sad that the best we can hope for is these companies get shut down by the courts because LLMs aren't fair use.

But, hey, companies can't inflate their market value and stock prices by announcing sensible investment in labor and making them actually more productive, versus making existential threats to the workforce and hope it doesn't trigger the biggest labor movement ever seen. Which isn't a bad bet, given how much has been done to discredit organized labor as force for positive change (note, organized labor dovetails with unionized labor, but it isn't the same). Then again, if you work two jobs and still have to share an apartment, maybe the odds aren't as good as those large companies would like.

And I can't really argue with that premise set by the article. Windows 11 Pro is better, but increasingly not by much.

I get why Microsoft has to ride this AI bubble and is trying to push Copilot everywhere. The stock markets are fickle like that. And shareholders, blah, blah.

It is the cost of operating systems being essentially free, but having to support development *somehow*. Apple has captive hardware. Linux has tons of free will and some enterprise support.

Windows, it's pretty clear that OEM licensing fees are shrinking. But instead of stepping up and providing a better experience and making things opt-in, it's back to the same old marketing and sales of turn it on by default and see what happens.

You could sell plenty of Microsoft 365 subscriptions with just a few tweaks to Windows, OneDrive and Office to reduce the suck.

If OneDrive didn't sync anything by default and had a retention policy for synced files that were deleted that was reasonably sane, it would be way better.

Office, make Copilot an addon. Done.

Windows: Fix backups. FFS. New system imaging tool, file based backup (not OneDrive) that is sane (no, copy and paste is not sane) and make a good experience out of previous versions. Seesh.

This battle was waged. OOXML won. It's hacky, it's the default, there is probably better, but nobody cares enough to force the use of ODT. This is about working documents in organizations. The read only archives are all PDF.

If you want to displace those use cases, you need to have product that brings its own values and advantages to Office 365 users. No, being free isn't enough. Office and Windows is eighty bucks at most for a user per month. It doesn't take much to recoup that cost in organizations, which is why it is so common. The competition has to be good enough to charge a similar amount because it gives a similar ROI.

That is really hard, so best of luck.

Too many investors and users saw the vision around AI in iOS and they wanted it. And the backpedaling is hurting them, because they can't get there soon and may never get there.

That kind of thing has to just work. Text summarization? One two many gobbled messes and boom, that feature gets turned off.

Oddly, Microsoft isn't under similar pressure because, well, nobody expects them to do "awesome" with anything. If Copilot comes to mostly naught, bring in the Clippy 2.0 memes and they will move on.

Not that I care if they are using other companies models to ease costs. You can't inhale the internet, wave your hands about copyright and then complain "IP" when somebody uses your stuff in way you don't like.

If it takes more air out of the AI bubble, all the better, I say.

But, honestly, web standards are more and more rapidly becoming whatever gets put in the Chromium code base.

Which would be fine, if Chromium was meant to a be reference implementation. But it's not. It's used to keep people going to the web and Google for as much as possible. After all, need that ad revenue.

At this point, we are stuck with web applications on the desktop. I'd love a desktop version of things like Amazon, Facebook, Insta and so on. But, the story on Windows isn't compelling enough and enough people (well, really developers) use MacOS and Linux to make this impossible.

So, I am stuck with every single web site using a slightly different way of adding payment information, of managing accounts and profile information, for logging in and out, uploading files and so on. It's a mess.

Maybe Firefox can be a stopgap to things being even worse. I don't know.

I get it, schools are hardly in a position to fight against AI tools and all the marketing around them, and are rolling over (just asking people to cite the AI they used). That still misses the whole point.

The reason plagiarism is a fundamental issue isn't some abstract ethical point, it goes to learning. You don't learn by taking other's work and presenting it as your own. And using a chatbot is even worse for learning for that then finding, reading and copying actual work.

And coding is no more dead than it was when (insert tool here) claimed it would be every decade since the 70s.

So, in the end, the schools are devaluing themselves and the value they provide to students and the community. Higher education is useful because people *can fail* to get degrees.

Honestly, most of the knowledge is out there already. This hiring of rare "AI talent" is very much a dotcom bubble tactic. Sure, there maybe a bit of special sauce out there, but the recipe is well known.

In my mind, all of it relies on massive copyright violation and unsustainable levels of resource investment and consumption. Also the levels of "this will see massive breakthroughs" ignore the massive work done in scientific computing combined with a seemingly complete and willful ignorance of Amdahl's law.

And nobody really wants this outside that want to make more money while contributing less to the overall economy. That level of income equality *never* fares well in the long term.

As for all the coding breakthroughs, the vast majority of it seems to be around web programming and frameworks. The problem is those frameworks are *uniformly* awful for the task at hand. Adding AI to the mix is just propping up mudballs with twigs. Sure, plenty of work for people that know how to get things, but where's the next generation of those people going to come from exactly in this new era?

Frankly, it be much better to invest in better tools for the problems at hand. I'd say let China at it, but the energy required for this stuff is too big that they wouldn't just start burning everything in sight again.

The whole article rests on the text saying "over 1 billion" versus "1.4 billion" in a previous version. Microsoft has clarified that the number of users is still about 1.4 billion.

Which makes sense, because the market would be screaming about that level of loss in Windows devices. Now, growth is pretty stagnant (or non existent) in the Windows segment, which is an issue.

Personally, I wouldn't mind if Microsoft saw a noticeable decline that would prompt them to remove the suck from Windows and get it focus on a OS that you can just get things done with.

Easy to do with reducing telemetry, no ads anywhere, all AI completely add-on only (not present in a default install, must install via the store).

They offered investment and access to cloud resources. If OpenAI wants to, they can make the move to other cloud providers or host their own services. Sure, moving to a other provider has challenges, but that's the case with every provider. Microsoft and Azure is no different than any other cloud provider out there in that regard.

I think Microsoft isn't investing in them as much and are increasingly treating them as an preferred Azure customer and OpenAI is complaining they aren't getting as big of a sweetheart deal as they once were.

I believe this is because Microsoft, while actually pitching AI everything externally, is much more skeptical internally. The engagement isn't there; the backlash is. So, they are reducing overall investment in this space and shifting the risk to other companies.

They have to ride the AI stock bubble, but I doubt they are hitching their future on it. If AI doesn't bring in Office and Azure revenue, they'll find something that does.

If you are engaged in a suit and you aren't very careful about what you retain and you are found to have deleted anything that the court ordered to be retained. And that is usually a very, very broad set of material.

This does not mean that everything is made public or is entered into evidence. Also, if things are entered into evidence, they may redact personal information to protect third parties.

And there is little that OpenAI can do to stop this. It's a well established practice. At some point, if you are a big enough company, you have to use solutions to manage all this.
 

This is a known, effective solution for putting check on large businesses making unreasonable demands on their labor force. Is it perfect? No. Is it doomed to not work? Again, no.

In this case, it would be doing Amazon a favor by not undermining core parts of its business by making working there even worse. Not to mention creating more and more code filled with AI "code foam". Sure, it's looks fine... Until you use too much of it.

Informatica is one of those products that their customers use that they swear solves really complex business problems by applying yet another layer of data abstraction on top of databases and the like.

Sure, you may eventually get there, but it will take a lot of effort and money to maintain it all. Because you'll never hire the developers to do your own thing, might as well get all the consultants to do it for you.

So, fits right in with Salesforce. Because, hey, it's not Oracle.

And quite a few people at Microsoft know it. Some at the company are trying so hard to make AI happen, but there are other segments (the major cash cows) are starting to realize that Copilot is Clippy and Cortana 2.0 and nobody is buying tickets for the sequel. Office (quietly) added options to remove it (you know, for compliance reasons, cough) and introduced the "classic plan" for Office.

Search "Copilot Key" and the biggest result is how to remap it to whatever you want.

The Azure group reduced their overall hardware rollout in this space and they did it because the internal demand wasn't showing up.

They open sourced all the bits around Copilot integration in VSCode because "AI is so core to modern development experiences it makes the most sense to integrate this..." They actually couldn't justify the expense in maintaining it otherwise and it undercut all the insanely overvalued code forks. They also open sourced the WSL bits, but that was just long overdue anyway.

So, when this is all over, they'll have to silently hire back engineers again and it will cost them a fortune to find because the pipeline will be drier than ever. I use Windows as my daily driver, but even the most die-hard of MS fans knows this was a bad move. They would be in more trouble, save for the fact that everybody else is doubling-down on AI whatever and making equally dumb mistakes.

This isn't really about the left (or feminists) pushing an agenda. Sure, there are plenty of way out there opinions (on the left and right), but the main goal was improving opportunities for everybody.

The current corporate system could have provided more jobs and opportunities by reducing shift lengths (while keeping benefits) focusing on long term sustainability and economic growth from the middle out.

They instead just pitted more and more people against each other and boom, when some people called it part of "woke agenda" the system latched on to that hard. It's a easy sell. It's not that almost everybody is grist for the mill. That wages and job growth are stagnant, that we tear apart the safety net so a few can accumulate even more wealth.

Nope, it's the education and government that is full of man haters. The patriarchy isn't really for the few and wealthy, it's all about men. Pit labor against each other, and nobody but the top wins.

Yes, we need increase graduation levels and educational levels for everybody. We need to invest way more in our educational and social systems.

Look, buy into all the manosphere, red pill whatever. Nobody can't stop you from being slowly poisoned. Just think about who really profits from providing the poison.