this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2026
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Right now your consumer usage is subsidised by venture capital funding, especially from Gulf States parking oil money. If they don't offer you more than the cost of token generation for free or near-free, you have plenty of competing models that do the same thing for free. If none of them are free, there are plenty of locally-run models that are. The AI bubble popping is when the investor funds dry up and the cost of token generation is passed onto consumers. It will try to follow the same enshittification process that streaming services have, but with a less valuable product. Trying to pass those costs onto businesses that are using AI to cut costs is so contradictory that the bottom falls out for the entire market.
Copilot won't leave your computer, it will just become like Office. I remember using Word and Excel for free but now they expect a subscription that's almost as obscene as Adobe's. Basic functionality of your computer will be paywalled to make up for the costs these companies sunk into AI bullshit, during the depression they caused where nobody can afford their products.
Right. Yep, I've already seen that at my current employer. Copilot is free for the time being but there is a strong push by Microsoft to get us onto an M365 paid Copilot licence at a nominal cost per user.
The only difference between the 'baked in' Office Copilot (which is literally now the Office 'apps' landing page) and the M365 copilot is that the latter purportedly will not use your tenant data to train models.
The app is functionally the same, and the only business units who want M365 paid version rolled out are governance and IT. All staff just use the free Copilot now or use other LLMs.
So if the app is functionally the same for user output, I guess the only way they can go is to remove the free one and have people clamour for the company to pay to get it back? So like, hopefully it may disappear from some parts of the Microsoft suite?
I've been using Windows since 3.1 and Microsoft stopped making good decisions after XP. They're such a bloated company that they're institutionally incapable of coming up with something new that's good, only doubling down on the things that have brand recognition. I could totally see them do something like make copilot run locally in the way Deepseek does but still charge a subscription fee to unlock half the functionality of Windows 12 with it.
This sounds plausible. They'd still need to strike a balance so they can retain some of the data for training, presumably, so it wouldn't be 100% local? Who knows, they may do something similar with paywalled logic models that require online compute, and then hamstring the local only version. We'll see.
i mean 7 was nice.
7 was inoffensive and I'd go back to it over 11, but I liked Windows 7 because it felt like they undid all the Vista shit to restore Windows XP with a more modernised UI.