Bringing the power of AI to Windows 11 (opens in new tab)

> We have added native support for additional archive formats, including tar, 7-zip, rar, gz and many others using the libarchive open-source project. You now can get improved performance of archive functionality during compression on Windows.

This is easily the most exciting part of the whole announcement.

Make sure to watch the embedded video.

A new permanent taskbar button opens an OpenAI LLM trained to use Windows 11.

You ask the LLM to do what you want -- "summarize this email and send the summary to my boss."

It works with all applications. It sees what you're seeing.

As a longtime Linux user, it pains me to say this:

It's... beautiful.

...

But it's also scary, because it's not under your control. Ultimately, it obeys only the bureaucracy at Microsoft.

In that sense, it's like "MOTHER" in Ridely Scott's Alien and "HAL" in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

As a MacOS user, this looks really cool. I just hope Apple figures out how to do it, which I don't have a ton of hope for since they've flubbed Siri for so many years.

I mean seriously, the fact that Microsoft is this far ahead with AI (because of their partnership with OpenAI), comes off as a massive failure on Apple's part. Not only that, but Microsoft's continued positioning as dev central (Github, Github Copilot, VScode, and more) while Apple dwindles with docs that have been lacking in quality for years and only providing the bulky Xcode as a code editor is frustrating me as someone who loves coding on Mac. I love using this unix-like machine but not having to sacrifice UX by using linux. But as time goes on it makes me wonder if Apple will ever start focusing on devs again, and now AI!

AI is great but how about fixing start menu search? Search that was perfectly working on Windows 7 but was lobotomized in subsequent versions.

More privacy setting changes that will default to spying on you and sending everything you do and all you data to Microsoft. I wish I could look at this kind of announcement and see something positive, but it's all just thinly veiled espionage.

I'm 100% in for this purely for the fact that it looks like it will actually tell you / provide a button to perform the action. I am a Windows fan and use it as my primary operating system, but I cannot tell you how irrationally angry I get when I end up in the new control panel and there are links like "find out how to do X" which just dump you into Bing search. Microsoft already knows the answer, that answer is potentially relevant to the specific version of windows I'm using, but they need to pump up Bing's numbers so they send me there and honestly the results aren't always that helpful.

My issue with this is that it feels less like a new toy to play with and more like a new worm that is meant to hook me, my workflow, and my data into their silo. I'd like to see better demarcation in windows tooling when it comes to how they're managing user data. Similar to how developers tend to colour code DEV and PROD environments so that they don't accidentally alter PROD. I'd like to see colour coding on microsoft tooling that delineates "local data that is processed locally, and is 100% private" processes from "local data that will be processed in the cloud and possibly stored for training later without you being able to know" processes. The moment data leaves my local network, I assume it is compromised, so having clearer delineation will help me know what tools to avoid.

I'm pretty sure I won't get this offered since I am not signed into any Microsoft account on my Windows 11 installation. Or, I get it offered, but requested to sign in.

I have zero issues with signing GitHub Copilot into my GitHub account to use it with Android Studio or VS Code, I just don't want the OS to be logged into a cloud account which I don't really own and where I don't know what's getting synced to it.

There are two things to note here:

1. A cross-application connectivity layer that pipes data and actions between apps

2. A natural language interface to control #1

Thinking about them separately is useful, because although chat is the new UI hotness, #1 is valuable on its own and the two can potentially be deployed separately.

As presented here, I suspect the natural language interface will be faster and easier than buttons for operating the cross-app layer for complex queries, but potentially slower than operating buttons for simple things (like "start dark mode").

But personally, I believe #1 combined with some AI context awareness is more powerful of the features.

...

And btw, I left Apple last year to build a local-first and developer-extensible assistants for the Mac that's pretty similar. If this interests you, would love to chat (email in profile, as well as a waitlist).

This looks like it could be great. I use GPT-4 all the time, so a system-wide integration and especially assistant capabilities sound nice to me. And yet I cannot make myself excited for this.

I can't get past the feeling that Windows Copilot will be used in slimy anti-privacy ways. I am somehow very sceptical that it will only use the screen's context as context for the user's queries. Probably because many new Windows 11 features have been anti-consumer, and Microsoft have been consistent at building this kind of reputation for years. It has numbed all of my excitement for anything Microsoft does.

Soo instead of finishing the migration of the old Control Panel to the new Settings app they slapped some ML onto it and called it a day?

We need something like this on Linux, maybe powered by Vicuna. I’m not sure if the current batch of LLaMA variants is coherent enough to work as a digital assistant, but my gut feeling is that a little fine tuning on tool use might be all thats needed.

I don't know if I'm quite willing to go there yet, but LLMs are barrelling towards a level where, if the pace continues, they will easily be looked upon as the most import advancement of computing.

The fact that training a statistical model on terabytes of text can lead quite naturally and obviously to what is shown in the video in the webpage is shocking. The shocking part is how natural it feels, and how I know this is something that can work.

Congratulations to the teams that have been going down this path, this is wildly impressive stuff.

Can the AI fix my taskbar and ungroup task buttons or will i still have to use a 3rd party program?

I can't wait for somebody to figure out a webpage that tricks this LLM into deleting C:\Windows.

Edit: A less harmful proof of concept could be, say, turning volume up to 100% and opening fifty Edge windows with the Baby Shark video.

> AI-Generated review summary: We are making it faster and easier for customers to scan reviews for apps by using the power of AI to compile thousands of reviews into a simple summary, enabling customers to discover new content with ease.

Would be cool to have an option to actually read those reviews. If I open Firefox page in the Store app it says 420 ratings but I can only read a single review. If I press 'See all' it just shows an empty page. If I open Firefox store page[0] in the browser it says 'No one has reviewed this application yet. Be the first to add a review.' Reviews seem to be split by country or by some other criteria for no good reason.

[0] https://apps.microsoft.com/store/detail/mozilla-firefox/9NZV...

This is great, but I wish they'd focus as much on fundamentals. The bloat is tangible and measurable.

A feature designed by the marketing department. Hopefully, we will be able to turn it off like Cortana.

Microsoft and Windows has lot of neat stuff going on. But something happens in the productization process and the end result is a trainwreck. Large part of that is the distinct lack of trust that we have, both as consumers and technologists. Lot of fancy stuff gets built, then remains unused and unutilized, which inevitably leads the thing to wither and die. If MS wants to stop FAANG etc from eating their lunch they need to figure out a way to reverse the trend. And that doesn't happen with gimmicks like this, no matter how cool they are.

This might actually be a better UI for finding settings than their real settings app cause I swear I can never find anything in it and they move stuff around and rename things every other update

Would be great if it can help you find how to do things in Office apps too, because it's the same problem. Those apps have had so many redesigns over the years, Googling for anything more complex than the most basic of usecases is impossible.

I'm not the target audience, but reading the comments made me curious so I watched the videos and the examples were disappointing. They all require more steps than my current workflow and it has to go through some third-party server to achieve it.

I was expecting more than suggestions for playlists and slack hooks.

Cortana is back: this time with much less personality and yet more ability to hallucinate facts than ever.

I honestly don't see any benefits to the Dev Home app as is besides Dev Drive, which could be cool if it is that simple to just create a drive that is sandboxed.

Perhaps the community will whip up (most likely not), extensions for stuff like Sentry or CI/CD. Could be a neat thing then.

Is this limited to Win 11 Pro edition only or also available for Win 11 Home users ?

Everywhere they are mentioning coming soon to Windows 11, but considering they are projecting it as a developer focussed instead of for normal people i get the vibe it is not for Home edition.

I was already uneasy about the day when my employer makes us switch to Win 11. This makes me even more uneasy.

I hope it's possible to remove the AI controls (especially the copilot button) from the UI.

Meanwhile, Apple users still fighting SIRI that can only provide answers to 1% of questions at best, given you are lucky and it was able to understand your accent.

Maybe bring the power of in-house QA to Windows 11, please?

If I'm reading this correctly, it's going to upload anything I copy/paste to their own LLM.

We have confidentiality agreements that I'm not sure would pass this.

Err. F$#k?

This is a significant announcement.

Note namechecking every non-Apple CPU vendor and NVIDIA - but not mentioning AMD/Intel GPUs. Another note: Lots of small improvements, but not allowing users to move the Taskbar (to Microsoft, some things are important). Oh, and they haven't abandoned ReFS - so will it be available without Windows Professional for Enterprise etc.? I can't see many devs paying for that alone.

It can see what I see? So it can see that unlabeled button on the screen and click it for me? It can see the game area I'm in, and can send controller input events to get me where I need to be to do the next part of the game I can play? I can describe this barely accessible Winget GUI app to me and check update all for me?

Now that would be pretty freaking cool!

Will the AI allow me to disable the big blue "bing chat" button that shows up every time I try to search for something?

Here goes me never using Windows again for anything serious. This is a ticking time bomb of privacy and security issues.

It's a great set of updates, and it's especially telling that "privacy" wasn't mentioned even once in the whole article.

I'm impressed with the progress.

I'm also scared about privacy of the data. How will that work with installing windows in business environments with sensitive IP?

Dev Home dashboard seems neat. Although not sure how worth the rest of it is. ReFS is nice I suppose.

We are so very close to 1) AI escape and 2) AI reproduction. I don't see how broad swaths of humanity stand a chance against ambitious capital holders in combination with AI.

Great. Pretty soon I'll be able to say "Computer, enhance!" and it'll hallucinate whatever details I ask for in my JPEG.

Reminds me of that spoof commercial, about Microsoft designing the artwork for an Apple mouse.

am i the only one who is curious about how they are going to charge for this?

“Bing, fire 5,000 of our workers with the lowest productivity scores”

You’ll need an AI tool to summarize that press release!

Thanks, I hate it.

The videos in the article are absolutely slick!

>horrible OS designed for consumer cattle

>now with AI

Now you can actually talk to Big Brother!