701–710 of 771 posts
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> When Microsoft executes well, they’re a scary force. They were exceptional under Gates and it looks like they are again. I agree with this. And what I think is so fascinating is how much they left on the table during this very same time. Steven Sinofsky's Hardcore Software substack is an amazing read[1]. And it really shows how much they got wrong as well as how much they got right. MS is firing on all cylinders. B…
I agree that MS is executing well, but why would Google be afraid? There's no AI moat keeping anyone from replicating what MS is doing. They can train on everything on GitHub just like MS can. If anything, this is where they should both be afraid because an upstart with a browser extension could replace them.
Google regularly bans or breaks browser extensions that are inconvenient for their profits.
They also control the main app store for Android devices.
And for apps installed externally, they have a backdoor to remove any app they want from Android devices that they claim is for malware.
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$50+ in monthly subscription fees? BRB buying some MSFT
We forgot very quickly that there was an entire generation of developers who paid $1000-2000 or more for an MSDN subscription just as the base cost for doing business. This is what Microsoft does.
This is cool no doubt and I use it every day and it still has shortcoming and isn't perfect. However, I definitely see job cuts coming. Not now, in some years. I'm lucky, I'm closer to the tail of my career than the start. But I feel for the hords of young people who have got into this career but may soon find only a smaller percentage of them are needed. You can't fight it, it's going to happen. It's up to the indiv…
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If it were not for the impending headset, Apple would look a wee bit caught out as well. I suspect once Apple turns toward gen ai, all of its other advantages (infra, hw, instal base, services, etc) will propel it to forefront.
I'm curious on this as well - although a VR headset at this point feels like a foul ball straight backwards and into the net. Apple is good at a lot of things but it is AWFUL at AI. Siri is still the worst experience you can have with a language model. That said, all they need to do is integrate some OpenAI API's. In which case, Microsoft STILL wins because of its investment there and where OpenAI's enormous compute…
The thing is, a voice assistant needs to actually perform Natural Language Understanding -- it has to understand the intent of what's being said to it. That's actually a very different AI problem than what LLMs are doing at this point. Samsung's Bixby -- yes, the one everyone turns off -- can handle a "conversation" like this: (This is run using the "Space Resorts" sample capsule, a fictitious hotel booking system)
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User: Show me hotels near Mars
Bixby: I found these space resorts on Mars. (Shows two, “Martian Oasis” and “Space Y”)
User: [taps Martian Oasis] make a reservation for Christmas week
Bixby: Which habitat pod would you like? (Shows two)
User: Honeymoon
Bixby: Are you sure you want to book this trip? (Shows the hotel, “Number of astronauts: 2”, and the dates for Christmas week)
User: change the astronauts to 4
Bixby: (Shows the sam confirmation screen, with the number changed)
User: Yes
Bixby: I hope you have a great time at Martian Oasis. (Shows booking info)
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Now, in some ways this is no great shakes, but I don't think "all [Apple] needs to do is integrate some OpenAI APIs," because they don't have an API for NLU and deriving intent. GPT4 et. al. aren't currently designed for this kind of problem space. You could use them to make Siri (and Bixby and Alexa) better at answering general questions, but you can't use them to make the voice assistant do something, just respond to something.
Bixby 2 (the current version) is, incidentally, what came out of Viv, the voice AI startup that the Siri folks made after they left Apple.
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> have to wonder at what point developers remember how anti-developer Microsoft used to be Microsoft has historically been anti-opensource, but not anti-developer. Their first product was a BASIC interpreter and in my experience throughout the 90s and early 2000s their developer ecosystem (aka Visual Studio) has really been first-class. I am not a fan of Microsoft because they have been openly hostile to open source,…
Microsoft was also a long time anti-commandline and against scripting, they tried to made everything clickable, with wizards and s**, and remove text and keyboard-input as much as possible for admins and devs. Thinking about, Copilot is in it's own way, a continuation of this, just more dev-friendly.
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>Scary. For the first time in my life, I feel like my expertise is at risk of being rendered obsolete. Maybe not this year, but the writing is on the wall. I'm extremely skeptical about this happening. I haven't seen any evidence that GPT is capable of creating something new or even thinking logically. What's going to happen if you ask it to create something that isn't like anything in its training set? My experience…
Counterpoint: how often do you as a developer create something totally novel that has never been built before?
Also, it was recently proven by experts that aliens are living on the earth's core, they breed spherical cows and flying pigs.
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$50+ in monthly subscription fees? BRB buying some MSFT
If you want it cheaper: https://how2terminal.com This is when I build a product and then Microsoft releases it three weeks later -_-
I would love to hear from other people here but I tried it for a while and dropped my subscription. For short things it was nice, but the larger the suggestion the worst it got. I found myself constantly mentally debugging the output it suggested, I do not know if it was faster but I was mentally exhausted by it, unable to go for long periods of time. Dumb code completion is predictable, I know I'll need to press dow…
My trial ran out yesterday and I cancelled the subscription. It feels limiting on its own. There are three use cases off the top of my head - auto complete. This one is amazing but I’m not willing to spend 10/month for only that - generate code inline. The main purpose of copilot. It works okay but too often I feel like I’m faster if I google things myself. Perhaps I’m just a very fast googler and reader. Wouldn’t su…
This! I think what we lose from these auto-completion systems is a differing of opinions, options and abilities to learn and evolve our ideas.
I don't always want the most commonly weighted average answer. I want to see, learn and try new things.
But above all I cancelled for two reasons: it’s too slow and I can’t trust my privacy and code IP to be respected
I'm starting to look for GitHub alternatives for this reason, I'm sure it's no surprise where they're getting all the great training data from, it's our code. Which might be ok, but no you won't even be able to innovate to make some money because co-pilot will be reading all your suggestions.
I wonder if Microsoft trains it on their own proprietary code? :)
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I'm mostly curious how far the hockey stick will go up. Eventually most things level off.
This is the big question isn't it. With self driving cars we have been on the final 20% for what seems like forever.
But when we have that, it’s hard to believe that self driving won’t work.