From the Editor’s Desk: AI Level Set (Premium)

Like many of you, I’m shocked by the sudden rise of AI-generated content and by the news that this will soon be commonplace virtually everywhere that work gets done. But I’m even more shocked by the gullibility of those around me who are supposed to be more objective about this advance. Have we learned nothing over the years?

AI has dominated the news cycle for the past two weeks. It’s inescapable. On the last episode of Windows Weekly, Leo presented his usual fair take on both sides of the AI argument, leading to some interesting conversation. But it was a throwaway aside, that one doesn’t realize it when they’re living through history, that kept my mind racing. And a few days later, it suddenly dawned on me that, actually, sometimes you do realize it. Of course you do: ask anyone who lived through 9/11, the violence of the 1960s, or the start of World War II and they’ll tell you. What’s not understood at the time is how things will resolve, and the resulting fear and uncertainty is perhaps what we remember most of all.

Whatever your take on the AI revolution that’s now sweeping the world—whether you’re a bright-eyed Pollyanna or a sandwich board-wearing doomsayer—we should at least agree on this: there is the pre-AI world that we used to live in and, after we get through the current period of uncertainty and fear, there will be the AI era that we will be living in. Beyond that is just details.

Looking past the emotional aspects of AI—mostly worries about the industries and jobs it will destroy—I feel that AI is in many ways the ultimate expression of personal technology, something that will give so much but also take away so much. And I worry that we won’t consider both sides of this horrible truth in our rush to embrace this new technology. Because we’ve never done so.

As a long-time Microsoft reporter, I’m also a little freaked out by the overly-positive press that Microsoft is getting now for Bing AI in particular. There are a few salient points worth remembering here. First, Microsoft didn’t invent any of this technology; it’s licensing it from OpenAI and mixing it with the dubious search history of Bing, a lackluster product no one was at all interested in as recently as just a few days ago. And secondly, counting out Google is a mistake, and one that betrays a lack of understanding of how entrenched dominant products and services work: being as good as or just a bit better than Google isn’t going to earn Bing an appreciable part of the market. (On the flip side, even small usage share gains for Bing will be a positive development revenue-wise.)

Let me be blunt. All the AI in the world can’t save the Oldsmobile of personal technology from itself. The question is whether this problem can even be fixed.

Actually, I’m not even sure that’s a question: Microsoft has already explicitly stated that it will surround Bing AI search results with ads. And I’m curious what the end game there is: will it generate chat-based results that are actually ads that don’t answer the query one is asking? And isn’t this issue why Google walked away from its own AI-based version of Search years ago when it found that it’s not possible to easily monetize it as is the case with traditional search today?

And we have ample evidence of what happens to a free product that Microsoft tries to monetize. Just look at Windows 11, a pretty face surrounded by privacy-stealing telemetry that can’t be disabled, advertisements, sponsored apps in the Start menu, an ever-growing selection of add-on subscription services, and other ills. This is a product that lets you set your preferred web browser and then ignores that choice so it can funnel you, lemming-like, to Microsoft-owned MSN, Bing, and advertising services.

It’s not just that Bing is a bad brand, or that Microsoft doesn’t understand consumers and never has, it’s that the consumers that Microsoft wants to attract so badly don’t care about the software giant in the slightest. And honestly never will. Microsoft’s biggest concern in the 1990s was that it would become the next IBM, but that fear was realized long ago: today, Microsoft is the second most successful company on earth, but it’s successful mostly because of what most would describe as infrastructure. And it will likely see much better success selling OpenAI-based services and APIs to third parties via Azure than it will selling search to individuals. Bing AI doesn’t change that, especially when AI-based improvements are popping up everywhere.

Consider augmented reality (AR). For all of Microsoft’s investments in this space, the only major AR products that were successful at scale happened on smartphones, not on HoloLens, and came out of left field, like Pokémon Go. That’s already happening with AI, too, where anyone can use their smartphone to create heroic cartoon images of themselves, invent oil painting-like artwork using plain English descriptions, solve coding problems, create travel itineraries, and more. Bing will simply be yet another place where people can use AI chat to arrive at more complex answers to queries, just like Bing today is simply yet another way to search online. One that few people use.

But the biggest issue for Microsoft, I think, is that AI is arriving at a point in history where the world has collectively come to the understanding that Big Tech is too big to not regulate. And that given all of the investigations into the obviously illegal behavior at companies like Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and even poor Microsoft—again, the second most powerful company on earth—now is not the time to give these companies even more control over our lives. In other words, Microsoft has much to fear from regulators, governments, and lawmakers as it does from its competitors. Maybe more.

I will never understand what Microsoft made jumpstart this AI revolution given that the technology so often feels like a self-congratulatory orgy of often unauthoritative content delivered with a confidence it simply does not deserve. But it happened, and now we have to deal with it. And we will be judged by those in the future by how we did so.