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  • So LLM-based AI is apparently such a dead end as far as non-spam and non-party trick use cases are concerned that they are straight up rolling out anti-features that nobody asked or wanted just to convince shareholders that ground breaking stuff is still going on, and somewhat justify the ocean of money they are diverting that way.

    At least it's only supposed to work on PCs that incorporate so-called neural processor units, which if I understand correctly is going to be its own thing under a Windows PC branding.

    edit: Yud must love that instead of his very smart and very implementable idea of the government enforcing strict regulations on who gets to own GPUs and bombing non-compliants we seem to instead be trending towards having special deep learning facilitating hardware integrated in every new device, or whatever NPUs actually are, starting with iPhones and so-called Windows PCs.

    edit edit: the branding appears to be "Copilot+ PCs" not windows pcs.

    • Since this isn’t really even related to GenAI at all, in our house the theory is:

      • MS has been trying and failing to push ARM in PCs for a while
      • Now they take one with an NPU and rebrand it as Copilot+™️®️ PCs
      • They have market research that says initial sales are going to be soft and they panic because early soft sales create a bad vibe
      • So, without doing any of the usual build up of exciting the tech press, without hyping trade show buzz, they rush an unfinished, insecure, unwanted product to market in the hope it will be the killer app at last for high-battery life ARM on Windows.
      • They use lot of AI hype language to capitalize off the hype cycle, even though besides the OCR it seems to be pretty limited in its relationship to anything machine learning at all.

      • @gnomicutterance
        I kind of wonder if part of this isn't literally 'so we can siphon up all the things you type for more training data', and literally everything else is just to walk around that.

        So just a straight leverage to get everything everyone types!

        It's sure an awful way to do it...

      • this isn’t really even related to GenAI at all

        Besides the ocr there appears to be all sorts of image-to-text metadata recorded, the nadella demo had the journalist supposedly doing a search and getting results with terms that were neither typed at the time nor appearing in the stored screenshots.

        Also, I thought they might be doing something image-to-text-to-image-again related (which - I read somewhere - was what bing copilot did when you asked it to edit an image) to save space, instead of storing eleventy billion multimonitor screenshots forever.

        edit - in the demo the results included screens.

      • This might be the case, but at least the first I heard about the Copilot+ launch was that it was finally a "Macbook Air" killer - which I suspect would already be a strong selling point (at least if MSFT solved the backwards compatibility issue). Yet right after they announced the Recall stuff, and at least from what I have read it was received very negatively. So now they have the story that if you want the latest fast, efficient windows machine, you need to allow it to spy on your screen. Not the best marketing imo.

      • That you can jailbreak recall and run it on non compliant hardware seems to be the least concerning thing in that article, recommended reading.

  • There’s a MacOS app around that does pretty much the same thing called Rewind AI, but it’s a stupid subscription service as usual and for some inexplicable reason some people actually want this.

    While half of the reactions were “this is a the top of apps I wouldn’t install on my machine ever”, the other half was celebrating it in the name of our lord and savior productivity, going as far as saying this is a nice way to remember passwords …

    • Nightmare blunt rotation in the Rewind AI front page recommendations:

      Also it appears to be different than Recall in that it's a third party app and not pushed as the default in every new OS installation.

  • Microsoft has made windows noncompliant for so many places

    • ISSOs everywhere hitting the Tums, I bet.

      Personally, I just penguined up for the first time in years. Net-installed Debian 12 last week, no ragrets.

  • I shouldn't be surprised at the quantity of Microsoft stans posting to excuse Recall, but holy shit

  • This is the best summary I could come up with:

    At a Build conference event on Monday, Microsoft revealed a new AI-powered feature called "Recall" for Copilot+ PCs that will allow Windows 11 users to search and retrieve their past activities on their PC.

    To make it work, Recall records everything users do on their PC, including activities in apps, communications in live meetings, and websites visited for research.

    By performing a Recall action, users can access a snapshot from a specific time period, providing context for the event or moment they are searching for.

    For example, someone with access to your Windows account could potentially use Recall to see everything you've been doing recently on your PC, which might extend beyond the embarrassing implications of pornography viewing and actually threaten the lives of journalists or perceived enemies of the state.

    Recall also shares some obvious similarities to Rewind, a third-party app for Mac we covered in 2022 that logs user activities for later playback.

    To use Recall, users will need to purchase one of the new "Copilot Plus PCs" powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite chips, which include the necessary neural processing unit (NPU).

    The original article contains 596 words, the summary contains 185 words. Saved 69%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

31 comments