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

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."

Comments

more powerful and engaging experiences

[sinij]

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

Re:more powerful and engaging experiences

[Excelcia]

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.

Re:more powerful and engaging experiences

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Clippy on steroids

[h8sg8s]

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..

Hardware acceleration?

[nmb3000]

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?

Re:Hardware acceleration?

[jetkust]

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.

"Hardware-Accelerated AI "?

[Gaxx]

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

Sounds reasonable

[EndlessNameless]

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.

It's a trap!

[rune2]

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."