Posted by thewebguyd 9 hours ago
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.
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.
It's almost like the kind of trap a lot of solo devs get into where they build a thing that is interesting to them but then can't find anyone else interested. But at least the solo devs built something that worked for themselves. I can't imagine anyone at MS eating their own dog food on this stuff.
At a company like MS, that shouldn't happen. They're supposed to have the resources to understand what their customers want. But we've seen this trend for the last 15 years. Companies like MS, Meta, Google, don't want to engage and collaborate with the customer. They want to push ideas down and be celebrated for their design brilliance. They don't even really A/B test this stuff anymore. The inmates are running the asylum.
The problem is that no amount of studies or A/B testing is going to change a political decision inside the company. And with AI, I'm convinced that for all the big players it is political at this point simply because all the execs have bet so much money on it. If they can't make it work, we're talking about literally billions of dollars of responsibility. Hence these desperate attempts to shove it everywhere in hopes that something somewhere would work well enough, if not to recoup the investment, then at least to postpone the moment it all comes crashing down.
Also, Co-pilot objectively sucks and is a lying disinformation machine that has rarely helped me with anything.
Trust is Microsoft's greatest asset and they don't seem to have any champions inside the company that can tell these people they are destroying the company's trust.
Bing has been broken for a year now and nobody has fixed it. ATROCIOUSLY broken. That hurts trust.
Today I asked it to add a constant as an argument to every call to a specific method in a unit test. The result was pure slop: The prompts leaked out into the proposed diff, and there was just a list of every method call, not placed where the method calls were in the unit test.
Just get the darn stuff to work before you shove it into every corner of my life.
Not to mention, I can find AI perfectly impressive and still have absolutely no day-to-day use for it… certainly not enough to justify it taking over my operating system experience.
Nor do I ever want to have a voice conversation with my computer to where it responds in an uncanny valley voice. If I do want to use voice, it's to give a command. No response needed. "Hey computer, call John" that's it. Do the thing, don't talk back. A glorified voice assistant is all the further it needs to go.
I don't think Microsoft as a corporation is any longer even aware of customer trust as a concept. All we are is a KPI and a credit card to be exploited for anything they feel they can take.
We aren't even people to Microsoft anymore. Just a revenue source to be maximally exploited right now with no concern for future revenue.
I think this is a big part of it. If Apple ever achieves their vision for personal context Siri & AI in their OS, I bet people will praise it and actually use it. Because Apple has built trust with their customers, and has strong marketing around privacy.
Microsoft burned that bridge a long time ago. They feel sleazy. Maybe if they haven't violated their users trust over and over again, people would be more receptive.