this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
312 points (85.0% liked)
Technology
60026 readers
3613 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I can only imagine they're shutting it down to replace it with something with different branding, based on an LLM. Microsoft has gone all-in on LLMs and I'm sure they'd love some of that virtual assistant action if they were able to differentiate themselves.
Windows copilot . It’s available for testing in canary builds. And it kinda sucks even worse than Cortana did.
I have no idea why they're doing this. LLMs are a useful tool in certain areas, but they're by no means ready as the sort of universal assistant tool Microsoft is trying to position them as.
I use GitHub Copilot to make writing boilerplate code faster and easier, and it works really well for that, but I can't see any other computing tasks I engage in regularly benefiting from an AI assistant trying to get all up in my business.
I get why a lay person would misunderstand the capabilities of LLMs. They sound like a thinking person should sound, so they treat it like it's coming from a thinking person.
But how are all the (presumably) tech-literate Microsoft employees also confused by this? Anyone paying even a little attention should have seen numerous instances of LLMs confidently asserting "facts" that they pulled out of their asses. They are not the right tool for most of the stuff people use a voice/OS assistant for.
I have to assume it's the business guys up top hearing the "AI" buzzword and getting horny for capitalism but god damn