The fact that MS is doing this could be a sign that most people just don't find much utility in these AI tools.

Like you said, they're trying to get people hooked.

But if AI isn't any useful to people in the first place, this goes nowhere and they're still stuck with a low/decreasing amount of users.

Or perhaps “chat” just isn’t the best use of LLMs. Autocomplete-based integrations, rather than chat, could be better. I know I love and get great utility from GitHub Copilot, but not really any online or offline LLM chatbot.

Also, from a UX perspective, I feel an autocomplete-based UI encourages me to make sure the thing “I’m saying” is actually what I mean to say - ie, to not implicitly trust LLM hallucinations.

LLM-based generative text everywhere, in every app, could be useful, very straightforwardly integrated at an OS level into all text controls, something MS is well-poised to do, and “Copilot” a very good brand for that. (And I would be shocked if Apple and Google aren’t working on the same.)

I use llms to write text for me sometimes simply to rewrite it myself because sometimes having something to criticise is better than having to create from scratch

Replying to myself to note that it looks like Google just started rolling this out in Chrome under the name "Help Me Write": https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/14582048?visit_id=6...

They don’t need to tweak them, the terms are already totally fucked, they are explicitly anticompetitive terms.

Given the relative simplicity of integrating LLM autocomplete into OS text fields (compared to other integrations supported in modern OSes), I would be shocked if a state entity with balls (like the EU) doesn’t introduce laws enforcing that OSes must have open support for third-party LLM/generative text integrations.

That said, that’s almost certainly Microsoft’s short-term strategy until then! And probably part of why Apple made their sudden priority shift towards LLM features.

The idea is to introduce advertising into the responses—-subtly. Which will be extremely powerful.

In a few years competitors to gpt-4-turbo will exist so this sounds like a rather foolish plan.