targeting ads is only one teeny tiny use case for user data. Building general AI is a race and the more user data you have the faster your AI will learn. You definitely want to limit the amount of data your competitors have.

The vast majority of the revenue for half of the biggest tech companies is one teeny use case?

It's the biggest one, followed by company specific recommendation engines.

teeny tiny use case for general AI, yes.

How users use computers has very little to do for a useful AI.

Or... if most knowledge work happens on a computer, and you just want the AI to replace knowledge workers, then maybe how people use computers is the only thing the AI needs to know.

Probably true for AGI but the overloaded term "AI" could be applied to learn from how people use software to _carefully_ suggest improvements.

Usage stats could help you improve a user interface, teach users new skills (eg: "you always do this, here's a shortcut to save you time"), perhaps more personalized operating system interfaces and defaults.

You probably don't need a fancy pseudo "AI" system for any of these, but that's the current gold rush so someone's gonna do it

I look forward to the day when the term 'AGI' gets co-opted by marketers and we need to come up with a new term for true AGI (TAGI?).

That's pretty absurd considering the average american has a screen in front of their face 8-10 hours a day. You're basically saying what people do for 8-10 hours a day, every day, for their entire lives isnt useful information to AI.

Well, I don't think there is any reason why MSFT wouldn't dream that, just that they don't have a magic wand to do that. They do however are trying to add more and more tracking to Windows, which is what they do control.