5 ms·
Bringing the power of AI to Windows 11
- CatWChainsaw 3y agoMaybe bring the power of in-house QA to Windows 11, please?
- version_five 3y agoMore privacy setting changes that will default to spying on you and sending everything you do and all you data to Microsoft. I wish I could look at this kind of announcement and see something positive, but it's all just thinly veiled espionage.
- y2hhcmxlcw 3y agoI can't agree more, totally opaque data will almost certainly be sent to an ever growing number of locations. If I so much as ask about it I'll be labelled a nutter.
- gigel82 3y agoThis is great, but I wish they'd focus as much on fundamentals. The bloat is tangible and measurable.
- Nextgrid 3y agoAI is great but how about fixing start menu search? Search that was perfectly working on Windows 7 but was lobotomized in subsequent versions.
- lizardking 3y agoThe context menu too!
- thereisnospork 3y agoHow about the settings menu? (edit: tbf while I don't have Windows 11, this feels like a safe presumption)
- miles 3y agoIt's easy enough to restore: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/restore-old-right-click-context-menu-in-windows-11/a62e797c-eaf3-411b-aeec-e460e6e5a82a https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/restor...
- warning26 3y agoEven in Win7 it wasn't particularly fast. I don't get how that one random person working on that "Everything" search utility was able to build instantaneous search on Windows, but Microsoft themselves couldn't figure it out.
- mjburgess 3y agoOne assumes that it's loaded with telemetry and bing-first searching, so it's design for data exploitation of customers rather than to be a menu
- 16bitvoid 3y agoIn fact, if you disable web search via a registry value or group policy (don't remember which), it becomes a lot faster. Not Everything fast, but significantly faster nonetheless.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoIt’s the next great thing about surfacing semantically relevant bing ads in your start menu and sending Microsoft summarized “diagnostic data” about everything you do and read to “improve their product experience.” Enjoy!
- EliRivers 3y agoMaybe the AI will be able to delete files and directories faster than me doing it myself with a magnetised needle and a steady hand.
- tinus_hn 3y agoThey’re still working on perfecting the system that sends all your data to the cloud so you can search it again.
- darrenkopp 3y agoI'm 100% in for this purely for the fact that it looks like it will actually tell you / provide a button to perform the action. I am a Windows fan and use it as my primary operating system, but I cannot tell you how irrationally angry I get when I end up in the new control panel and there are links like "find out how to do X" which just dump you into Bing search. Microsoft already knows the answer, that answer is potentially relevant to the specific version of windows I'm using, but they need to pump up Bing's numbers so they send me there and honestly the results aren't always that helpful.
- dhimes 3y agoI don't think your anger at that is irrational at all.
- kamefrede 3y agoI honestly don't see any benefits to the Dev Home app as is besides Dev Drive, which could be cool if it is that simple to just create a drive that is sandboxed. Perhaps the community will whip up (most likely not), extensions for stuff like Sentry or CI/CD. Could be a neat thing then.
- ActionHank 3y agoAfter their move to train AI off of Github repos I am deeply skeptical of wrapping up any code with a neat little bow for MS to further analyze.
- crakenzak 3y ago> We have added native support for additional archive formats, including tar, 7-zip, rar, gz and many others using the libarchive open-source project. You now can get improved performance of archive functionality during compression on Windows. This is easily the most exciting part of the whole announcement.
- Filligree 3y agoYes, but why did it take so many years?
- crakenzak 3y agoprobably because they were spending all those years putting annoying ads in the OS and start menu.
- recursive 3y agoMS has enough developers to build two features at the same time.
- solarkraft 3y agoBut not to fix annoying and abundantly obvious bugs, apparently
- CaptainNegative 3y ago1. Ads in the Start Menu. 2. Ads in the rest of the OS.
- pjmlp 3y agoYou would think, yet WinUI 3.0 is years away to achieve parity with WinUI 2.0/UWP tooling.
- ndiddy 3y agoHopefully it reaches parity with WPF before the OS gets EOL'd
- DrThunder 3y ago[flagged]
- blendigashi 3y ago[flagged]
- waboremo 3y agoDev Home dashboard seems neat. Although not sure how worth the rest of it is. ReFS is nice I suppose.
- hbn 3y agoThis might actually be a better UI for finding settings than their real settings app cause I swear I can never find anything in it and they move stuff around and rename things every other update Would be great if it can help you find how to do things in Office apps too, because it's the same problem. Those apps have had so many redesigns over the years, Googling for anything more complex than the most basic of usecases is impossible.
- shrimp_emoji 3y ago>horrible OS designed for consumer cattle >now with AI Now you can actually talk to Big Brother!
- blendigashi 3y ago[flagged]
- hulitu 3y agoBut the Big Brother wouldn't listen.
- qwertox 3y agoI'm pretty sure I won't get this offered since I am not signed into any Microsoft account on my Windows 11 installation. Or, I get it offered, but requested to sign in. I have zero issues with signing GitHub Copilot into my GitHub account to use it with Android Studio or VS Code, I just don't want the OS to be logged into a cloud account which I don't really own and where I don't know what's getting synced to it.
- icemelt8 3y agoEmbrace the future or use linux.
- TremendousJudge 3y agoI used linux for many years. Ultimately, I like my laptop's touchpad and trackpoint to remain functional. Believe me, I have tried.
- meekaaku 3y agoWhat do you mean or? the future is linux and it is here
- JohnFen 3y agoI wish I had that option, but unfortunately I'm forced to use Windows at work.
- the_third_wave 3y agoEmbrace the future -> Extend the future -> Extinguish the future Thanks but no thanks, it is a long time ago I took a different path which leads to a different future, one which is not likely to be extinguished.
- alar44 3y ago[dead]
- Xeamek 3y agoWhy does it matter if you are signed in? I mean, it's not like not singing in into microsoft account somehow prevents them from collecting telemetry. It's might be /slightly/ harder for them to match your profile, but we are talking about data collection scale that this is arguably irrelevant anyway
- valine 3y agoWe need something like this on Linux, maybe powered by Vicuna. I’m not sure if the current batch of LLaMA variants is coherent enough to work as a digital assistant, but my gut feeling is that a little fine tuning on tool use might be all thats needed.
- Ajedi32 3y agoThe hard part I think will be integrating the LLM closely enough with the other programs on your machine that it's actually useful in that context, and not just a glorified chat window or a text interface to do things you can already do more easily with a KB+Mouse.
- valine 3y agoIn a perfect world you give the LLM a python interpreter and it does the rest. Realistically, with the LLMs we have today, the right approach is probably to curate a set of APIs it's allowed to interact with. Some basic file system access and FFmpeg support would be extremely useful on it's own.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoLinux is fundamentally not monolithic like Windows, but maybe some DEs could expose hooks for LLMs to use. There is also the performance issue. Right now the task energy/memory usage of llama implementations is very high, and it takes some time to load into RAM and/or VRAM. It seems Microsoft is getting around this with cloud inference, and eats the hosting cost (for now). > little fine tuning on tool use might be all thats needed. Maybe I am interpreting this wrong, but LORA finetuning is extremely resource intense right now. There are practical alternatives though, like embedding databases people are just now setting up.
- icemelt8 3y agoThe videos in the article are absolutely slick!
- 1024core 3y agoReminds me of that spoof commercial, about Microsoft designing the artwork for an Apple mouse.
- zhenyakovalyov 3y agoam i the only one who is curious about how they are going to charge for this?
- seydor 3y agoCan the AI fix my taskbar and ungroup task buttons or will i still have to use a 3rd party program?
- 16bitvoid 3y agoThere's a section in the linked article about improvements to the taskbar, including the following: > You can now quickly identify and access any instance of each app housed in the taskbar with just one click. All instances of the app are ungrouped with labels on the taskbar. It makes it sound like you need to click a group first to ungroup it, but maybe there's an option to keep them ungrouped by default. I guess we'll see. You can catch a glimpse of what the labeled windows in the taskbar looks like in the Dev Home video embedded in the article.
- cs702 3y agoMake sure to watch the embedded video. A new permanent taskbar button opens an OpenAI LLM trained to use Windows 11. You ask the LLM to do what you want -- "summarize this email and send the summary to my boss." It works with all applications. It sees what you're seeing. As a longtime Linux user, it pains me to say this: It's... beautiful. ... But it's also scary, because it's not under your control. Ultimately, it obeys only the bureaucracy at Microsoft. In that sense, it's like "MOTHER" in Ridely Scott's Alien and "HAL" in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
- Gijs4g 3y agoYes, I really want OpenAI observing all my actions closely and 'taking notes' of everything I do.
- IceWreck 3y agoI would love this in Linux, but only if it works offline. Not a fan of sending everything I do to a remote machine.
- creatonez 3y ago> It works with all applications. It sees what you're seeing. Sounds like it will also see prompt-injection malware hidden in plaintext documents.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoOh yes. This is going to be glorious to watch. Before, prompt injections were mostly a joke. With this, they will truly become a proper, new type of attack vector.
- srslack 3y agoIt's also under the control of anything that it finds in its current "context window" that it decides to act upon, not just Microsoft... https://greshake.github.io https://greshake.github.io https://kai-greshake.de/posts/in-escalating-order-of-stupidity/ https://kai-greshake.de/posts/in-escalating-order-of-stupidi...
- 3y ago
- jetzzz 3y ago> AI-Generated review summary: We are making it faster and easier for customers to scan reviews for apps by using the power of AI to compile thousands of reviews into a simple summary, enabling customers to discover new content with ease. Would be cool to have an option to actually read those reviews. If I open Firefox page in the Store app it says 420 ratings but I can only read a single review. If I press 'See all' it just shows an empty page. If I open Firefox store page[0] in the browser it says 'No one has reviewed this application yet. Be the first to add a review.' Reviews seem to be split by country or by some other criteria for no good reason. [0] https://apps.microsoft.com/store/detail/mozilla-firefox/9NZVDKPMR9RD https://apps.microsoft.com/store/detail/mozilla-firefox/9NZV...
- JohnFen 3y agoI was already uneasy about the day when my employer makes us switch to Win 11. This makes me even more uneasy. I hope it's possible to remove the AI controls (especially the copilot button) from the UI.
- probablypower 3y agoMy issue with this is that it feels less like a new toy to play with and more like a new worm that is meant to hook me, my workflow, and my data into their silo. I'd like to see better demarcation in windows tooling when it comes to how they're managing user data. Similar to how developers tend to colour code DEV and PROD environments so that they don't accidentally alter PROD. I'd like to see colour coding on microsoft tooling that delineates "local data that is processed locally, and is 100% private" processes from "local data that will be processed in the cloud and possibly stored for training later without you being able to know" processes. The moment data leaves my local network, I assume it is compromised, so having clearer delineation will help me know what tools to avoid.
- nodogoto 3y ago[dead]
- G3rn0ti 3y agoA feature designed by the marketing department. Hopefully, we will be able to turn it off like Cortana.
- stnmtn 3y agoI don't know if I'm quite willing to go there yet, but LLMs are barrelling towards a level where, if the pace continues, they will easily be looked upon as the most import advancement of computing. The fact that training a statistical model on terabytes of text can lead quite naturally and obviously to what is shown in the video in the webpage is shocking. The shocking part is how natural it feels, and how I know this is something that can work. Congratulations to the teams that have been going down this path, this is wildly impressive stuff.
- yyyk 3y agoThis is a significant announcement. Note namechecking every non-Apple CPU vendor and NVIDIA - but not mentioning AMD/Intel GPUs. Another note: Lots of small improvements, but not allowing users to move the Taskbar (to Microsoft, some things are important). Oh, and they haven't abandoned ReFS - so will it be available without Windows Professional for Enterprise etc.? I can't see many devs paying for that alone.
- TremendousJudge 3y agoWill the AI allow me to disable the big blue "bing chat" button that shows up every time I try to search for something?
- vincengomes 3y agoIs this limited to Win 11 Pro edition only or also available for Win 11 Home users ? Everywhere they are mentioning coming soon to Windows 11, but considering they are projecting it as a developer focussed instead of for normal people i get the vibe it is not for Home edition.
- crooked-v 3y agoI can't wait for somebody to figure out a webpage that tricks this LLM into deleting C:\Windows. Edit: A less harmful proof of concept could be, say, turning volume up to 100% and opening fifty Edge windows with the Baby Shark video.
- agluszak 3y agoSoo instead of finishing the migration of the old Control Panel to the new Settings app they slapped some ML onto it and called it a day?
- lrpe 3y agoThanks, I hate it.
- zokier 3y agoMicrosoft and Windows has lot of neat stuff going on. But something happens in the productization process and the end result is a trainwreck. Large part of that is the distinct lack of trust that we have, both as consumers and technologists. Lot of fancy stuff gets built, then remains unused and unutilized, which inevitably leads the thing to wither and die. If MS wants to stop FAANG etc from eating their lunch they need to figure out a way to reverse the trend. And that doesn't happen with gimmicks like this, no matter how cool they are.
- Closi 3y agoI'm not sure Google is eating Microsoft's lunch right now... Microsoft seems to be coming to the lunch table and starting fights for Google's turkey sandwich (search).
- zokier 3y agoOffice is the bread and butter of MS, and Gsuite is very much eating into that. edit: I wouldn't be surprised at all if Amazon released an office(/groupware) style suite also soon. It definitely would be an match, they already have lot of user-facing enterpricy software
- devinprater 3y agoIt can see what I see? So it can see that unlabeled button on the screen and click it for me? It can see the game area I'm in, and can send controller input events to get me where I need to be to do the next part of the game I can play? I can describe this barely accessible Winget GUI app to me and check update all for me? Now that would be pretty freaking cool!
- qw32332 3y agoMeanwhile, Apple users still fighting SIRI that can only provide answers to 1% of questions at best, given you are lucky and it was able to understand your accent.
- willio58 3y agoAs a MacOS user, this looks really cool. I just hope Apple figures out how to do it, which I don't have a ton of hope for since they've flubbed Siri for so many years. I mean seriously, the fact that Microsoft is this far ahead with AI (because of their partnership with OpenAI), comes off as a massive failure on Apple's part. Not only that, but Microsoft's continued positioning as dev central (Github, Github Copilot, VScode, and more) while Apple dwindles with docs that have been lacking in quality for years and only providing the bulky Xcode as a code editor is frustrating me as someone who loves coding on Mac. I love using this unix-like machine but not having to sacrifice UX by using linux. But as time goes on it makes me wonder if Apple will ever start focusing on devs again, and now AI!
- joshstrange 3y agoI'm hoping Apple is working on something that run locally or potentially in some privacy-focused cloud approach but honestly I can't see any way to feed data into an LLM that doesn't result in leaking a ton of data about you if someone peaked at the input/output. The good news is I've been impressed with running various AI-type things (Stable Diffusion and llamda.cpp) locally on my M1 Max Macbook so if anyone can pull this off locally I think it's Apple.
- willio58 3y agoI do agree Apple's hardware is still top-notch. Their home-made chips have been amazing to use and I have no worry they'll continue to push the envelope there. And even iOS I feel is a solid piece of evolving software (other than Siri). It's MacOS and their lack of focus on devs that worries me.
- joshstrange 3y ago> It's MacOS and their lack of focus on devs that worries me You and me both, System Settings alone is a disgrace that I'm embarrassed for them that they shipped and it's only one of many recent failures related to macOS.
- rasengan 3y ago
- uses 3y agoWe are so very close to 1) AI escape and 2) AI reproduction. I don't see how broad swaths of humanity stand a chance against ambitious capital holders in combination with AI.
- deet 3y agoThere are two things to note here: 1. A cross-application connectivity layer that pipes data and actions between apps 2. A natural language interface to control #1 Thinking about them separately is useful, because although chat is the new UI hotness, #1 is valuable on its own and the two can potentially be deployed separately. As presented here, I suspect the natural language interface will be faster and easier than buttons for operating the cross-app layer for complex queries, but potentially slower than operating buttons for simple things (like "start dark mode"). But personally, I believe #1 combined with some AI context awareness is more powerful of the features. ... And btw, I left Apple last year to build a local-first and developer-extensible assistants for the Mac that's pretty similar. If this interests you, would love to chat (email in profile, as well as a waitlist).
- knrz 3y agoI was also thinking about how they could've integrated this into every app, but I figured that simple tasks would be more reliable across all apps if they did AI-recognition on screenshots of the desktop + injecting data like "Installed Apps", then by the end of it output virtual keyboard event or a virtual click at an X/Y coordinate. Just some afternoon postulating haha
- lostmsu 3y ago#1 has existed in Windows and other OSes for ages: accessibility APIs and UI test tooling (called UI Automation in Windows).
- awegio 3y agoIt looks like this is a high level interface more like Intents on Android, e.g. in the video it opens the Logo Templates page of Adobe Express probably without automated UI interaction.
- zeroDivisible 3y agoIt's a great set of updates, and it's especially telling that "privacy" wasn't mentioned even once in the whole article. I'm impressed with the progress. I'm also scared about privacy of the data. How will that work with installing windows in business environments with sensitive IP?
- frozenport 3y agoYou’ll need an AI tool to summarize that press release!
- worksonmine 3y agoI'm not the target audience, but reading the comments made me curious so I watched the videos and the examples were disappointing. They all require more steps than my current workflow and it has to go through some third-party server to achieve it. I was expecting more than suggestions for playlists and slack hooks.
- marak830 3y agoIf I'm reading this correctly, it's going to upload anything I copy/paste to their own LLM. We have confidentiality agreements that I'm not sure would pass this. Err. F$#k?
- WorldMaker 3y agoCortana is back: this time with much less personality and yet more ability to hallucinate facts than ever.
- crimsontech 3y ago“Bing, fire 5,000 of our workers with the lowest productivity scores”
- marcofiset 3y agoHere goes me never using Windows again for anything serious. This is a ticking time bomb of privacy and security issues.
- clnq 3y agoThis looks like it could be great. I use GPT-4 all the time, so a system-wide integration and especially assistant capabilities sound nice to me. And yet I cannot make myself excited for this. I can't get past the feeling that Windows Copilot will be used in slimy anti-privacy ways. I am somehow very sceptical that it will only use the screen's context as context for the user's queries. Probably because many new Windows 11 features have been anti-consumer, and Microsoft have been consistent at building this kind of reputation for years. It has numbed all of my excitement for anything Microsoft does.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoContinuing the justified, if cynical take, in the near-term I'd worry less about privacy, and more about ads. Microsoft has a track record of putting overt and covert advertising directly into the OS. With deep system-wide integration and awareness of commercial applications, how long it'll take before Windows Copilot turns into a sneaky salesman, preferentially suggesting commercial tools and solutions of the highest bidders, while Microsoft gulps up a firehose of money coming from approximately every company of the planet paying to slot themselves into model fine-tuning?
- HomeDeLaPot 3y agoGreat. Pretty soon I'll be able to say "Computer, enhance!" and it'll hallucinate whatever details I ask for in my JPEG.