I suspect it will falter with or without wider adaptation. I’ve been happy to adopt the free offerings and still engage my brain. I don’t see how they get enough revenue to pay for the massive outlay of all these data centers.
The ads are coming. Google is also beginning to push the idea of agentic shopping, so the AI will probably get a kick back if it pushes you to buy certain products.
Of course, all of this undermines the value of the AI, because it will no longer be giving the best information, as it knows it, it will be pushing high margin items for its owners, much like a pushy salesman. Not that current AI product recommendations are any good, as I’ve run into several situations where the source on its data is a low-effort SEO page loaded with affiliate links.
I have suspected all along that AI will commoditize, as in "free with your phone purchase" and sediment, being valuable only to verticals with highly curated databases.
Microsoft and Google have been in the "all things to all people" business, IMO, and to me, that's no moat around that, and invites enshittification.
As infinitewars implies, another excuse for massive data-gathering, and many of us watched the entanglement of search engines and government evolve (or devolve, depending on your POV) But what happens when you have ALL the data?
Again, I think that this massive funneling is, as we said in fishing, just dynamiting the lake and collecting all the fish.
Businesses with specialized needs won't need Microsoft, since they can/must create their own focused databases and spin up their own apps, witness DeepSeek and friends. I really don' think that a surgeon cares about the latest TikTok trends.
Saying the quiet part out loud. Also isn't it his fault for investing in it the first place? Desperately finding things to put copilot onto in Windows isn't working out so well, it seems.
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