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Posted by thewebguyd 11/19/2025

Microsoft AI CEO pushes back against critics after recent Windows AI backlash(www.windowscentral.com)
234 points | 381 commentspage 2
taco_emoji 11/19/2025|
Look, GPT-3 was pretty magical. DALL-E was amazing.

Everything since then has not really pushed too far passed that "impressive tech demo" state. I like using AI to help me with coding. That's... about it.

kulahan 11/19/2025|
it's pretty good at highly specific questions about software support, from my experience. I'll say what program I'm using, what I'm trying to do, and what errors I keep hitting.

"Click this, then that, then this other thing and it should work"

"that other thing isn't an option"

"Oh you're 3 versions behind. Instead, it's in location X."

falcor84 11/20/2025||
> But with Microsoft literally becoming an AI company in the last year ...

"literally"?! What does that mean? That they offloaded all decision-making to AI?

uberman 11/19/2025||
This is Microsoft's "Do you guys not have phones?" moment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqjVdPtB9lU

surgical_fire 11/19/2025|
Considering Diablo Immortal generated a ton of money, I hope you are wrong.

I believe users are stupid enough to stick to Microsoft "agentic OS" anyway.

FridgeSeal 11/20/2025||
My biggest issue with “users choosing to stick with it” is the inordinate number of users in corporate environments who simply won’t be given a choice.

They’ll be given some garbage W11 laptop by IT, which will be irrevocably infested with whatever garbage MS wants, and there will be _nothing_ they can do about it. I can see it happening in real time with my partners work computer.

3eb7988a1663 11/20/2025||
Garbage software loaded on a corporate laptop is nothing new. That it comes directly from Microsoft instead of a third party security company does not meaningfully move the needle. I have long assumed that a work machine has literal keyloggers.
haolez 11/19/2025||
The endgame is obvious: make people train agents and models that will replace them. Executives at MS must think this is subtle and a genius move, but it is obvious and low effort. They don't see that making crappy products in the short term will strengthen their competition, even from small contenders, which might disrupt their core. I doubt MS will out execute others in this race. Let's wait and see :)
AndrewDucker 11/21/2025||
I am impressed by AI. I just don't want to use it. "Look at how realistic this extruded text looks from a distance!" is definitely an achievement. It just doesn't add to my life in any useful way.
Ekaros 11/21/2025||
Real question for me is how often do I want to generate a image, video or have a conversation with computer. For me really quite rarely.

And no replacing your customer support with chat bot does not make it better. Just make a damm website with everything I need. Lot less errors, lot simpler for me to do what I want.

red-iron-pine 11/21/2025||
yeah the generated images are fun a few times, and they've come up in some tabletop RPG gaming with friends as quick fillers for NPCs or cave locations, etc.

but it's a niche thing. in exchange for one-offs we basically have the internet turn into bots and the annihilation of art as man-made expression -- and by burning the equivalent of a small country's daily power consumption.

at this point its tech bros praying for AGI, which will in all likelihood end up with a Torment Nexus

netdevphoenix 11/21/2025|||
>It just doesn't add to my life in any useful way.

Most products don't add value into our lives imo. They are the means by which we get money flowing which is needed to keep the economy alive. Some might argue that they actually subtract from it hence the need for dopaminergic products. The question for the tech CEOs is how to make LLMs reliably dopaminergic in the way Instagram/Tik Tok and the like are.

franktankbank 11/21/2025||
I've come to be unimpressed by this "money flow" hypothesis to the economy. Kinda sounds like retarded bullshit an accountant monkey came up with.
HeavyStorm 11/21/2025||
Have you tried using it as a knowledge retrieval mechanism, I. E., in lieu of Google? Because if not, you really should.
AndrewDucker 11/21/2025|||
I would invite you to read the other comments on this post by people who have tried to use it for that, and found that it makes regular fundamental errors.

Most of the time you're better off reading a few responses to a given question (on, say, Stack Overflow) and synthesizing your own understanding out of them, rather than taking one that an AI has synthesized for you.

mingus88 11/21/2025|||
I feel that calling it AI is a big part of the problem.

An LLM parses and generates language exceedingly well. I use LLMs daily now and they are a boon for certain tasks.

An LLM is not an all knowing Oracle. It doesn’t know anything. People who treat the language generator as an authority on anything are fools.

simianwords 11/21/2025|||
Who is getting fundamental regular errors? I don’t get any.
croon 11/21/2025|||
Do you verify regularly against real documentation/outside sources/subject authorities/question the output? I do, and regularly get wrong information from premier LLMs. I still use it for information retrieval because interrogating large corpora of text and double checking key information can still be faster, but I'm not fully convinced it's long term beneficial for my intellect or knowledge retention.
franktankbank 11/21/2025|||
I need a way to block specific people on HN.
Yizahi 11/21/2025|||
It's mostly useless for anything with numbers or other hard facts. Sure, 80% of the numbers would be correct, but we can never know which 80% and would need to manually verify everything. Not that Google is better in complex tasks). LLMs are mostly useful for producing some vague non-factual business speak, or some abstract imprecise media. This is natural result of the architecture of these programs.
wewewedxfgdf 11/19/2025||
Microsoft management may be succeeding with building the cloud business, but they've wrecked Windows.
pjmlp 11/19/2025|
This is one thing that I miss from Balmer days.
moribvndvs 11/20/2025||
“Why people don’t trust a black box–owned and operated by an increasingly untrustworthy and incompetent organization, with a clear and vested interest in extracting and selling information about its users– with access to all their files and activity is mind-blowing to me” says corporate executive equivalent of a used car salesman.
themafia 11/19/2025||
> Jeez there so many cynics!

Jeez there are so many clueless CEOs!

> It cracks me up when I hear people call AI underwhelming.

This is your business. It should "make you curious." Saying it "cracks you up" is ridiculous behavior from someone in your position. I will never do business with someone like this.

> I grew up playing Snake on a Nokia phone!

Because you were bored? Or because you literally set time aside every day to play it because it was just that good? What is this nonsense?

> The fact that people are unimpressed that we can have a fluent conversation

I have "fluent conversations" already. With people. About recent and relevant things. The fact that a computer can pretend to do this is not impressive. Press on it hard enough and you'll immediately see the cracks. We've had weak chat bots since forever.

> with a super smart AI

That's trained on existing data. It cannot synthesize new perspectives or prerogatives. It often fails to know anything that recently occurred. It often presents data as if it is absolutely true and that it could not possibly be wrong. It's the opposite of smart in every way.

> that can generate any image/video is mindblowing to me.

It can make copies. It cannot generate anything novel. There was no part of my life that was hampered by the fact I couldn't generate images or videos. This is an amusement, not anything that adds to my bottom line.

FridgeSeal 11/20/2025|
If it weren’t so tiring having to wade through all the ai slop they add to products I’m forced to use, the fact that leadership in the field are getting petty and childish about how not everyone thinks their toy is shiny is a real “telling on themselves” moment.

If it actually, truly, world-changingly good as they are _begging us_ to believe they are, they wouldn’t need to care that people disliked it or chose not to use it.

But because they’re practically going red in the face screeching about it, it really comes off as “cope”, to use the hip new word.

650 11/20/2025||
Mustafa Suleyman (Microsoft AI CEO) is a grifter. He dropped out at 19 and later ran "product" for Deepmind, riding the coattails of Demis Hassabis.

He's known for:

- bullying employees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mustafa_Suleyman#cite_note-14:...

- reorgs, pointless meetings, toxic culture (example: extra office day for his org): sources who work at Microsoft

- https://x.com/pmddomingos/status/1972584701736157664

- He's a corporate climber, good at empire building, which is why Google let him go. Hires product people from his ex companies and you are left with 3 engineers and 5 product managers for a feature and don't ship anything useful.

willis936 11/20/2025||
Seems like a perfect match for a product that is a computer that lies.
FridgeSeal 11/20/2025||
I mean, if they want to put a grifter and a con artist in charge of their division and torpedo themselves, I say let them go for it!

Something, something, never interrupt your opponent whilst they’re making a mistake.

cadamsdotcom 11/19/2025|
> it's hard to believe we're going to see a version of Windows that isn't bloated with AI functionality most people didn't ask for.

All the leadership need to do is read these types of articles and they’ll see what’s going on outside the walls. One wonders how the internal incentives can be so wrong.

pessimizer 11/19/2025||
Because they're right. They'll all collude to make sure that you can't install a non-"smart" OS, just like you can't buy an non-"smart" tv, and the public will be well-trained to mumble something about the "market" and call you names ("luddite," "techie," "boomer," whatever...) when you complain about it.

Once a generation has been raised who never saw a computer that couldn't refuse to let you type what you wanted into it, young people will stop believing that you could ever type what you wanted. Old people will forget that you could ever type what you wanted. It worked with literally everything else.

Vespasian 11/20/2025||
Yeah it worked everytime so despite complaints so they have all the reason to believe it will work this time either.

The future is never certain and, as always, there will be unexpected and rapid societal shifts that may change things rapidly, but those may well be 300 years out.

Macha 11/20/2025|||
The investors want AI because they believe it will replace all intellectual work, and so the company with the best AI will get all the money from several other sectors.

The execs want AI to show to the investors to improve their job security and compensation packages.

The middle managers want AI to show execs to improve their promotion causes.

The customers only get to talk to the day to day employees of the company, so their opinion doesn’t matter to the rest of the hierarchy

Narishma 11/20/2025||
Reminds me of the Xbox One reveal disaster.
abdusco 11/20/2025||
I had to remind myself what that was about

> The Xbox One reveal disaster in 2013 stemmed from controversial policies that were widely rejected by consumers, primarily the mandatory 24-hour online check-in (effectively an "always-online" requirement) and severe restrictions on used games. Compounded by a primary focus on TV and media features over gaming, and a higher price tag of $499 with a mandatory Kinect, the policies caused a massive public backlash. This allowed the PlayStation 4 to successfully position itself as the consumer-friendly gaming option, ultimately forcing Microsoft to reverse all the controversial DRM policies before the console's launch.

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