from Hacker News

Why MSFT Copilot+ and AI PCs are the final nail in the coffin of open computing

by dollar on 5/22/24, 3:14 AM with 60 comments

• by pjmlp on 5/22/24, 7:13 AM

  Thing is the "The openness and modularity of PCs allowed users to customize their machines, create what they wanted without restrictions and maintain control over their digital experience. However, this open spirit that once defined the PC era has been gradually eroding, giving way to a new age of closed, tightly controlled computing." was only due to a mistake on IBM's part.

  IBM never imagined the PC would be taken away from them, the vertical integration market we have been slowly going back to, was the common way of selling 8 and 16 bit computers, until PC's came to be, and Compaq took advantage of it.

  The thin razor margins of PC components, the commoditization of computing, are most likely the main drivers for going back to that model.

• by bitwize on 5/22/24, 3:43 AM

  Enterprises are going to LOVE being (even more) beholden to Microsoft for this. Recall is going to give them a scrubbable, searchable timeline of nearly everything every employee does with their PC, making goldbrickers and troublemakers even easier to identify and punish. Don't think this will happen? Microsoft Office already has bossware built in, with nice dashboards and reports available to your manager showing what you're doing with Microsoft Office for how long. Building this in at the OS level will make Fred Taylor cum in his grave.

• by wmf on 5/22/24, 3:47 AM

  This article deserves a huge [citation needed] since Microsoft said these features are provided locally. I understand that in general Windows 11 loves phoning home but that's not enough to condemn the new Copilot features.

• by yjftsjthsd-h on 5/22/24, 3:39 AM

  > But there’s a catch: the advanced capabilities of these NPUs are tightly tethered to Microsoft’s cloud ecosystem.

  Why? If anything, hardware acceleration should make it easier to run AI locally.

• by zeroonetwothree on 5/22/24, 3:31 AM

  Phones were never upgradable so I don’t see how they are evidence of computing becoming more closed. I can still build a PC and run Linux on it just as I did 25 years ago.

• by throwaway4good on 5/22/24, 6:06 AM

  I am not so optimistic. I think LLMs and massive AI processing might be the last hurrah before a long early-2000s desert walk for big tech.

  Essentially we are at peak personal computing: End-users are just as well served by the laptop they had 10 years ago and the mobile phone they had 5 years ago, as they ones they have today.

  Don't get me wrong; LLMs are useful and exciting and so are other forever upcoming things from CS - say microkernels ... but that doesn't mean they can justify an arbitrary large valuation. Ultimately these things are worth no more than the value they can generate for their end-users.

  Right now big tech is betting it all on LLMs. It's a perfect match for big tech - requires massive amounts of capital and just a tiny number of highly paid specialists.

  But after having spent billions and their best minds. This is what they come up with: An app running on your PC that takes a screenshot of your desktop every n seconds and feeds that into an LLM that you then can interact with. Requiring completely new hardware and massive amounts of computing resources.

  So that you can go - "I looked at a brown leather bag earlier - what website was it at?" and similar.

  All has value I am sure, but also probably limited value. And could have been supported much more straight forward and with much less computing power through traditional software.

• by lakomen on 5/22/24, 8:00 AM

  I wish laptops would be component based, you know what I mean, don't twist my words.

  They would be less expensive and you could upgrade then too over the years. Why spend 3k on a new one when all you need is a new GPU for 700.

  But regarding the article or rather M$ PC"+", my 14900k has AI features, apparently. A NPU can come bundled with the CPU, doesn't have to be a separate component.

  I don't think the article is correct, it's just trying to ride the announcement. Category spam.

• by partiallypro on 5/22/24, 4:04 AM

  I like the idea of "Recall" but surely it will have some controls on what apps it is allowed to track? I don't think it is a great idea to have something like this if you're working on a sensitive project; or at just doing something you don't want others to know about in general. Suddenly if someone has your PC, they have your entire history. Not just browsing, but of -everything.- They did something similar with Windows "Timeline," but I never used it because I had absolutely no control over what it tracked. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvTJ8kGRi18)

  Apparently, this is done all on-device, with no phone home, but that's only one concern addressed.

• by mrits on 5/22/24, 3:36 AM

  It is really odd to me that people put any value on current AI platforms. Not only is the field advancing so fast that next year ChatGPT might be worthless we also have the ability to train from existing model for a fraction of the cost.

• by gmuslera on 5/22/24, 5:03 AM

  It seem to be an active, coordinated campaign against AIs bringing out of proportion the wrong things. Microsoft, Google, Apple, didn’t need AI to take control of our devices and information.

  With the Scarlet Johansson voice seem to be the same, too much noise in too much media at once for something that should had been obvious from the start, and it is not even the start of it.

  It may or not be the next step in a progression? Ok. That increases what players are in the game? Maybe. But the game was already set, and with the main players of today.

  There are more things to be scared about, with AIs and those players (and some that play the elephant in the room role), but that is not what they are pointing out.

• by Animats on 5/22/24, 3:58 AM

  What's Linux going to have to equal this?

• by extr on 5/22/24, 4:09 AM

  This article ironically sounds a lot like it was written with AI assistance.

• by johnea on 5/22/24, 7:17 PM

  Windows was a "bastion of open computing"?

  This is obviously crap/inaccurate/a misrepresentation, windows has always been a completely closed prorietary s/w platform.

  The only "openness" (since we're not allowed to say "free software" on HN) has been the ability to load unverified binaries from unknown developers. In other words, a complete security nightmare of a s/w platform.

  "Enterprise" has been "beholden" to M$ for decades. I would expect the M$U graduates in IT everywhere to embrace this abomination like they've embraced all the ones that came before it, that is with gusto 8-)

• by RunSet on 6/1/24, 12:49 PM

  "Intel Management Engine 2: The Sequel"

• by sys_64738 on 5/22/24, 10:53 AM

  Are these Copilot+PC mean "(Copilot) + (PC)" or is it "(Copilot+) (PC)"? It was never clear what the heck it even means. Figured it was AI with a PC bolted on but you never know.