Proprietary (Premium)

If you haven’t watched Microsoft’s Bing AI/Edge presentation, you should: though it’s not clear why the software giant didn’t stream it live, it’s available on YouTube now. I’ve watched it twice, and I’ve read many reports from people who attended and who were able to experience the AI-infused Bing for more than a handful of queries. And I’m not sure that I like what I see.

Looked at broadly, we live in an age of misinformation triggered by the unfettered dominance of Big Tech, organizations that are in many ways more powerful than the governments and other regulatory bodies that ostensibly determine how their businesses operate. The introduction of AI into this market will exponentially exacerbate this problem, which is why I’ve openly wondered why Microsoft, a conservative, slow-moving company under Satya Nadella, would so aggressively move to embrace technology whose quality it can’t even control or vet.

But the answer might be semi-obvious: Microsoft, like other giant corporations, has what I think of as an institutional memory, and part of that memory is how it faltered in the dark decade after its antitrust transgressions hobbled it, and how competitors like Amazon (cloud), Apple (devices), and Google (search), were able to dominate markets that it feels were otherwise Microsoft’s to own. Institutional memory doesn’t make a company like a person, that’s nonsense. But it’s driven by people who still work at those companies, remember what happened, and now are in positions to make decisions that can help the firms redeem themselves by imparting revenge on their enemies.

Institutional memories of bad events are so strong, I think, that Microsoft---a company that once ethically took facial recognition capabilities away from law enforcement because it was inherently biased against dark-skinned people---is throwing caution to the wind and setting up the metaphorical Skynet future we often joke about. But it’s not a joke. We already expect to find every answer online in seconds. With AI, the creation of new content of all kinds will happen online in seconds, with no people needed, quality and accuracy be damned.

Unfortunately, it appears that some who attended the event are in no position to understand what’s happening. Kevin Roose, who was just a “nerdy, internet-obsessed preteen” when Google first arrived, was so blown away by Microsoft’s presentation that he’s immediately switching to Bing (“yes, Bing,” he elaborates). I think it’s a bit early to discount how Google will respond, but whatever. His report raises some issues about the world’s ability to understand what’s really happening here.

He tells the story of how “a Microsoft executive”---no need to name him, I guess (it was Yusuf Mehdi)--- “navigated to the Gap’s website, opened a PDF file with the company’s most recent quarterly financial results, and asked Edge to both summarize the key takeaways and create...