By way of synthesizing my own feelings together with agreement with @whitequark's earlier comment on my posts, I'll say that part of my frustration with "AI" as a fad is precisely that it's tech as it ever was.
It's the whole industry admitting that the this is what tech always was and what capitalism wants tech to always be.
If this absolute fraud keeps going, soon it won't even be possible to build your own Linux desktop from parts without getting a CPU that is built from the ground-up for putting stolen art through a meat grinder and turning it into anime pfps.
@whitequark
Fully agreed on that one, yeah. I tried to call that out explicitly as the exception that I saw (they didn't mention it, but the very closely related application of transcription is also a godsend).
From that perspective, I'm not even objecting to the NPUs themselves, but to those incentives. They're the same as always, as you point out, but it does feel like something has changed in degree.
At Microsoft, we have a company-wide commitment to develop ethical, safe and secure AI. Our responsible AI principles guided the development of these new experiences, and all AI features are aligned with our standards. Learn more here."
Selection bias and telemetry are so difficult to reconcile. Amongst other things, I have had to explain to folks that you don't learn about the population as a whole, only the subset of the population that uses your project/product.
Apropos of nothing, remembering going to Vegas last year for Fan Fest and encountering the absolute and entire absurdity that is the Convention Center Loop.
Literally, it's just two one-mile underground tunnels that only drive Teslas. It's the most wildly impractical and ridiculous thing, and yet, there it is.
The future of transportation as imagined by the intersection of Vegas hotels and Silicon Valley techbros: lanes of traffic, but very expensive, enormous fire hazards, and completely proprietary.
Reading about creature-only commander decks, now my demand avoidance is going into full overdrive and making me wonder if you could make a reasonably successful commander deck with no creatures whatsoever (e.g.: with one of the few planeswalkers that can be a commander).
(And yes, Facebook is Facebook and Twitter is Twitter. After all, both networks have been quite clear in their policies that deadnaming isn't actually bad.)