Yet another Hacker News

Microsoft Abandons Personal AI Chatbot Race with Copilot Reboot

21 points sbulaev 1 hour ago 14 comments

joshstrange 1 hour ago | parent

https://archive.ph/XJG5V

bena 38 minutes ago | parent

Did this one become a Nazi as well?

nekusar 35 minutes ago | parent

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 28 minutes ago | parent

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"

pdntspa 22 minutes ago | parent

Again?

2OEH8eoCRo0 19 minutes ago | parent

Still can't believe they ditched the Cortana name.

rm_-rf_slash 16 minutes ago | parent

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 4 minutes ago | parent

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

VCFundedGenYer 1 minute ago | parent

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.

infecto 11 minutes ago | parent

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.

oh_no 7 minutes ago | parent

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 4 minutes ago | parent

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.

red_admiral 3 minutes ago | parent

> 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 2 minutes ago | parent

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.