Was using my SO’s laptop, I had been talking (not searching, or otherwise typing) about some VPN solutions for my homelab, and had the curiosity to use the new big copilot button and ask what it can do. The beginning of this context was actually me asking if it can turn off my computer for me (it cannot) and I ask this.
Very unnerved, I hate to be so paranoid to think that it actually picked up on the context of me talking, but again: SO’s laptop, so none of my technical search history to pull off of.
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Absolutely amazing.
My guess is that at this point there are so many user prompts its received so far in its training set that bring up both Copilot and privacy concerns that it first interpreted the question, then searched for the most common topic associated with itself (privacy), then spit out a hardcoded MSFT override response for ‘inquiry’ + ‘privacy’.
Occam’s razor dictates that it’s just overly permissive settings by default and an owner who doesn’t know how to turn off mic access
I want to believe that is the explaination, I really would’ve expected at least a hardcoded “features and capability” response, or for it to be more than a neutered chatGPT that im sure neither of us are going to use
MSFT appears to still be using a fundamentally old chatbot model that they’ve just slapped a bunch of extra ‘features’ (namely, Wooow! It has APIs and works on other MSFT stuff!) to, much like Bethesda’s game engine.
Probably barely different from Tay in terms of broad conceptual design, just patched and upgraded to do what it does faster.
The core design is garbage, and just like Windows itself, its nearly certainly a giant fucking mess of layers upon layers of different versions of itself hiding under a trench coat, all standing on top of something 10 to 20 years old.
I never needed Bing to open up in a side panel, I’m not sure why I would want that now
They bought OpenAI and all, why aren’t they using the most cutting edge from them? Or is it just severely lobotomized with some preprompt to the point I still would rather open up chatGPT
As a person who used to work at MSFT:
I can almost guarantee you there are a whoooole lot of people who have made their careers basically championing the very old chat bot model, and they are probably now either directly in charge of the OpenAI stuff, or at the very least ‘stakeholders’.
They will do nonsense corporate bullshit to make them selves seem very important, never really wrong about anything, and this will result in extremely slow and gradual actual adoption of the GPT stuff, all the while stressing all the reasons their old stupid bullshit can’t be seriously modified because of reasons that have to do with synergizing with other MSFT products.
The process of the company gradually figuring out that none of that matters when it comes to producing something that is actually better will be slow, painful and incremental.
Itll probably take half a decade.
…
For reference, as an aside, I was doing a contract of DBA kinda stuff when they unveiled Windows 8. We had to dogfood it, ie, the MSFT process of everyone working at MSFT has to beta test everything else MSFT is making.
Well… Windows 8 initially broke basically everything we were using to actually do DBA.
I got angry and pointed out that Windows 8 had removed the ‘windows’ from Windows. The initial version was soley the tablet based design, only allowing a maximum of two ‘panes’ open at a time.
We had to wait about a month for the various problems with SQL Manager Studio to be ironed out, and for them to basically allow the option to just use the more or less Windows 7 desktop for you know actually working on our PCs.
Point of me mentioning this is: I saw how ludicrous this all was, and was frequently verbally abused by our team lead for pointing it out.
Youre not allowed to go against the grain at MSFT unless youre a big dog. And… you become a big dog by bullying people and vastly overstating the necessity of what your team is doing.
The culture there is downright psycho and sociopathic.
Very informative insight, I’ve worked at a place or two where project management seems just so very disconnected to what is happening, going as far to argue about how competitions product quality doesn’t matter when we were in a meeting about a customer threatening to return their device… not suprised to find those mindsets have weaseled their way (or even made) big tech what it is today