All of big tech is really worried about this.
- Apple is worried about its own science output, with many of their office heavily employing data scientists. A lot of people slate Siri, but Apple’s scientists put out a lot of solid research.
- Amazon is plugging GenAI into practically everything to appease their execs, because it’s the only way to get funding. Moonshot ideas are dead, and all that remains is layoffs, PIP, and pumping AI into shit where it doesn’t belong to make shareholders happy. The innovation died, and AI replaced it.
- Google has let AI divisions take over both search and big parts of ads. Both are reporting worse experiences for users, but don’t worry, any engineer worth anything was laid off and there are no opportunities in other divisions for you either. If there are, they probably got offshored…
- Meta is struggling a lot less, probably because they were smart enough to lay off in one go, but they’re still plugging AI shite in places no one asked for it, with many divisions now severely down in headcount.
If the AI boom is a dud, I can see many of these companies reducing their output further. If someone comes along and competes in their primary offering, there’s a real concern that they’ll lose ground in ways that were unthinkable mere years ago. Someone could legitimately challenge Google on search right now, and someone could build a cheap shop that doesn’t sell Chinese tat and uses local suppliers to compete with Amazon. Tech really shat the bed during the last economic downturn.
Meta is struggling a lot less, probably because they were smart enough to lay off in one go,
or more like their user experience was already so garbage, adding AI to it doesn’t make any noticeable change lol
I don’t use a single Meta product on purpose. I’m sure they scrape my data despite my best efforts to not be tracked online.
I still unfortunately order things from Amazon for the convenience, use Windows for gaming and at work, and occasionally use Google search with heavy boolean search, custom search engines, and browser extensions for filtering out the garbage. I also still use Google Maps and I have an Android based tv where I occasionally watch SmartTube.
Hell I even get Netflix included with my T-Mobile subscription. My wife watches that.
And for now, I have an iPhone SE until it dies and I make the switch to a Google phone or something.
Typing this out makes me wonder what I’m waiting for to find alternatives for this FAANG garbage, but I have no idea how Facebook still exists.
I still unfortunately order things from Amazon for the convenience
It turned out that it’s incredible easy to order as guest at other sides
Yes but I don’t want to type my billing details every time I need some thing. I don’t want to wait 6 weeks. I don’t know if other sites are reputable. I don’t want to pay shipping. I like being able to wishlist stuff or store stuff in my cart for later and read lots of reviews on products (I’m aware many are fake).
There’s also the fact that nearly every website runs on AWS, so even if I boycott Amazon (I’m sure they’ll miss my $100 a month in purchases), I’m still providing them money by visiting the sites that are hosted on AWS. Pretty hard to completely avoid them in this day and age.
Amazon for me has been utter garbage in the last 10 years. Fake products, stuff that is supposedly coming next day comes in 3+ days, customer service is some copy/paste canned answers etc
We order a lot of baby stuff on there. They’ve accepted returns on everything that didn’t work or wasn’t what we anticipated. We can walk to a UPS store from our house and drop it off. Anecdotally, they also have the best deals about 50% of the time on PCPartPicker.
It does take longer to fulfill some orders for us. But others show up a day or three early even though we don’t pay for Prime. I used to work for the post office before they switched to their own delivery, and they would drop off their pallets to us in the mornings to be taken out for the last mile by our carriers. It seemed like that was a better experience. It has definitely enshittified somewhat since their golden days.
Monopolies don’t care about the user experience, only profit. The AI doesnt understand the former, only the latter. The continued degredation of the user experience is a likely indicator of an increase in revenue as function of successful application of AI.
The AI doesnt understand the former, only the latter.
Do you possibly mean “The AI evangelists” or something similar?
Like, I could totally understand it in the “software will also include the biases of those who wrote it” kind of way (a la Amazon’s failed attempt at automating job candidate search). If the only incentive you’re given as a programmer is “make it make money”, then yeah, your AI is going to bias towards that end.
Just couldn’t tell on first reading
I’m not actually asking for good faith answers to these questions. Asking seems the best way to illustrate the concept.
Does the programmer fully control the extents of human meaning as the computation progresses, or is the value in leveraging ignorance of what the software will choose?
Shall we replace our judges with an AI?
Does the software understand the human meaning in what it does?
The problem with the majority of the AI projects I’ve seen (in rejecting many offers) is that the stakeholders believe they’ve significantly more influence over the human meaning of the results than exists in the quality and nature of the data they’ve access to. A scope of data limits a resultant scope of information, which limits a scope of meaning. Stakeholders want to break the rules with “AI voodoo”. Then, someone comes along and sells the suckers their snake oil.
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Oooh la la
its a function of paying their employees less for more work relatively speaking and extracting more profit from consumers through ads and enshitification in general
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But that’s also a path for them to no longer be a monopoly, if the right competitor makes the right moves.
We’re living in a late stage capitalistic hellhole and you’re advocating faith in the free market.
What. The. Fuck.
I’m saying it’s happened before. AOL. Palm. Yahoo. Blackberry. A company with an effective monopoly gets complacent and fails to serve their users. They get replaced.
I don’t remember anything ever in history undermining faith in the free - from regulation, but not from jailing crooks, - market.
It’s not as if anything lefties claim to be that were free. And when one talks about what is needed to make it free, one can hear screeching of the “reeeeeee useful idiots for capitalism reeeeee you just want poor people to die reeeeee we should all vote for 8 hour work week and peace on Earth reeeeee what do you mean it’s not enough to vote reeeee” kind.
Even Ponzi schemes are usually about everyone being conscious it’s a scheme, but thinking they are very smart and will fool some other suckers, and those suckers think the same in turn. That is covered by the “jailing crooks” part.
And various cartels and trusts and such usually make government regulation their instrument. They benefit from it.
I mean, all this has been said and proven many times.
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Google has let AI divisions take over both search
I fucking bing’d something the other day to get a better search result. What the fuck google.
Try Kagi. Paid search engines are the future in order to extract yourself from the enshittification of “free” search engines.
If your goal is to get away from this AI shit show, Kagi might not be the answer, according to their own blog.
I will search for a very interesting article you should read, before deciding to give kagi any money.
Edit: found it
There’s also the whole interaction in how the CEO treated someone who wrote an article and he wouldn’t leave her alone after asking him to stop.
From his perspective I get it, you want to have good press and try to clear up any misconceptions. But how he went about it was very unprofessional and far too pushy.
yeah, that seems rough on kagi’s part. i used the free trial, and then just moved onto startpage because startpage doesn’t make me pay.
I read that stuff a few weeks ago. And the responses and discussion on Kagi’s Discord. I’ll continue to monitor Kagi’s behavior, of course, but for now I prefer Kagi. I get far more relevant results with no advertising noise and as much or as little “AI” assistance as I want.
Google is a cesspool and DDG is simply inferior - worthy, but inferior.
Using Kagi is not a bad decision. After reading a lot of positive things about it and beeing quite hyped, I was so ungently reminded, that every good thing comes with its own baggage of bad.
I thought I share it, so that everyone can make their own decision.
I also tried Metager, a german meta search engine. Sad to report: not usable for me, although I like their club (suma-ev) and donated some money towards them.
For now it’s DDG I guess. :-(
I’m not sure there could be any sort of legitimate threat to them, but I could definitely see a Netflix situation playing out. That is a popular upstart temporarily seems poised to take over, but then suffers from extreme levels of interference from bigger players who artificially hold the upstart down while they desperately catch up and then ultimately come at least equal while the Netflix equivalent is mostly a shell of what it could’ve been.
Never underestimate how much buckets and buckets of cash reserves can overcome even incredibly out of touch laziness when it comes to competing with any start ups. Apple in particular could probably afford to let competitors get a decade ahead and still be able to come back based on the ridiculous amount of cash they have to float their business along with.
Yeah competition won’t work in a market where some competitors have such massive amounts of wealth. This is a failure of unrestrained capitalism and it’s bad for consumers ultimately.
Someone could legitimately challenge Google on search right now
Not really, unfortunately, because of the sheer mass of the internet the infrastructure to just support the index of it requires massive funding. Even other giants like MS with Bing struggled with this. Short of a radical new way to run a search engine without a massive index, I just don’t see it happening.
It’s kind of curious to me about search because honestly my Internet world has only grown smaller and smaller. Where I used to use Google to find new websites, I feel like most of my searches on Google are now to search a handful of sites I already know. Ironically if Reddit had a better search function, a lot of my Google usage would fall off as I’d just go directly there, as it’s still the best place I’ve found for troubleshooting support and real reviews of lots of products. A competitor to Google wouldn’t really need to index the entire web for most people, but rather a relatively small number of website super giants like Amazon, Reddit, Wikipedia, etc.
Kagi literally provides the same quality Google used to.
They pay Microsoft for access to the bing index
They stopped using Bing a year ago.
You’re right, my bad. (Source: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html)
Kagis ok, it’s better than Google now, but not the Google of the past and only if what you were looking for is recent and indexed. If not, it just falls back to the same Google results. Good if you want separation and not having Google know what you’re searching for, but beyond that…meh.
If the AI boom is a dud,
Whaddya mean, “if”? Emperor wears no clothes…
AI did boom, but people don’t realize the peak happened a year ago. Now all we have is latecomers with FOMO. It’s gonna be all incremental gains from here on.
I think the true use case for these AI technologies is yet to come. What most people are doing with the “AI” tools available today is just gambling around. But working with personal computers could be changing fundamentally in the coming years.
AI did boom, but people don’t realize the peak happened a year ago.
A simple control algorithm “if temperature > LIMIT turnOffHeater” is AI, albeit an incredibly limited one.
LLMs are not AI. Please don’t parrot marketing bullshit.
The former has an intrinsic understanding about a relationship based in reality, the latter has nothing of the likes.
I can see where you’re getting at, LLM don’t necessarily solve a problem, they just mímic patterns in data.
That is indeed exactly my point. LLMs are just a language-tailored expression of deep-learning, which can be incredibly useful, but should never be confused for any kind of intelligence (i.e. logical conclusions).
I appreciate that you see my point and admit that it makes some sense :)
Example where I think pattern recognition by deep learning can be extremely useful:
- recheck medical imaging data of patients that have already been screened by a doctor, to flag some data for a re-check by a second doctor. This could improve chances of e.g. early cancer detection for patients, without a real risk of a false detection, because again, a real doctor will look at the flagged results in detail before even alarming a patient to a potential diagnosis
- pre-filter large amounts of data for potential matches -> e.g. exoplanet search by certain patterns (planet hunters lets humans do this as crowdsourcing)
But what I am afraid is happening for people who do not see why a very simple algorithm is already AI, but consider LLMs AI, is that they mentally decide to call AI what seems “AGI” / “human-like”. They mistake the patterns of LLMs for a conscious being and that is incredibly dangerous in terms of trusting the answers given by LLMs.
Why do I think they subconsciously imply (self-)awareness / conscience? Because to not consider as (very limited) AI a control mechanism like a simple room thermostat, is viewing it as “too simple” to be AI - which means that a person with such a view makes a qualitative distinction between control laws and “AI”, where a quantitative distinction between “simple AI” and “advanced AI” would be appropriate.
And such a qualitative distinction that elevates a complex word guessing machine to “intelligence”, that can only be made by people who actually believe there’s understanding behind those word predictions.
That’s my take on this.
And people will still say AI isn’t a bubble.
There is a bubble in AI, AI isnt a bubble. In the same way there was a bubble in e-commerce that lead to the dotcom crash. But that didnt mean there was nothing of value there, just that there was too much money chasing hype.
I think it will hinge on one thing: Will AI provide an experience that is maybe worse, but still sufficient to keep the market share, at lower cost than putting in the proper effort? If so, it might still become a tragic “success”-story.
It’s very, very costly, both but the hardware and the electricity it takes to run it. There may be a bit of sunk cost fallacy at play for some, especially the execs who are calling for AI Everything, but in the end, in AI doesn’t generate enough increase in revenue to offset its operational costs, even those execs will bow out. I think the economics of AI will cause the bubble to burst because end users aren’t going to pay money for a service that does a mediocre job at most things but costs more.
That’s what I suspect, too, but I’m not entirely sure in my research so far. The question I am still unsure about: Is it as costly in running, or is the real costly part “just” the “training our model” part? I wondered that, because when I was messing around, things like generative text models could run on my potato PC with a bit of python scripting without too much issue, even if not ideally - as long as I had the already trained dataset downloaded.
Can’t really answer the expense trade-off until you look at concrete use cases, something general AI is allergic to…
You’ve got a great point there, actually
No. They are still capable of pressure typical for oligopoly (censoring out mentions of their competition, tactically buying out things which could help that competition and shutting them down, defamation, lobbying for laws directed against their competition).
Unless that happens too fast for them to realize.
Summary: stick to open source if you want usability.
How does that address web search and online shopping?
web search: Searx-ng & co.
online shopping: only thing i see so far in local big shops is AI chatbots to reduce load on telephone support. I never used Amazon, don’t care what bullshit they do.
slate
slag?
I work at a big EU company, MS top partner / strategic account etc. We wanted to implement MS Dynamics CRM in one of our newer business lines, we barely got a reply to our official emails.
After some informal discussions, we were told that salespeople are now only incentivized to sell Copilot, so they don’t really bother with the rest.
If MS is overinvesting to ride the AI hype as a middle man, while letting their core business capabilities (Windows and Office) decline, they will be in trouble in the long term.
To be fair, you can be their Platinum Ultra Tier Level Partner or whatever, and they’ll still not reply to you for a week. And when you get the reply it looks like it was written by ChatGPT anyway, and says nothing.
It was written by copilot, thank you very much
They are purposely enshittifying windows already, they don’t give a shit about making a functional OS anymore and are in the milking their products for all their worth phase and right now Ai is the hot seller.
Hopefully they will be so shortsighted and suffocate themselves with this Ai hype.
Hopefully they will be so shortsighted and suffocate themselves with this Ai hype.
waves from over in the linux corner seize the day, and microsoft’s throat :P
Just installed Linux Mint the first time last month. Been very much enjoying the experience of a M$ free OS.
Hell yeah, it is so much easier than it used to be right?
How was your experience?
Any tips for someone who might be about to do the same?
Did you create a ritual pyre of Microsoft jewel cases and old manuals and stuff and burn it while dancing around it chanting burnnn babyyy burnnn?
They see the post-PC world, and Windows Phone never panned out.
Windows Phone was never given a chance to pan out. There wasn’t space for Windows Phone to force its way on the scene when it finally began to fire on all cylinders as a smartphone OS but they were building a critical mass of loyal users that would have set up Microsoft longterm to successfully exploit the opportunity to when it came.
It is wild to me that upper management at Microsoft was too dumb to understand that and just killed their perfectly good apparatus for gaining a foothold on the mobile market. Simply put a tech company that large should always be thinking seriously about maintaining a practical entrance to an industry as important to their bottom line as this.
They are fools and they ultimately threw mud in the face of the small amount of windows phone fans (of which there definitely were loyal fans especially for the great Nokia cameras and extremely focused UI) who could have delivered that initial burst of energy and excitement/growth when the opportunity eventually did come. Thus they have actually sealed and barricaded the door to Microsoft ever EVER being in the mobile space since they betrayed ALL of the early adopter nerds who would have stuck around for the rough beginning.
Well, maybe it’s good they’ll die finally.
Windows actually aren’t a very big share of their revenue, but Office is yeah.
It’s kind of crazy to me that their AI product is already 50% of the revenue of their OS product. The thing that a stupidly high amount of computers require to even function for most people.
The chart shows revenue, not profit. I wouldn’t be surprised if Copilot is not profitable.
TBH if it weren’t for windows I don’t think anybody would be dumb enough to use a Mac computer. Microsoft really wasting potential in the OS market, though, I agree.
Yeah those MacBooks are really known for their poor build quality and terrible efficiency.
Sucks to suck if you ever need one repaired. Which is very often.
You won’t catch me defending Apple’s repairability but you saying they need repaired often is completely untrue in my experience and that of the wider user baser. In fact their durability and longevity are very good. There are people still running around with 2014 models that have never been repaired.
I mean fuck their anti right to repair bullshit, but the machines are good.
The ~2018 models right before they switched to the M series chips have been quite cursed from my experience. Basically all the touchbar models. Seen a bunch of those fail just out of warranty the last few years. Otherwise I agree Apple has been quite reliable otherwise.
As someone who tried macOS and really didn’t like it I still have to say that you’re overreacting. It is worth using if you want everything to look good while never ever configuring anything yourself (many things can’t be changed), and if you want all your devices to work together without any setup (requires buying all devices from Apple).
It can’t do anything that other OS can’t. But it does many things out of the box.
Look, mate, Apple will betray you at every possible turn. The prices they charge don’t justify the products they sell, and you incur risks by merely using their products which fail after only a few years and you’re not allowed to repair. Literally every reason you would purchase a mac, you would be better off to go with Linux or Windows instead. Even if you like the efficiency of the apple ARM processors, which they hold the advantage in only via anticompetitive market practices, their low lifespan doesn’t seem to justify the cost. Generally they’re built to last about 7 years, due to California regulations, but they experience major slowdowns and failures after about 2 or 3.
And the entire time: you’ll funneling money into sweatshop operations.
Wow you just shined a ton of light on a problem my company had. We wanted to implement a medical imaging system from one of their subsidiaries, and it took an average of 3 months for the salesperson to respond to EACH of our emails
Sounds like a really good opportunity for competitors to sweep in and start attacking
There’s the slight hope that decreased service additionally to the bad reliability leads some governments to look for alternatives.
How do I short MS, hm
If MS is overinvesting to ride the AI hype as a middle man, while letting their core business capabilities (Windows and Office) decline, they will be in trouble in the long term.
They aren’t just overinesting in AI, they are foreclosing the future of programming and software design as a prestigious, respectable and valuable career.
It doesn’t matter if the AI works or not, it just matters that programmers sat there and took it because they thought they were special and the ruling class would never betray their trade.
Well here we are kids if you want a realistic career that will pay the bills dont follow your heart and go into programming and computers, that is a passionate hobby you shouldnt expect to be highly paid for it. Go into the trades, anywhere else, programming as a career is fucked (and again it has nothing to do with whether AI works or not).
I am stuck with Windows 10 & 11 at work, on multiple various machines. Also some versions of Windows Server.
It honestly feels hostile towards the user now. For myriad reasons. It’s a constant battle for me to turn pointless crap off that it keeps turning back on with the next big update.
Linux is waiting for you. You know you want it.
I realize gaming on Linux is already very doable (I have a steam deck), but for me specifically, I need the majority of the mod developers to have shifted over to Linux gaming before I can switch. I primarily play games that tend to be heavily modded and it’s really common to need to run some sort of 3rd party tool to mod. One that is often not Linux compatible. I realize there are utilities that can sometimes help with this, but between extremely spotty mod documentation and my own lack of familiarity with Linux, that kind a tricky ask for me to accomplish. I’ve pretty much given up on playing modded games on my steam deck for now. I hope someday most of the gaming world will switch, but until then I feel somewhat chained to Windows if I want to enjoy my hobby.
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Run them with wine on Linux or search the internet to check if others have tried running that software under Wine. I had very good luck with small, single-purpose software.
Must be a very specific game. Last time i had to run a tool for modding was in Gothic 3. And i think X4 was it, it has a linux version but some mods have Windows paths? Though it would work fine in wine. And Kenshi has a cmd script to fix some data for performance the studio missed, for which some included tools don’t run. But that was faster with find and sed anyway.
Btw, most weird tools run fine if you install vcrun (libraries) or dotnet (GUI stuff) via winetricks.
wintricks vcrun2022 dotnet48for the latest.
It honestly feels hostile
Very well put. I have the same feeling and it gets worse with every iteration.
Reading stories in which MS shoots itself in the foot, I am so glad there are 0 Windows 11 installations at home and Windows 10 installations are old (up to date but every install is at least 1 year old) so they don’t become enshittified.
Use Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC until it lasts (~2027 iirc). And pray that Linux gets enough first-party support from hardware vendors till then, otherwise we’re properly fucked.
I’m not using Linux in any enterprise capacity, but the compatibility improvements I’ve seen since the last time I tried out a distro for fun are immense.
So immense infact that I’m migrating all my home studio and gaming stuff over to Linux and making it my official daily driver via Nobara.
I’m honestly amazed by how well music production software and hardware works on Linux now. I’m so relieved because I thought this whole Windows enshittification thing was just another part of my life where I seemingly have no control over being made into a product and having all of my data sold constantly.
A recent migration to GrapheneOS and this new discovery of Linux’s amazing capabilities for my use case are such a breath of fresh air. I now have the choice to reject the exploitative practices of these tech companies that have zero respect for people and that makes me happy.
The more we use and recommend Linux the more of a chance we get of first party support in the future!
The more we use and recommend Linux the more of a chance we get of first party support in the future!
I don’t think that has ever been the case. Hardware vendors are not very likely to listen to the whims of a tiny fraction of retail customers, especially the kind which don’t make them much money. Institutional clients are the only one who can have any such sway, and that too is a stretch in most cases.
Whatever push desktop Linux support may get, it will be coming from enterprise customers. So if you have any influence on your company’s IT dept get them to ask for it, especially since this is a golden opportunity as the dissatisfaction with Windows is at an all-time high.
Windows is a OS that works against you since at least 10.
Man, the disclaimer at the bottom that Business Insider is partnered with OpenAI to allow them to train on their articles is really the cherry on top.
That’s a shit circle. I figured most of their articles were already written by LLMs.
It might be, but to be fair, that’s what the glorified autocompletion is actually good for, if it’s actually used a supporting tool, and not to pump out quantity over quality.
It could be that microsoft was just the bootloader to closedAI
Microsoft is having its IBM moment
Copilot is going to want 50 gigs on YOUR computer’s hard drive to store snapshots. MS also wants you to buy dedicated AI hardware to run a few of their apps. They’re going to steal your computer’s storage and processing resources to create a worldwide AI and surveillance network.
No thanks. I finally switched to Linux. Microsoft can become Skynet without my help.
Isn’t that a good thing? The best job in the gold rush was selling shovels. Nvidia is already doing that, so I guess the second best thing is providing lodging, which is what Microsoft is doing.
They own like half the company, so wouldn’t OpenAI’s success be their success?
It’s the “all your eggs in one basket” problem.
Boeing turned to shit after acquiring another company (not sure of the name), and it changed the culture and leadership
I think you mean McDonnell Douglas, it’s what happens when companies fire all the engineers in charge and replace them with beancounters.
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I think maybe execs and investors might feel it’s all the same, but if you’re a project manager for cloud infrastructure for enterprise services or you’ve been working for years on releasing a new component of Bing search that you think is a real gamechanger and some muckity-muck at the top says, ‘Oh, don’t worry about that anymore: a property manager that’s owned by a private equity partner of one of our big investors wants the chatbot that schedules apartment viewings in Huntsville to be more flirty, so go massage the prompts to make it convincingly laugh at bad jokes,’ some of those folks are liable to start grumbling that this isn’t the role that they were pitched when they took this job.
Success . . . . yes. Yes that’s it.
Paywall
Some Microsoft insiders worry the company’s AI strategy has become too focused on its partnership with OpenAI.
A few even grumble that the software giant has turned into a glorified IT department for the hot startup. These comments were part of a recent exclusive story from Business Insider in which Microsoft insiders shared candid views on the company’s AI future and its new Copilot tools.
The group at the center of this is Microsoft’s AI Platform team, run by Eric Boyd. This sits within Scott Guthrie’s Cloud + AI organization.
Insiders say Microsoft is focused less on the internal services that previously made up Azure AI Services and more on the Azure OpenAI service.
One former executive who left as a result of the changes said products like Azure Cognitive Search, Azure AI Bot Service, and Kinect DK are practically gone. Microsoft spokesman Frank Shaw said these services exist in some form but either aren’t part of the Azure AI org, have been renamed, or have been bundled with other products.
“The former Azure AI is basically just tech support for OpenAI,” a former Microsoft executive said. "Eric Boyd is effectively maintaining the OpenAI service. It’s less of an innovation engine
Windows Recall did it for me. I switched to Pop!_OS Linux and have been pretty content so far.
Great os, I switched a year ago, no complaints! Plays games, edits videos, no crashes, to anyone reading, get it!
I cant stand microsoft I have to use windows at work and it drives me nuts.
Only reason I like using windows at my work is the only other choice is Mac, and my work mac is only sorta barely usable for what I need
I’m in the opposite boat, I have to use macOS for work, and I much prefer Linux. But macOS is way* better than Windows, so I don’t complain too loudly.
Hey now! They’re also the world’s foremost bloatware packager. No one will ever take that away from them.
And judging by the recent Claude Sonnet 3.5 results, OpenAI may not even be the top AI company anymore.
Nah, it hasn’t changed. It’s garbage.
