The " AI Wave" is just a fiction. The whole idea is just an attempt to get investments for companies that don't and cant really produce any value. I've tried many of these "AI" tools and none of them can really do anything useful.
this post was submitted on 17 May 2026
530 points (98.0% liked)
Technology
84796 readers
3607 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- 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, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
From what I've seen programmers are using Claude a lot. It may still cause problems in the medium to long term by squeezing out junior developers or atrophying the skills of senior developers, but in the meantime it is speeding up production of code.
It's also making scams a lot easier by simulating real human communication, up to and including video chat.
I'm not sure what will cool down the hype. It's almost exclusively driven by c-suite morons who find AI very useful for writing unclear emails and inaccurate notes. The sort of things they'd do themselves before. Even programmer who adopt it are mostly quietly muddling along.
There are many fields that are kind of forcing workers to use AI. Then their logic is: well, if you use AI, then I'll either cut your wages or hire cheaper workers.
That being said, do you really (and by “you” I mean all the lurkers as well) think this whole thing will backfire in the long run? I only see companies using more and more AI and being fine with laying off people and rehiring people who are 25% cheaper.
Companies' pretense that they don't need skilled workers is a bluff move in the struggle between labor and capital. It is an attempt to devalue workers and lower their wages. The bluff cant be sustained for long.
Relying on a chatbot to do work for you that isn't bulk writing or giving your customers the runaround is a recipe for disaster. Now, I'll grant you that this is a very advanced chatbot, but just because it can fool the average CEO, doesn't mean it can do much of anything truly useful.
Companies seek to monopolise skill and knowledge within these AI and encourage people to know nothing and pay them for skills/knowledge instead. This can only end poorly when it becomes uneconomical to provide this service to consumers but has also made those consumers devoid of skills/knowledge.
i do think its mostly about an excuse for workforce reduction rather than pull some other bullshit excuse from their ass they can use this one,for a time at least.
An example is here in Australia our biggest bank, CBA, crowed they reduced their workforce and saved a bunch from AI, turned out they just literally offshored and hired in India
Eventually customers will get super frustrated with telling the chatbot that this didn't solve the problem.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Microslop was right there along with the rest of them. Idiots with more wealth/resources than they are actually capable of managing letting fear/fomo drive their decision making is going to bury us all.
There is no "AI wave". Machine learning can he incredibly powerful when used properly, and is being used to process scientific and medical data in pursuit of improving humanity's understanding of reality around us.
But that is not what Microslop is pushing. LLMs that exist to chew up RAM, water, and electricity to shit out slop and generate suicidal tendencies in children.
They aren't trying to make copilot useful, they are trying and failing to make it profitable, just like every other LLM.
The "AI wave" is a scam. Everyone missed the AI wave because it sucks at everything except making slop.
I was going to say. If such a wave existed, Microsoft (which has considerable leverage over, and integration with, OpenAI) rode it better than almost every other company.
load more comments
(1 replies)
That's why I embraced the Dagothwave.
load more comments
(9 replies)
They didn't miss shit, they just competed and lost to like the four other AI companies that executed much better than them.
You know the real problem? They thought because their button was easier to find and press that people would use it and not look for better buttons. And, to an extent, they are right, but... the other buttons are compellingly better at the things they specialize in, and right now no company specializes in ALL THE THINGS particularly well. Claude is a better writer, ChatGPT makes better drawings, Gemini is (getting closer to) what Google Search always wanted to be. They're all imperfect, but each has its niche and people shop around enough to discover that CoPilot isn't usually the best scratch for their personal itch.
load more comments
(3 replies)
The more logical explanation is that AI is not a wave like the Internet and Mobile, but it is instead a wave like cryptocurrencies, NFTs and tulip bulbs.
If there's one thing that almost 3 decades at or near the forefront of Tech has taught me is that "novel" is not the same as "better", and that of all the times a novel technology was pushed by insane amounts of hype, only a handful turned out to match the hype and the ratio of good-ones to bullshit has become much worse in the last 2 decades as the Tech Startup sector fully morphed from Techie-driven to Financeer-driven.
On hype alone "AI" (as in, what's called now AI for the public, rather than the ML domain) stinks of greed-driven bullshit and the more one analyses the Technical details of LLMs and the Mathematics of it as well as of the improvements over time, the more painfully obvious it becomes that it's not at all AGI or a path to it, rather it's an overhyped attempt at it that turned out to be the wrong path. (All of which would've been absolutelly fine and a big Scientific step forward if it weren't for the greedy financeer class and grifters pushing, purelly for their own personal enrichment, for people and companies to adopted it for doing things it's not suitable for)
Maybe AI is a particle?
Maybe it only behaves as a particle when it's being observed?
AI has an interesting economic trait in that it's very, very expensive to deploy, and made very fast progress from 2022 to 2024. That caused investors with money to believe that:
- Pushing the frontier was going to cost a lot of money. More than any other purported revolutionary tech.
- Extrapolation of past improvement meant that whoever was on the cutting edge may end up with a product with a huge paying market.
- So whoever wins this race would be rich, and the investment would have been worth it for them.
But since 2024, we've seen that the cutting edge got even more expensive much faster than expected, and much of the improvements in performance now come from inference rather than training, which represents a high ongoing cost.
Now, if we extrapolate from that trend line, we'll see that the market will be much smaller for AI services at the cost it takes to provide that service, and the question then becomes whether the industry can make its operations cheaper, fast enough to profitably provide a service people will pay for.
I have my doubts they'll succeed, and we might just be looking at the industry like supersonic flight: conceptually interesting, technically feasible, but just a commercial dead end because it's too expensive.
The economics of it don't add up and the growth rate of the curve of improvement over time has already significativelly fallen which looking at the historical curves for other technologies is a very strong indication that it's approaching the limits of how far it will go even though it's nowhere close to the hype.
So at both levels it all looks like a massive bet in the wrong horse that's turning out not to be a winner but it keeps getting pushed by those who bet on it in the hope of making enough people and companies dependent that its sustained by nothing more than the unacceptable cost of it failing.
(In terms of strategy, it's similar to how Uber started by using loopholes in the regulations for taxis, investing heavilly in becoming so big and established fast that when Authorities around the world got around to address those loopholes, they ended up accepting Uber and the like as something that could not be reversed and instead of regulating it out of existence, legitimized it. A very similar strategy was used by AirBNB: make the facts on the ground so big and reverting them so damaging that their low-value-adding business model with massive negative externalities and collateral damage ends up protected rather than made to pay for the societal costs of said collateral damage and negative externalities - essentially at some level Uber and especially AirBNB are being heavilly subsidized by society by being allowed to "polute" at will without paying for it).
So as I see it, the way Microsoft and other AI investors are going at it is to try and create a beachhead for it via hype, branding and lock-in in the expectation that something will come along at some point from the companies they invested in that is actually a genuine breakthrough that uses all the computing capacity created with their investment money.
I think that the reason why from the point of view of the public the AI adoption feels wrong is because it's almost entirelly top-down, driven by marketing techniques and against the natural desires of people - it's a novel form of entertainment being shoved down people's throats as suitable for important responsabilities.
From my own experience, this feel a lot like the hype part of the cycle for the Segway, only with 100x or 1000x more investment money behind it.
The economics of it don't add up and the growth rate of the curve of improvement over time has already significativelly fallen which looking at the historical curves for other technologies is a very strong indication that it's approaching the limits of how far it will go even though it's nowhere close to the hype.
Yeah, I'm convinced that they've maintained the illusion of continued exponential improvement from 2024-2026 by sneaking in exponential increase in resources (hardware complexity, power consumption), to prop things up past what should have been a plateau.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(27 replies)
I don't care anymore. Haven't used Windows in years.
It's a wave of sewage, few users want to ride it in the first place
It’s like they created a very good phone tree and are trying to shove it into everything that never had or needed a phone tree in the first place.
load more comments
(22 replies)
load more comments
(4 replies)
They should add much more AI. Why? Cause it's really funny to watch from the outside as a Linux user.
If Microsoft wasn't run by tools, they'd see the gap Google and Apple have left behind by locking down their eco systems.
They could be the hero we need by saying we'll make the software and you fully own your device like pc / windows.
But of course they won't, and will just shoot themselves in the dick.
Just like when they ditched explorer we were all like yaay! Then instead of attaching to Firefox they just became another chromium cuck.
Why would anyone take your shitty browser that's just a skin of chrome...
Again, they had the chance to take the pro customer lane and succeed, but they were too inept.
It isn't just ineptitude. Of course executives at Microsoft know that they could be good and be successful with consumers. But they don't need to please consumers, they have far more important customers: the surveillance state, and the military industrial complex.
Once corporations have a near-monopoly position, they do not need to make good products anymore. Microsoft has enough money already to completely fail at everything for centuries and they'd be just fine. So they can focus on other goals, such as dismantling online anonymity for the benefit of the ruling class, who owns and controls Microsoft.
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
Wave? This is like being sad you did not get in on the housing crisis, or the dot com bubble, or any other clearly labeled landmine.
load more comments
(5 replies)
You didn’t miss the “mobile wave”. You purposely gave up. Idiots.
True. As much as I hate to admit it, the Windows phones were actually pretty good.
Had they not botched app adoption and then immediately given up, they could have done fairly well.
load more comments
(4 replies)
load more comments
(7 replies)
They didn't miss the "wave", they discovered it's just hype and a bubble. They spent a fortune and damaged their core products to try and get in on AI, and have realised it was fools gold that their actual paying customers don't want. This really sums the problem up well:
According to Velloso, less than 3% of paying users actively use Copilot, even though Microsoft has pre-deployed it directly into the Windows 11 taskbar and across the Office suite.
Out of Microsoft’s 450 million Microsoft 365 user base, the company has only managed to convert roughly 15 million paid Copilot seats. This means a staggering 96.7% of users are rejecting the premium AI features, yielding just a 3.3% paid adoption rate. When viewed against Microsoft’s estimated $37.5 billion quarterly AI spending, this is an alarmingly low adoption rate.
I'm sure I'm like many people - I tried Copilot a couple of times; it's ok to make an email or even document text a bit more concise, but that's really it. I don't find it useful; I do all the actual work and then occasionally get an AI to help make it a bit easier to read very similar to a spell check and grammar check. It's not good enough to do anything else; it bullshits and is error ridden and like all the AI I've tried it's really plateaued. I just really don't see where the value in that $37.5bn spent by Microsoft is.
I certainly wouldn't pay for copilot myself. Instead I object to it being rammed down my throat at work, and Windows 11 just being generally awful but not improved. Microsoft are finally making the right noises but the damage is already done.
load more comments
(3 replies)
scales back?
I just got an update that puts a persistent copilot overlay in the corner of Excel, blocking my cells. and the same update seems to have added a context menu that shows up on left click on a squiggle word in Word, which again blocks my document unnecessarily. I use neither of these features. I want neither of these features. I want to use the fucking program to do my goddamn work
On my work laptop, Notepad used to have Copilot built in but now it doesn’t. So that’s a little scaling back
load more comments
(3 replies)
Are you really being "left behind" when everyone else is going the wrong way?
I'm really baffled because this is super easy to fix.
Step 1. Pull all the AI bloat out of Windows 11. Make a clean, compatible, and user friendly OS out of the Windows brand.
Step 2. Spin CoPilot into it's own OS. Go crazy with your "Every app is just a different AI presentation of your data." Make the AI in there all powerful. Allow users to remote to the OS and run the same AI regardless of the platform.
Step 3. Print money
You're saying they're going "the wrong way", but from the standpoint of a publicly traded company it's literally the best way possible.
You promise to give $1million to Nvidia, Nvidia promises to give $1million to you - wam, bam, suddenly your stock market valuation's up, people are throwing their money at you, and you didn't even have to call your bank to make any transfers.
They're literally printing money out of thin air.
That it will all crash and burn at some point? Who cares? If everyone goes down, you can blame the market. If you're not in on the bandwagon while everyone else is printing money, you get sacked by the board of directors.
That's all there is to it.
The problem isnt co pilot. Its co pilot being rammed in incredibly stupid ways into every possible product.
More importantly, its cramming it in everywhere when basis windows 11 sucks. Explorer sucks, search sucks, performance sucks, Updates suck.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
I encurage MS to make an Operating System, like sit down with the Linux From Scratch book and try to make something. The Gentoo handbook is also a blast. Get the basics in, make a solid init system, a package manager and watch hardware start working for you.
Plastering DOS with even more layers of patches, AI slop and sales pitches has been done, did not work and it's time to move on.
load more comments
(1 replies)
this is a decent read. theres honest criticism and not a "m$ sux lol" rant. a someone who can agnostically enjpy tech history, i would like to see how this plays out.
load more comments
(6 replies)
The article touches on a bunch of valid points, but re the headline, I don't really think that a failure to generate excitement about AI integration into Windows 11 is because they missed the boat. It's because they're shoehorning it into places it doesn't belong.
They have the ability to make it useful. Ethical concerns aside, GitHub Copilot is as good as any AI development assistant, and better than most. Hopes that they'd gain ground with Bing would have needed them to be way ahead of the curve (and for AI search result summaries to be more useful than the top results, which they rarely are).
But for Copilot to be useful in the desktop environment, it needs to be there quietly in the places it's needed. Improve your help tools, make Grammarly irrelevant, infer document context to make search better. Don't rename half of your products "Copilot", don't put flashy buttons in every app, just use the benefits of applied AI to improve your products.
Oh, and make it optional, for fuck's sake. If I don't feel like I have control over my OS any more, I'm not likely to stick around when other options are available.
load more comments
(3 replies)
view more: next ›