this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
73 points (100.0% liked)

Technology

37739 readers
500 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] redcalcium@c.calciumlabs.com 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Microsoft has recently announced Windows Copilot, an AI-powered assistant for Windows 11. Windows Copilot sits at the side of Windows 11, and can summarize content you’re viewing in apps, rewrite it, or even explain it. Microsoft is currently testing this internally and promised to release it to testers in June before rolling it out more broadly to Windows 11 users.

Assuming this will use OpenAI API like other Microsoft's AI products, this is going to be expensive to operate. Subsidizing it indefinitely is surely not an option. How would Microsoft monetize it? By charging subscription like GitHub Copilot, or monetizing it somehow using users data they collected? I assume it would be the latter.

[–] boonhet@lemm.ee 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There's talk about Microsoft SoCs on their own products, much like Apple does the M1 SoCs.

These Microsoft SoCs would be used in Surface devices and likely have dedicated AI hardware. Again, much like Apple.

If we're talking about specialized models, not one generic LLM for everything a la GPT4, they might not have to be THAT big and could run on reasonably powerful devices.

[–] redcalcium@c.calciumlabs.com 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I really doubt that, at least for the next few years. "AI Assistant" usually means LLMs, and even M2 struggles to run them mostly due to large compute and RAM requirements. If Microsoft could somehow release a truly local AI assistant feature that can run on average windows users' hardware, that would be shake the whole ML field.

[–] boonhet@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

True, but they could get the base requirements of a task using OpenAI and then use specialized models locally to do subtasks.

Microsoft owns 49% of OpenAI, they don't need to pay nearly as much per request as we do and the cost will likely decrease over time too.