Microsoft Abandons Personal AI Chatbot Race with Copilot Reboot

ssbulaev about 3 hours ago 24 commentsRead Article on bloomberg.com

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Discussion (24 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

red_admiral•about 1 hour ago

> Companies were paying for more than 30 million Copilot subscriptions as of the end of June. And while individual users are free to use limited versions of Copilot’s chat experience, its most powerful tools are reserved for subscribers to the company’s M365 apps bundle, which has about 90 million paying users.

It needs to be more widely known that if you cancel a (home) 365 subscription, you'll be offered a cheaper version without AI integration.

VCFundedGenYer•43 minutes ago

It was foolish of them to think they had any consumer clout left. Shoving 1000 copies of an inaccurate, poorly functioning, and inconsistent product down everyone's throat will someday be a case study in how to immediately destroy a brand.

fakedang•11 minutes ago

Microsoft does not care about consumer branding because their enterprise branding game is A1.

PunchyHamster•25 minutes ago

.... immediately ? MS has been doing it for decades

pseudosavant•9 minutes ago

Does anyone even want to try this? I'm a Windows user, M365 subscriber, VS Code user (when I'm not in Codex), had a Github Copilot subscription, etc... and a heavy AI user. Basically, the prime target for Microsoft AI. And every attempt Microsoft has made to put AI into a product has been unusable garbage, using the same models I find productive in other tools.

So many AI doubters I know hate using AI tools because their employer only gives them the Microsoft offerings. Which is a totally understandable reaction to those tools.

TuringNYC•28 minutes ago

My blood pressure rises everytime i use Enterprise Copilot at work. It seems they truncate message history heavily (to save input token costs?) and Copilot forgets the last thing you told it in the chat. It is like a real-life version of Momento (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0209144/) mixed with Waiting for Gadot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_Godot), pretending to be in league with Anthropic.

gregschlom•21 minutes ago

Off-topic but I find it amusing that you managed to misspell both movie titles :)

infecto•about 1 hour ago

Not at all that surprising. There enterprise offering is barely acceptable and they have continued to drop the ball on having half decent Cowork solution.

They have all rights to win with their existing enterprise agreement but wow it’s amazing to see how bad their product cadence and decision making is. All they needed to do was copy Claude Cowork like OpenAI did.

glimshe•39 minutes ago

Great! I was looking forward to an unified AI service like we got unified messaging with MS Teams!!!

joshstrange•about 2 hours ago

https://archive.ph/XJG5V

2OEH8eoCRo0•about 1 hour ago

Still can't believe they ditched the Cortana name.

rm_-rf_slash•about 1 hour ago

Nah it makes sense. They know their AI is second rate at best. Cortana implies 26th century excellence. If the reality is a step back (and we all know it’s several), then “haha Cortana dumb” memes would sweep the internet. They would have to rebrand anyway. If anything it was smart to rip off the band aid early.

card_zero•about 1 hour ago

Since I never played Halo, it makes me think of Cordova, and implies 10th-century Islamic Spain.

VCFundedGenYer•43 minutes ago

No, it doesn't make sense. Cortana was a fantastic name for an assistant, and synergistic with Halo at the time.

The low quality of the voice assistant was unfortunate, but the naming was perfect.

Kirby64•19 minutes ago

The low quality of the voice assistant meant they doomed the Cortana name. It got associated with garbage voice assistance, so they had to rebrand.

If there had been consumer good will for voice assistant performance before poisoning the name, it might have survived... but when you first product in that realm is garbage and it lingers for a long time, you're dooming the name.

Also, synergy with Halo is meaningless to Microsoft. Most folks do not care or even know about Halo.

pdntspa•about 1 hour ago

Again?

oh_no•about 1 hour ago

microsoft Product remains an unmitigated dumpster fire.

i think github copilot has actually gotten to a pretty good place, and of course the two copilot products will both have features called "autopilot" that do entirely different things

infecto•about 1 hour ago

It’s really interesting to watch unfold because from the outside it seems so obvious. While I know change at scale can be hard it’s surprising nobody has called for a culling or shakeup to work it out.

bena•about 1 hour ago

Did this one become a Nazi as well?

nekusar•about 1 hour ago

At least a few of us remember TayAI. And to think this was 2016, well before "Attention is all you need" LLM paper.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/microsoft-shuts-down-ai-chatbot...

bena•about 1 hour ago

I was about to say that it feels so much earlier than that. But then, 2016 was a whole decade ago.

To think, the main impetus was mostly to see if it could be done. And to show Microsoft why you don't expose things like that to the public. Microsoft said "She'll learn from your conversations" and the internet said "Bet"

PunchyHamster•18 minutes ago

> Microsoft said "She'll learn from your conversations" and the internet said "Bet"

...well, it did exactly that, no bet here.