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Microsoft is adding a new key to PC keyboards for the first time since 1994 (arstechnica.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Copilot key will eventually be required in new PC keyboards, though not yet.

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[–] 55 points 2 years ago (2 children)

AI is absolutely "a thing", not sure there's really a debate about that. The desperation here is they want to be the first company to completely immerse itself in Generative AI, but they're moving so fast they're just shoving every experiment they can come up with down their customers' throats.

AI is going to be a huge part of the future, but Microsoft might not be a part of that future if they fuck up with over implementation of nascent tech.

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  • [–] 55 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    My bad, I should be more specific. They're so desperate for a fancy chatbot to be a part of everybody's workflow that they're going to add a special key that is not needed, or wanted by the vast majority.

    I hope this can be remapped to something useful.

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  • [–] 30 points 2 years ago* (3 children)

    You mean the Bixby button? (/s, but I think you can see my comparison of uselessness there)

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    I’m surprised people didn’t instantly remap the Bixby button to something else.

    On my S10 I had it long press to activate flashlight, and double press to silence my phone. It was really handy.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Wasn’t that impossible for awhile?

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    Maybe, but I’m trying to remember which model. My S8 and onward I always remapped my Bixby button via 3rd party app (no root) so maybe it was the S7 that wasn’t remappable?

    edit: The S8 was the first phone with the dedicated Bixby button, according to Google, so maybe it wasn’t remappable initially. I got it a year+ into it’s life cycle and I never activated Bixby

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Tried to look it up: https://mashable.com/article/samsung-will-let-you-customize-bixby-button

    That article claims the option came out when the s10 was out. I seem to remember being able to mod it on my phone as well S9. Can't test it though because while I've had this phone for 5 years now I may have not babied it enough. The physical bixby button has fallen into the phone itself so I can hear ot rattle around. If I were speculating, I would assume it either A. became available to all 3 phones during that same software update, or we remember it sooner being part of something like putting the phone into developer mode so we could have further modifications

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    Thanks for the link! Yeah, I definitely used a 3rd party app/software to be able to remap the S8 button. I think it was called something literally like “Bixby Remapper”. I thought I used the same app for my S10 but I might have just remapped it natively.

    As an aside, my S8 is still alive and kicking after all these years, while my S10 had button problems like yours + OneUI became a buggy mess on it after a year. The build quality just doesn’t feel the same.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago

    The button itself wasn't bad Have such an extra button on my Sony too and it's very nice (I have it set to take screenshots).

    The problem is when they don't let you map it to whatever you want.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    I agree with you, AI is a thing alright, an overhyped chatbot thing. LLM's are going to be neutered by pandering, and the true potential will be limited by investor fear and paranoia.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    What makes you think they'll be neutered? You think China is going to stop what they're doing with them because the US might do something stupid? The genie is out of the bottle.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    It’s a trend lately, that potentially sensitive things will be said or output from the models, so you can see an increasingly crazier set of guardrails getting put around the LLM’s so that they don’t offend someone by mistake. I’ve seen their usefulness decrease significantly, but their coding assistance is still somewhat good, but their capabilities otherwise decrease significantly.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I haven't had those problems with locally run models (stable diffusion, llamafile)

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago

    Agreed, but in the context of this post, that copilot key on the keyboard will take people to the most inoffensive and "walled garden" variety of generative AI that will be so one-size-fits-all to the point that its usefulness will pale in comparison to local run models or SaaS hosted style services that give you a hosted model to run off of.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I use copilot on a daily basis for programming. It has made me much more productive and it's a real pleasure to use it. Nothing overhyped about it.

    Curious to see what it will bring for other domains, e.g. for dealing with emails.

    I do agree that there's a lot of filtering happening. Not a huge deal for more applications. Luckily you can run your own models that are not filtered. I can definitely see a future where you run your own models locally. Afaik Apple recently did some stuff around that.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    Why are you talking about what Apple might do, in relation to locally run models, when that's what Facebook's already done? And it's source available, which is more than the Apple one will likely be.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    I understand why it would seem unimpressive someone that doesn't do something like research or programming in their daily life but when you do those things it's very clear the difference they're already making.

    The thing I'm coding at the moment for example I've been using it to tear ideas for image processing scripts, it'd have taken me a day to do one before maybe longer but even the free gpt can have an idea working after half an hour or fiddling. Being able to focus on coming up with ideas rather than the finer details of implementation.

    We're going to see people get used to using them properly and their uses spread into many other areas of life - you will be customising games UI and making complex control input using natural language tools 'Linux, remove the clock and put a system resource thermometer there instead for whatever bits are most likely to overheat' ten years from now you'll look back and wonder how people did anything without ai just like people often wonder how we lived without internet and mobile phones

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago

    It's overhyped but LLMs have become basically an essential part of my daily workflow. I can't imagine developing without it now and I've been using them for less than 12 months. The technology is only going to improve, and that's both cool and scary to think about.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    neutered by pandering

    Opinion discarded.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Why? It absolutely is the case that corporate provided LLMs are neutered to not provide anything that goes against 21 century American corporate norms. Try and get chat GPT to agree with you that capitalism is at the root of most of the worlds problems and it will fight you every step of the way, ask it about how capitalism drives innovation and it will write you glowing praise.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

    They are neutered to comply with current hate speech laws, and the developers err on the side of caution cause they don't have full control over the output for which they are legally responsible.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    Obviously they filter that yes, but they also go to huge amounts of effort to shape what comes out to fit their ethics. When chatGPT was new I spent a good half an hour trying to get it to admit that the fact that it was created by a for profit company meant that it would have significant bias towards the status quo and it wasnt having any of it. However asking it to imagine an equal LLM created by another company called chatPGT and all of a suddent it was agreeing with me that it would have pro-capital and anti public biases embeded into to due to who was in control of training it. Clearly it had been trained to not admit that chatGPT would give biased answers.

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