What is Windows 11 'AI Explorer'? Everything you need to know about Microsoft's upcoming defining AI PC feature (including it always watching you)
What is Windows 11 'AI Explorer'? Everything you need to know about Microsoft's upcoming defining AI PC feature
So, how will this work and comply with laws regarding its use in a medical institution?
What about its use in a company that has extremely valuable trade secrets that need to be kept that way?
What about the military?
Wouldn't this make for an excellent target to harvest data for hackers?
I wonder if Win 11 LTSC will leave it out.
Microsoft will release a GPO or MEM setting that works 20 percent of the time to turn off the constant AI data mining, only available to enterprise SKUs.
Other than them having some setting only for enterprise users, there's another question - what has more weight, Microsoft or the law?
In America who knows. In Europe, it’s probably the law
what has more weight, Microsoft or the law?
If law forces them, Big IT will challenge it only to get a few years to mine data and get a few billions. Or outright violate it, because the penalty will be less worth.
Very good questions!
Military would be fine, because they don't tend to update very frequently, if at all. If it works, that's the way it will stay, and the recent controversy wouldn't exactly encourage them to do so.
What about its use in a company that has extremely valuable trade secrets that need to be kept that way?
Same way the LLM debacle has currently gone, where people will just throw sensitive information into it with abandon. At least one major tech company has penalised workers for doing that with ChatGPT.
If there's a group policy to turn it off, maybe, but Microsoft might just not have one, or it'll need to be disabled every update.
Most importantly - is it watching my porn with me too and learning about that?
As worse and worse win11 features are unveiled it’s so funny to see these posts slowly filled with more “yeah i just switched to linux” comments.
Obligatory Linux mint post.
Switched to mint on my laptop a couple months ago and love it, using it full time on that system. Still need to run windows on my desktop for some audio production and VR gaming, but honestly that system is going to Mint next for the other 90% of the usage. Couldn't believe how refined the Linux desktop experience has gotten, but then again last time I gave it a try was probably well over a decade ago :)
pfff... I'm going back to Windows XP Pro x64 Edition.
don’t remind me of better days
Really loving Bazzite so far.
And removing one of the best features, the subsystem for android. It stops making sense from many people's perspectives and using a linux program like waydroid would probably be better than using android studio on Windows11.
Honestly I'm already not a big fan of Windows 10 so if Microsoft tries to force me to download Windows 11 with all these nonsense AI features that spy on you I'm just gonna switch to Linux
I switched in November. I have no regrets. I rarely run into issues, and having the control to make decisions over my own computer is superb.
having the control to make decisions over my own computer is superb
I find it really sad that it has come so far that feelings like these exist. That should be a matter of course. Instead, it has become a special feature.
I switched last week. It was pretty easy with only a few small issues.
Same! It was actually a pretty big surprise that Mint worked flawlessly out of the box on my crappy pre-built PC. Everything's working great including the printer! I'm seriously impressed.
Everything you need to know
Is to delete windows 11
yeah, no thanks so fucking very much
No fuckin thanks…
Bring back Clippy
They renamed it Creepy.
So they disable this in EU, right?
Useless bloatware. And then they added AI.
Yep, the AI will be watching, including porn. (not confirmed since not out)
‘It looks like you’re writing a letter. Would you like a tentacle with that?’
The Eye
(It knows you, it sees all that you do) (You cant hide) (....) (You thought so much about whether or not you Could, that you didn't think about if you should) (quite a scary thing) (to be so fully Known) (I hope that there is going to be a way to disable that)
(Why are we taking like this)
For the average user, with maybe a little bit of IT knowledge but doesn't work in IT, what can we do for ourselves and our families other than go to win 11 eventually?
Unironically, switch to Linux. Mainstream distros like Mint, PopOS or Ubuntu are very friendly for casual users, have GUIs for everything and if something does go wrong, the error messages actually have proper meaning and you'll find tons of resources online as well as people willing to help.
Most stuff nowadays runs in a browser anyway, so here there's no compatibility issues, office is available in Linux through libre office and gaming has come far with steam and proton.
If I'm reading this correctly this runs locally and will requirean NPU, so would not be present or working without AI dedicated hardware?
It honestly sounds useful and I would be a little excited to use it, but I imagine Microsoft will collect the data in some way which would be bad as it pretty much records your screen all the time (I somehow doubt all the info the AI collects will be actually stored locally)?
Hopefuly one day there will be a point when a similar software will be developed that runs 100% locally, storing the data locally and have no internet connectivity and just be a useful tool.
Good news is that unless you have Qualcomm CPU (or one with integrated NPU in the long run) you are safe from it for now
Yeah you just about summed up my thoughts about the feature.
It sounds like it could be genuinely useful, but I could never trust Microsoft to do it right, no matter how much they insist it's local only.
Honestly I think windows is so fucked in terms of market share and it seems like they are kind of just pre-emptively ceding the battle to linux intentionally or not.
Yeah people have been waiting for years for linux to eat windows for lunch and it hasn’t happened yet but I am convinced that linux becoming massively more practical and easy to use for gaming (Steam deck being a good catalyst) in the last couple of years has pushed things past a tipping point. Gaming might not make up the outsized chunk of desktop usage, but gaming is where people experiment, try new things, learn software inside and out and it is where people are most inspired to contribute and build and polish out the annoying little details of complex systems.
Yeah Microsoft will have its walled moats around entire sectors of business indefinitely into the future, and that probably is where most of the consistent money is, but I think Microsoft shitting the bed with Windows 11 so hard is creating the rosiest forecast for the future of Linux desktops I have ever seen in my life.
These twin factors converging has got me bullish af on Linux in the near to mid term.
Let’s fuckinnn gooooooo
The day Linux says all video games are compatible with their OS is the day I finally switch from Windows for good.
Until then I'm using a pirated version of Win11Pro and wondering how this AI will work with pirated copies.
The day Linux says all video games are compatible with their OS is the day I finally switch from Windows for good.
I mean Wine and steamOS’s Proton are that though? Sure compatibility isn’t perfect but the vast majority of games I have tried worked all the way from current AAA games to games like Steel Panthers WinspWW2, a DOS game from the 90s that barely functions on a modern windows computer but yet runs perfect on my Deck. Because the deck is using a virtual environment to emulate a windows OS it actually arguably creates a more stable platform to run windows software than windows itself running the program normally.
Pretty much the only obstacle left is stupid super invasive anticheat/spyware software that doesn’t bother to cover Linux in competitive multiplayer games.
Lol, not even Windoof is compatible with all video games.
You want to get rid of Microsoft's BS while still using Microsoft? I think you already know the only answer is Linux.
That's not, wasn't, and never will be free even if you don't ritual with your Talisman, the dollar.
Closed source software isn't about making money. That's just a sucker tool to vacuum people that accept shit-worse-than slavery from the dollar.
Free means to ditch any and all software that some person you don't gorram know bar one pedophile who stole everyone else's written software and turned around selling it promising what it does. Even he doesn't know jack fucking squat about what it really does.
If you flip that for the trust you gave over the then the news is that you're an even more gullible sucker and it isn't a gamble on whether or not the next software cracker will kidnap the rest of your family as well.
The life of everyone in your family will inevitably become the truth serum regenex for Steve Jobs when they unfreeze his ass. If you think he really is dead then you weren't paying the fuck attention to his stock market vaccine six months before his ice cube.
yeah right, that data definitely won't be sent to microsoft.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
It's an open secret that Microsoft is gearing up to supercharge Windows 11 this summer with next-gen AI capabilities that will enable the OS to be context aware across any apps and interfaces, as well as remember everything you do on your PC to enhance user productivity and search.
These new capabilities are set to ship as part of a new app internally called "AI Explorer," which I'm told will be unveiled during Microsoft's special Windows event on May 20.
The feature is also said to be exclusive to devices powered by Qualcomm's upcoming Snapdragon X series chips, at least at first, as Intel and AMD play catchup in the NPU race.
AI Explorer is able to do more than just remember the things you do on your computer, it's also able to analyze what's currently on-screen and provide contextual suggestions and tasks based on what it can see.
This capability is called Screen Understanding, and I'm told one of the big selling points of AI Explorer is that it's supposed to work across any app, with no developer input required.
The existence of Rewind.ai proves that this is a concept that can be done, and Microsoft is essentially building its own version into Windows 11 that offloads the resources required for such a feature onto NPUs to keep the load away from the CPU.
The original article contains 1,076 words, the summary contains 225 words. Saved 79%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
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Horrifying privacy implications aside, AI has really become the new cryptocurrency.
Don't get me wrong, both technologies are interesting, but it's tiring to see both be forced into applications that functioned just fine without them.
It's arguably worse, since it seems to be more pervasive than crypto and NFTs were at their peak.
Crypto never really hit the mainstream, and even NFTs were still fringe. Whereas AI and AI accelerators are packed into basically every new phone and (Intel) processor.
Regulatory hurdles kept crypto out of most mainstream products. There are no such barriers for AI, and any that are put up may come too late.
There are also more possible mainstream use cases for AI - if the technology works as promised. That’s the biggest for AI currently, and some products like the Humane Pin are already tripping over it.
There are way more uses cases to the average person than crypto so that's only natural. There's also a trust issue with crypto that doesn't exist with AI, as well as losing your money when things go wrong.
That being said, I don't approve of this nor adding it randomly to products where it clearly has little use. If people want generative software, they can just choose to install it.
Why call out Intel? Pretty sure AMD and Nvidia are both putting dedicated AI hardware in all of their new and upcoming product lines. From what I understand they are even generally doing it better than Intel. Hell, Qualcomm is advertising their AI performance on their new chips and so is Apple. I don't think there is anyone in the chip world that isn't hopping on the AI train
But what about my Web 3.0 AI cryptocurrency in the metaverse?
"An app that lets you make nfts from images created by a camera in the metaverse"
Written in rust.
AI what?
AI has uses that aren't about covering your tracks or evading law enforcement. Edit: bring on the downvotes, cryptobros.
I definitely understand your view on crypto, and I hate to be an apologist, but here's a view you may not have considered:
I think mainstream society has gotten far too comfortable with the lack of privacy in our everyday lives, and this extends to finance. A company has no business tracking the data about my purchases, let alone selling it. The government doesn't need to know everything I spend money on either.
As with most topics relating to privacy, it's not that I worry about what I have to hide. I worry about your intention with that information. As one example, if I were needing to buy Plan B for an emergency contraceptive, there is a not insignificant portion of our government and the general population that frowns on that, and could paint me as a target in the future if it was known.
Yes, but evading LEOs is good and buying drugs online in a free and open marketplace is my sacred, moral and god-given right than no glowie should infringe upon