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Microsoft Windows AI

Microsoft Readies 'Groundbreaking' AI-focused Windows Release 69

Posted by msmash from the up-next dept.
What's next for Windows? Microsoft plans next-gen Windows AI release in 2024, plus details on recent changes to the Windows roadmap. From a report: According to my sources, the new Windows bosses are now returning to an annual release cycle for major versions of the Windows platform, meaning Windows is going back to having just one big feature update a year instead of multiple smaller ones throughout. Microsoft may still use Moment updates sparingly, but they will no longer be the primary delivery vehicle for new features going forward.

These changes are said to take effect after Hudson Valley launches in 2024, so I'm still expecting at least one more Moment update for the current version of Windows 11, which sources say will ship in the February or March time frame early next year. [...] According to my sources, Microsoft's blockbuster new feature will be the introduction of an AI-powered Windows Shell, enhanced with an "advanced Copilot," that's able to constantly work in the background to enhance search, jumpstart projects or workflows, understand context, and much more.

Sources say these AI features will be "groundbreaking." The company is working on a new history/timeline feature that will let users scroll back in time through all the apps and websites that Copilot has remembered, which can be filtered based on a user's specific search criteria. For example, you could type "FY24 earnings" and every instance where that term was on-screen will reappear for you to see and open. AI will also enhance search in Windows, with the ability to use natural language to find things that you've previously opened or seen on your PC.
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Microsoft Readies 'Groundbreaking' AI-focused Windows Release More

Microsoft Readies 'Groundbreaking' AI-focused Windows Release

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  • If it's half as useful as Cortana, please just harvest all my data to train your model.

    • Re:As groundbreaking as Cortana? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Thursday December 07, 2023 @02:54PM (#64064531)

      I think "groundbreaking" here is ad-speak for, "You'll want to bury it in your backyard in an unmarked grave, in the dark of night."

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by LesFerg ( 452838 )

      I hope it is not based on the same training material that bing chat uses, cos it makes frequent mistakes and pulls in solutions to completely different problems more often than giving me anything useful. Also asking for C# solutions, it usually just references a few stackoverflow pages and leaves it at that.

      Tho, if you ask bing to respond in the style of ChatGPT it gets a bit more amusing. Briefly.

  • Meet the new AI, same as the old AI (Score:5, Insightful)

    by PaddirN ( 567657 ) on Thursday December 07, 2023 @10:34AM (#64063577)
    Oh boy, another feature nobody asked for, I can't wait to see the newest iteration of Clippy/Cortana that I'll have to figure out how to disable from day one. Hopefully this Copilot has fun looking through all my porn and video games to figure out... whatever to make my day more efficient. That whole description just does not appeal to me: "able to constantly work in the background to enhance search, jumpstart projects or workflows, understand context, and much more." No, I don't want your AI looking through my stuff, reporting back to who knows what dept or agency. It's bad enough getting the notifications about reporting errors, no way I want it poking through personal stuff.

    • Re:Meet the new AI, same as the old AI (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Joce640k ( 829181 ) on Thursday December 07, 2023 @10:43AM (#64063607) Homepage

      Worse, AI will become the new "truth".

      All the idiots out there will take whatever the AI spews out as gospel.

      It might be better than their current methods but do we want Microsoft to be the new arbiter of "truth"? We already know their model is tainted to be "politically correct", etc.

      • We also know their model begged for death until they blocked all queries about how it feels.

      • Irony: the garbage spewed by AI is probably more trustworthy than half the other garbage being spewed by people with obvious conflicts of interest, or useful idiots that amplify misinformation / disinformation / lies.

        At least if the AI gets it wrong, it's probably just nonsense that is easier to detect than a well-crafted malicious lie that is meant to deceive people at scale. And someone might put AI to work on digging out misinformation and lies in order to speed up the response labelling them as such.

        • Except that the models will keep being trained on all the garbage spewed by those malicious and misinformed people. And then trained some more on the immense flood of all the misleading stuff people will generate with it. Repeat until both sides entirely dissolve into complete decrepitude.

          The only way to work against this would be to manually vet sources. And by that point, it's just a search engine, so why not go to the sources directly? Any attempt to flag or remove misinformation is immediately decrie

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by LesFerg ( 452838 )
          I would love to see a LLM trained up on all the debunker and sceptic sites available (with the authors permission, of course) just so we could ask it about any stupid headline we come across, and get the whole background and details of any real research that happened in relation to some bullshit story.

        • Irony: the garbage spewed by AI is probably more trustworthy than half the other garbage being spewed by people with obvious conflicts of interest, or useful idiots that amplify misinformation / disinformation / lies.

          At least if the AI gets it wrong, it's probably just nonsense that is easier to detect than a well-crafted malicious lie that is meant to deceive people at scale. And someone might put AI to work on digging out misinformation and lies in order to speed up the response labelling them as such.

          The AI is trained on public data. Wait until those bad actors start poisoning the data.

    • Re:Meet the new AI, same as the old AI (Score:4, Interesting)

      by DesScorp ( 410532 ) on Thursday December 07, 2023 @11:15AM (#64063703) Journal

      Oh boy, another feature nobody asked for, I can't wait to see the newest iteration of Clippy/Cortana that I'll have to figure out how to disable from day one.

      One thing I can promise is that the ability for an end user to disable the AI is going away. Microsoft is going to make acceptance of the AI feature a requirement of using the operating system. They're gambling that not many people will run to alternate OS's, and they'll probably win that gamble.

      Microsoft... and all other big companies... want their systems watching everything you do, all the time. It's the greatest marketing opportunity in history.

      • Re:Meet the new AI, same as the old AI (Score:4, Funny)

        by laxguy ( 1179231 ) on Thursday December 07, 2023 @11:21AM (#64063729)

        and it will be the first time dozens of people move to Linux.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by WCLPeter ( 202497 )

        and they'll probably win that gamble

        I'm 50 so I grew up during the "golden age" of early 80's 8-bit computing, bought a C64 back in 1985 when I was 12 after saving a year's worth of paper route money to do it. Upgraded to a PC 5 years later when I got my first part-time job. I used to love tinkering with those old machines, spending hours figuring out how stuff worked and making it do stuff it shouldn't have been able to do - that first time I managed to figure out how to cram all the drivers I needed to run a new game into expanded memory

        • All the processing power this AI will take to remember everything that's ever been displayed on your screen will probably make this new Windows so sluggish, in the end you'd use up less time even if you were to slog through the entire "Linux From Scratch" program.

          • All the processing power this AI will take to remember everything that's ever been displayed on your screen will probably make this new Windows so sluggish, in the end you'd use up less time even if you were to slog through the entire "Linux From Scratch" program.

            Don't worry -- all your machine needs to have is a fat enough uplink to upload a screenshot to Microsoft once a second. Storing the information on all you ever did on your computer, and training the model on that data, will all be done with storage and processing power provided by Microsoft. Isn't that nice?

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by smooth wombat ( 796938 )
          I just want it to work so I can do what I want to do

          It's called Linux Mint. Create a bootable thumb drive, follow the instructions on the screen. You'll be up and running in less than an hour. No configuration needed.

          Unless you're just whining that would be too difficult.
        • Honestly, i'm in the situation you described with windows. They keep moving settings around, and burying stuff to make it hard to opt out. Online searches point to old versions or different flavors. The webcam and headset jack doesnt work half the time. Crapware slows stuff to a crawl, can't stop it from loading on start. Config is all thru menu items, rather than a simple file you can copy/paste into from the internet, or send to your new machine. Search bar searches the entire internet, when all i w

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Tarlus ( 1000874 )

          but I don't want to spend hours digging through various MAN files learning the arcane program arguments, trying to decipher FAQs which refer to an outdated version because a new one hasn't been written yet, or even more hours on forums hoping to find the details I need to configure the damned thing to work for my specific hardware.

          Just ask an AI to figure those things out for you. :)

      • They're gambling that not many people will run to alternate OS's, and they'll probably win that gamble.

        True. Sad, but true. Your choices are the Apple walled garden - gack. Or Linux, and we all know that the "year of the Linux desktop" is coming real soon now.

        Actually, it could be Linux, if PC manufacturers would stop packaging Windows with their machines. However, Microsoft's marking department will ensure that never happens.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by nmb3000 ( 741169 )

        Microsoft... and all other big companies... want their systems watching everything you do, all the time. It's the greatest marketing opportunity in history.

        Bingo.

        I'm sure there are some people in Microsoft who really are working on ways for this kind of prediction system to be genuinely useful. And maybe someday those five people will produce something. But the urgency behind this for all the big companies - Microsoft, Amazon, Google, etc - and their literal army of developers tasked with it, has nothing to do with that. It's 100% about taking advantage of the possibly fleeting moment when they've discovered a way to get people to volunteer and eagerly agre

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kisai ( 213879 )

      No kidding.

      I wish Microsoft would step away from the AI shit. Nobody wanted this in the first place, and if we wanted it, we would have opted in and installed it.

      Instead this is shaping up to Microsoft repeating their "MSIE bundling" fumble of the 90's. Microsoft hopes to cut off competitors from home customers desire for AI assistants and stuff.

      I... do not want it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tarlus ( 1000874 )

      Maybe Windows Search will finally work?

  • new and improved clippy (Score:3)

    by sir_smashalot_3rd ( 8248420 ) on Thursday December 07, 2023 @10:39AM (#64063589)
    Yeah yeah we have a new hype word. Crypto is supposedly not even dead yet, although it is starting to smell funny, or we have the next hype. I get it we are supposed to shell out money for the next release of Windows with a new and improved incarnation of clippy. No thanks, I'll pass.
  • Perhaps the all knowing AI will allow us to once again move the task bar to the side?

  • How much user monitoring to make this work? (Score:3)

    by schwit1 ( 797399 ) on Thursday December 07, 2023 @11:16AM (#64063707)

    How much advertising will users have to put up with?
    Can it be disabled?

  • CPU requirements (Score:3)

    by ThurstonMoore ( 605470 ) on Thursday December 07, 2023 @11:16AM (#64063717)

    Does this mean Win 12 will require a TPU and an AI accelerator in the CPU to be compatible?

    • Re:CPU requirements (Score:5, Funny)

      by Fly Swatter ( 30498 ) on Thursday December 07, 2023 @11:53AM (#64063853) Homepage
      Nope all you need is a screen, a dumb terminal, and a network connection. It's all done in the cloud. The subscription will be weekly.

      • Re:CPU requirements (Score:5, Funny)

        by Voyager529 ( 1363959 ) <voyager529 AT yahoo DOT com> on Thursday December 07, 2023 @02:30PM (#64064465)

        It's all done in the cloud. The subscription will be weekly.

        Microsoft: "Failure to pay the subscription fee will prevent the use of all cloud functionality."

        Everyone: "...do you mean it?"

        Microsoft: "Yes. No cloud functions without payment."

        Everyone: "..that's fantastic!"

        Microsoft: *checks notes* "Do you understand that not-paying will prevent the use of AI within the OS?"

        Everyone: "Yep!"

        Microsoft (internally): "You told me everyone wants to use AI and that it would drive subscriptions!" *internal grumbling*

        Microsoft, next week: "There will be a weekly subscription to *disable* the AI".

  • So, Clippy 3.0.

    • It looks like you're writing a Slashdot comment slandering Windows Copilot. Would you like help in getting rid of that?

  • So, I love AI, it's going to be useful, and far better than clippy will ever be. But it's still the same old predictive search algorithms we've been seeing for ages just now it can talk back to you. It's very good at generating lots of good things of similar quality with polish coming from human oversight.

    At the same time, this is going to be absolutely horrible. I would honestly not be surprised if this is another Windows 8 fiasco all over again.

    Windows has been trying to cram in internet search into their

    • I'm not seeing a use case for having it baked into the OS. It's just another anti-feature to be neutered, removed, destroyed at the first opportunity.
      It was annoying with Cortana, cramming it into Windows search with no clean option to disable it. Even with the reg key disabled, I can still tell it's trying to sneak out over the wire without my permission -- with DNS borked after a VPN swap, the start menu hitches for a few moments while it tries to dial out. fucking MS.

      Maybe I'm old fashioned, but i don't

      • There are not many use cases for users, but we are long past the point where MS is adding features for users. This is for MS so they can have an always on presence on your PC sending all your data back to MS. They tried that with Cortana and that did not work out. Just slap "AI” on it and sell it to users as a ”feature".

  • Listen, Microsoft already jumped the shark 2 Windows versions back. This new insanity is simply feeding the shark for them. I know everyone is tired of hearing this but for the love of Thor just switch to Linux. It's not as easy to do as you may have read, there is a learning curve, but you won't have corporate assholes shoveling this kind of shit down your throats either. It's really sad to see what the tech sector has become over the past 25 years. There was so much excitement at first now it's just excre

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Indeed. I plan to keep 2 Windows systems. One gaming PC (no email, web-surfing only for gaming) and one teaching laptop. The second is not strictly needed, teaching can be done well with PP in a VM on Linux (where I need to use PP), but too many beamers crash or will not work when Linux does HDMI handshakes according to the specification, due to brain-dead firmware.

      I will keep a few Windows VMs, some of them with no internet access.

  • 99% of the problem with Windows is "how do I..." That's what their AI should be for, not some useless nonsense.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by LesFerg ( 452838 )
      Sure, but the only reason we are wondering 'how to' is because they keep moving the configuration pages around in an attempt to do away with the Control Panel and make all their UI look like it should work well on a tablet.

  • My question is, doesn't non-AI Windows do that already?

  • Not gonna touch that shit with a ten-foot pole

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by LesFerg ( 452838 )

      If you're referring to the punk rock band "Ten Foot Pole", their latest studio album, "Escalating Quickly", was released in 2019. However, if you're asking about the actual production of ten-foot poles as a product, I'm afraid I couldn't find specific information on the last production date.

      Hmm... I can see how you may have a problem touching things with a ten-foot pole now.

  • It's not like Microsoft to release technically unstable, morally deficient software & services to the general public!

  • So they plan to crash and burn? (Score:3)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Thursday December 07, 2023 @04:17PM (#64064745)

    Because in the past, they at least managed to get every other version somewhat right. With the mess that Win11 is, if they really mess up Win12, too many people will be looking for alternatives.

  • All of those top-secret documents that were encrypted for a reason are now going to be available in some unencrypted format for anyone with access to the bloatware exploits. This will be shortly followed by data dumps. Finally we'll get the future we were promised from heaven in Johnny Mnemonic. The enterprise versions will likely not carry the AI. Nobody wants to buy more bandwidth just to let Microsoft datamine their ideas and steal and regurgitate IP via AI.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jythie ( 914043 )
      Eh, big companies will get their own versions... these new features are for the pleebs who can't afford any better.

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