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Next Big Windows Update Will Bring Hardware-Accelerated AI (zdnet.com)

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the why-not dept.

Mary Jo Foley, writing for ZDNet: Every tech vendor these days is quick to slap the AI label on products and services. Up until today, I thought Microsoft had done an admirable job in refraining from doing this with Windows. But the shark has been jumped as of March 7, the company's latest Windows Developer Day. Cue the eye rolls. Microsoft is telling developers that the next release of Windows 10, which we are still calling by its codename, "Redstone 4," will enable developers to "use AI to deliver more powerful and engaging experiences." Microsoft execs say there's now an AI platform in Windows 10 that enables developers to use "pre-trained machine learning in their apps on Windows 10 devices."

43 of 87 comments (clear)

  1. more powerful and engaging experiences by sinij · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "more powerful and engaging experiences" is a euphemism for spying on users.

    1. Re:more powerful and engaging experiences by Excelcia · · Score: 2

      That's only half right. "Engaging" is the user spying. "Powerful" is the other half of the coin, improving Microsoft's ability to remotely control our computers.

    2. Re:more powerful and engaging experiences by Rick+Schumann · · Score: 1

      Yeah, this, in spades. Just one more thing you'll have to jump through hoops, and hack the hell out of the registry to disable.

    3. Re:more powerful and engaging experiences by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      MS has documented the of data they collect from someone using their OS.

      No, they documented some interfaces and data formats. If you look carefully at the documentation you'll see quite a bit of it is undefined key/value pairs that is never actually concretely specified.

      You can configure the OS to not send information to MS.

      No you can't. Microsoft's own documentation makes this very clear. You cannot turn it off. You can limit what is transmitted but you can't stop it at least not with the levers and knobs provided by Microsoft assuming those levers and knobs don't mysteriously reset themselves every time a forced update is installed.

      Any telemetry data collected and sent to MS is anonymized and encrypted.

      I would guess very few people concerned with privacy actually care or believe any of this. The point is it's none of Microsoft's business in the first place... It's not about how careful they are or what they do with it.

      They also collect just enough data to provide the automatic update process which 99% of their users take advantage of.

      LOL like anyone has a choice. Like you can turn off updates even if you wanted to.

      It is possible to design an update process that doesn't require data collection. In fact the early versions of windows update did just this even going so far as to print out a message on the display that updates were being performed without sending any data to Microsoft.

      If you are concerned about someone spying on you then g after the chief violators of your privacy. Focusing your angst on MS sort of makes you look like an idiot who is not capable of identifying the real culprits.

      Have you actually read Microsoft's privacy policy? Do you not understand by default Microsoft grants itself the right and ability to exfiltrate both configuration and data from your system without your knowledge? They have remote access tools baked into the software to do this.

      Saying Windows 10 isn't a privacy problem isn't a credible position. Their own documentation, their own privacy policy makes this much crystal clear to anyone who has bothered to read it. There is absolutely no way out.. no way to spin it otherwise.

      Google collects, stores, analyzes, and sells your personal information every time you use any of their services.

      Google is also a creepy stalker, what's your point? I hope your not trying to deflect responsibility by saying "look Google does it too!!".

      Every cellphone in use today can and does transmit every thing you do when using the phone.

      This is both irrelevant and false. Third party images are readily available for a large number of devices without any spyware shit baked into them.

      With GPS enabled you are transmitting your location data which details every where you go.

      GPS is a receiver not a transmitter. You can use GPS without transmitting data to third parties.

      And let's not leave out Facebook and all the other time wasting applications where people give away all their personal information on purpose.

      You can offer up a list of a billion other corporations who do the "same thing". It changes nothing. It doesn't absolve Microsoft from violating everyone's privacy. No matter what example you dream up of someone else doing something else it changes nothing.

    4. Re:more powerful and engaging experiences by Rick+Schumann · · Score: 1

      If you're going to shill for Microsoft it's more effective to use an actual logged-in account instead of posting as AC.

    5. Re:more powerful and engaging experiences by sinij · · Score: 1

      They are still working out the bugs out of shilling AI.

  2. Microsoft Windows 10 and AI by oldgraybeard · · Score: 1

    What a hoot ;) lolololololol

    just my 2 cents

  3. Clippy on steroids by h8sg8s · · Score: 2

    MS Bob is now pumped up and will shove animated AI paperclips up your @ss if you do anything he doesn't like. I, for one, welcome our new Skynet overlords..

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    Organization? You must be joking..
    1. Re:Clippy on steroids by rtb61 · · Score: 1

      Yeah will it seems, a playstation or steambox for gaming and a Linux box for coms and cursing M$ to hell for anything else, not that I believe but the 9th level with the betrayers would be suitable for them.

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      Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
  4. Hardware acceleration? by nmb3000 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Microsoft execs say there's now an AI platform in Windows 10 that enables developers to use "pre-trained machine learning in their apps on Windows 10 devices."

    That's not hardware acceleration, because you need, ya know, specialized hardware for that which you can't send via a software update. In fact, the word "hardware" isn't even in the linked article, so where did this silly headline even come from?

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    "What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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    1. Re:Hardware acceleration? by jetkust · · Score: 3, Informative

      They did include an architectural diagram in the article. The hardware part is WindowsML -> DirectML which will utilize the GPU and/or the AVX-512 instruction set of the CPU, or any possible future chip created with ML in mind.

    2. Re:Hardware acceleration? by DigiShaman · · Score: 1

      Correct. GPU aren't just for graphics and physics, they will be taking on the role of performing AI as well. Just ask nVidia.

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      Life is not for the lazy.
    3. Re:Hardware acceleration? by EvilSS · · Score: 1

      Yep, they even included 640 Tensor cores in their Titan V GPU.

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      I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
    4. Re:Hardware acceleration? by im_thatoneguy · · Score: 1

      AI specifically needs a general purpose CPU, so this is just AI running on a computer

      No this uses Nvidia Titan xp's dedicated neural net chip and Qualcom 835's dedicated neural net chip.

      It also will run on a general purpose GPU or CPU as a fallback.

    5. Re:Hardware acceleration? by TomGreenhaw · · Score: 1

      I beg to differ. The internal on CPU chip hardware for advanced vector extensions (AVX) executes many parallel fused multiply and divide instructions in one clock cycle. This is fundamental to critical machine learning algorithms. The underpinning of linear regression is y=mx+b and AVX is purpose built for this.

      One of the advantages to this approach is reducing the bottleneck of moving large amounts of data from the matrix math oriented machine learning system to a conventional procedural CPU.

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      Greed is the root of all evil.
  5. This is a good idea, not "eye rolling" by SuperKendall · · Score: 1

    I can't believe the seemingly low understanding of modern AI and neural networks that seems to linger on Slashdot...

    It's a good idea to provide frameworks that help the system use GPU or other dedicated hardware to work with pre-existing neural networks. It means practical use of local pre-defined networks for things like image or speech recognition - or did you seriously all WANT all of that traffic going to a server for processing?

    Apple just introduced this last year themselves, they call it CoreML.

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    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
    1. Re: This is a good idea, not "eye rolling" by Pseudonym · · Score: 1

      I don't necessarily want it baked into the OS either but a bunch of incompatible and expensive third party systems isn't an improvement. The best of all worlds would be a standard cross-platform open source toolkit.

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      sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
    2. Re: This is a good idea, not "eye rolling" by jddj · · Score: 1

      Um...TensorFlow? Neural Compute stick?

    3. Re: This is a good idea, not "eye rolling" by Pseudonym · · Score: 1

      Thank you for making my point by mentioning two competitors.

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      sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
    4. Re: This is a good idea, not "eye rolling" by jddj · · Score: 1

      The neural compute stick (I have one) can run tensor flow models. What's your point?

  6. Caling it... by mapkinase · · Score: 1

    ... Artificial Stupidity would not carry such a marketing zing, would it?

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    I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
    1. Re:Caling it... by jetkust · · Score: 1

      Artificially Simulated Stupidity would.

    2. Re:Caling it... by suutar · · Score: 1

      we've had artificial stupidity for decades. Very fast, too :)

    3. Re:Caling it... by iggymanz · · Score: 1

      Natural born and bred stupidity is best. It can even win trade wars!

  7. "Hardware-Accelerated AI "? by Gaxx · · Score: 2

    Er... so that would be a computer, then?

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  8. Sounds reasonable by EndlessNameless · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Per the article, they will let developers train their AI in Azure and then import directly into applications. Training a neural network is exactly the kind of limited-duration, CPU-heavy activity that the cloud is designed for. Borrow a thousand CPUs to knock it out in short order and get on with your work.

    And imagine if you wanted to train an algorithm with different inputs to see which method yields the best results in your application. You can burn through the training process in parallel in the cloud quickly, and then start building packages for testing immediately. You can iterate faster to fine tune things once you've picked the best baseline training. Without paying for an expensive AI "render farm" up front. The idea is promising, although the devil is always in the details.

    And, obviously, any decent hardware-level support for AI would be great. The article only refers to the Azure integration though, so it appears the Slashdot headline is misleading.

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    According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
    1. Re:Sounds reasonable by EndlessNameless · · Score: 1

      GPUs can be virtualized as well. Plus, all of the big players are customizing hardware to accelerate their cloud workloads. That includes Microsoft, Google, and Facebook for sure, and probably Amazon as well---though Amazon has never said anything publicly.

      If Microsoft wants to do NN training, they could easily add GPUs, custom ASICs, or FPGAs to support those loads. They have done ASICs and FPGAs before, so I'd be shocked if they aren't already gearing up for AI workloads. Since they control the entire stack from the UI down to the hardware, they have almost unlimited flexibility with Visual Studio in Azure.

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      According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
  9. it's a clipnado by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 1

    it's a clipnado

  10. pre-trained machine learning by Anonymous+Brave+Guy · · Score: 1

    Don't worry, "pre-trained machine learning" is probably a euphemism for if-statements, so it's unlikely that either will be necessary.

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    If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
    1. Re:pre-trained machine learning by invalid_user · · Score: 1

      C'mon. As much as I despise them, I'm sure there are script-kiddies who can code Keras or PyTorch at Microsoft.

      https://www.kaggle.com/gaborfo...
      https://github.com/Cadene/pret...

  11. Jumping sharks? by thegarbz · · Score: 1

    So 90s. I thought we stopped Jumping Sharks when we started Nuking Fridges.

  12. Not spying, Trying to by OYAHHH · · Score: 1

    Sell crap!

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    Caution: Contents under pressure
    1. Re: Not spying, Trying to by TrumpThemAll · · Score: 1

      More like spying to sell crap.

  13. Re:Slashdot is tired by EvilSS · · Score: 1

    The anti microsoft bullshit here at slashdot is very tired. what a lazy writeup this is about a real technology. poopooing machine learning as though its nothing when its most definitely not. lame journalism.

    Don't you know the best and the brightest are only on /.? More than every academic and corporate research center in the world combined. If someone in a /. comment or summary poo-poo's AI, then that's the final word.

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    I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
  14. Marketing noise by Weaselmancer · · Score: 1

    It's a marketing ploy. AI is being mentioned in the news a lot lately, so Microsoft has to look like they're on board. That's all this is. I'm surprised they didn't say "blockchain" in there somewhere as well.

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    Weaselmancer
    rediculous.
    1. Re:Marketing noise by oldgraybeard · · Score: 1

      I'm surprised they didn't say "blockchain", yep! your right I did not look at it that way when I first read it ;)

  15. Windows - pah! by Applehu+Akbar · · Score: 1

    Just checked out two Windows laptops, running Windows 7 and Windows 8.1. On each, I checked Windows Update and found the usual uninstalled stack of Optional Updates waiting to be downloaded. On each machine, I dutifully checked all the installation boxes and clicked Download and Install. Both machines cranked away for a half hour and then crapped out with "Cannot find updates. Try again later?"

    Before Microsoft puts anything resembling AI into Windows, could it deign to release a version of the OS that doesn't turn into unupdatable shit after the first year?

    1. Re:Windows - pah! by marcle · · Score: 1

      Yes this. I have been supporting Windows machines for friends, family, and clients for years.
      I can't recommend Microsoft any more. They were never terrific, although Windows 7 was a high point. But now they've gone full tilt into this remote-controlled walled garden kind of thing.
      Want to guess how an app could use AI? Such as noticing your activity and recommending various products and services? Or, worse, reconfiguring things for you?

    2. Re:Windows - pah! by ConceptJunkie · · Score: 1

      Let me guess... instead of waiting for a Windows update to rearrange all the systems settings UI, this "A.I." feature will dynamically rearrange things for you on the fly.

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      You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
    3. Re:Windows - pah! by MemeRot · · Score: 1

      Predictive analytics to move the update now button under your mouse at the most unexpected time

    4. Re:Windows - pah! by ausekilis · · Score: 1

      "It looks like you're trying to find a shortcut on your desktop. Would you like help?"

        -Clippy

  16. Re:Surveillance capitalism by AHuxley · · Score: 1

    Hardware-Accelerated Spyware.

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    Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
  17. It's a trap! by rune2 · · Score: 2

    Need I remind you that this is the company that invented Clippy?

    There, fixed it for you:
    "Redstone 4," will enable developers to "use AI to deliver more powerful and annoying experiences."