The "AI wave" is a scam. Everyone missed the AI wave because it sucks at everything except making slop.
this post was submitted on 17 May 2026
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The more logical explanation is that AI is not a wave like the Internet and Mobile, but it is instead a wave like cryptocurrencies, NFTs and tulip bulbs.
If there's one thing that almost 3 decades at or near the forefront of Tech has taught me is that "novel" is not the same as "better", and that of all the times a novel technology was pushed by insane amounts of hype, only a handful turned out to match the hype and the ratio of good-ones to bullshit has become much worse in the last 2 decades as the Tech Startup sector fully morphed from Techie-driven to Financeer-driven.
On hype alone "AI" (as in, what's called now AI for the public, rather than the ML domain) stinks of greed-driven bullshit and the more one analyses the Technical details of LLMs and the Mathematics of it as well as of the improvements over time, the more painfully obvious it becomes that it's not at all AGI or a path to it, rather it's an overhyped attempt at it that turned out to be the wrong path. (All of which would've been absolutelly fine and a big Scientific step forward if it weren't for the greedy financeer class and grifters pushing, purelly for their own personal enrichment, for people and companies to adopted it for doing things it's not suitable for)
AI has an interesting economic trait in that it's very, very expensive to deploy, and made very fast progress from 2022 to 2024. That caused investors with money to believe that:
- Pushing the frontier was going to cost a lot of money. More than any other purported revolutionary tech.
- Extrapolation of past improvement meant that whoever was on the cutting edge may end up with a product with a huge paying market.
- So whoever wins this race would be rich, and the investment would have been worth it for them.
But since 2024, we've seen that the cutting edge got even more expensive much faster than expected, and much of the improvements in performance now come from inference rather than training, which represents a high ongoing cost.
Now, if we extrapolate from that trend line, we'll see that the market will be much smaller for AI services at the cost it takes to provide that service, and the question then becomes whether the industry can make its operations cheaper, fast enough to profitably provide a service people will pay for.
I have my doubts they'll succeed, and we might just be looking at the industry like supersonic flight: conceptually interesting, technically feasible, but just a commercial dead end because it's too expensive.
The economics of it don't add up and the growth rate of the curve of improvement over time has already significativelly fallen which looking at the historical curves for other technologies is a very strong indication that it's approaching the limits of how far it will go even though it's nowhere close to the hype.
So at both levels it all looks like a massive bet in the wrong horse that's turning out not to be a winner but it keeps getting pushed by those who bet on it in the hope of making enough people and companies dependent that its sustained by nothing more than the unacceptable cost of it failing.
(In terms of strategy, it's similar to how Uber started by using loopholes in the regulations for taxis, investing heavilly in becoming so big and established fast that when Authorities around the world got around to address those loopholes, they ended up accepting Uber and the like as something that could not be reversed and instead of regulating it out of existence, legitimized it. A very similar strategy was used by AirBNB: make the facts on the ground so big and reverting them so damaging that their low-value-adding business model with massive negative externalities and collateral damage ends up protected rather than made to pay for the societal costs of said collateral damage and negative externalities - essentially at some level Uber and especially AirBNB are being heavilly subsidized by society by being allowed to "polute" at will without paying for it).
So as I see it, the way Microsoft and other AI investors are going at it is to try and create a beachhead for it via hype, branding and lock-in in the expectation that something will come along at some point from the companies they invested in that is actually a genuine breakthrough that uses all the computing capacity created with their investment money.
I think that the reason why from the point of view of the public the AI adoption feels wrong is because it's almost entirelly top-down, driven by marketing techniques and against the natural desires of people - it's a novel form of entertainment being shoved down people's throats as suitable for important responsabilities.
From my own experience, this feel a lot like the hype part of the cycle for the Segway, only with 100x or 1000x more investment money behind it.
Great, can I now buy RAM, SSDs, and HDDs on a cheaper price?
I encurage MS to make an Operating System, like sit down with the Linux From Scratch book and try to make something. The Gentoo handbook is also a blast. Get the basics in, make a solid init system, a package manager and watch hardware start working for you.
Plastering DOS with even more layers of patches, AI slop and sales pitches has been done, did not work and it's time to move on.
They should add much more AI. Why? Cause it's really funny to watch from the outside as a Linux user.
Are you really being "left behind" when everyone else is going the wrong way?
I'm really baffled because this is super easy to fix.
Step 1. Pull all the AI bloat out of Windows 11. Make a clean, compatible, and user friendly OS out of the Windows brand.
Step 2. Spin CoPilot into it's own OS. Go crazy with your "Every app is just a different AI presentation of your data." Make the AI in there all powerful. Allow users to remote to the OS and run the same AI regardless of the platform.
Step 3. Print money
The problem isnt co pilot. Its co pilot being rammed in incredibly stupid ways into every possible product.
More importantly, its cramming it in everywhere when basis windows 11 sucks. Explorer sucks, search sucks, performance sucks, Updates suck.
The problem isnt co pilot
I will stop you there because Copilot is downright horrible compared to other LLMs lol
Wave? This is like being sad you did not get in on the housing crisis, or the dot com bubble, or any other clearly labeled landmine.
I know right. They dodged the AI bullet would be a more accurate headline.
I don't think they dodged it
Prolly not eh
Did they though? Don't they control Open AI to the point where they could force Open AI to keep Sam Altman as CEO?
I have no idea, just talking about an alternative title "Missed the wave". I care very little about Microsoft these days. 😅 I only use a fraction of their products for work because I'm forced to. (Authenticator, Outlook, Azure, basically.)
scales back?
I just got an update that puts a persistent copilot overlay in the corner of Excel, blocking my cells. and the same update seems to have added a context menu that shows up on left click on a squiggle word in Word, which again blocks my document unnecessarily. I use neither of these pictures. I want neither of these features. I want to use the fucking program to do my goddamn work
"Guys, we're scaling back on AI! Honest! Isn't this great publicity?!"
"Also, totally unrelated... but today we're launching SchmoPilot Assistant for Notepad!"
You don't know what you want, you ungrateful shit.
If Microsoft wasn't run by tools, they'd see the gap Google and Apple have left behind by locking down their eco systems.
They could be the hero we need by saying we'll make the software and you fully own your device like pc / windows.
But of course they won't, and will just shoot themselves in the dick.
Just like when they ditched explorer we were all like yaay! Then instead of attaching to Firefox they just became another chromium cuck.
Why would anyone take your shitty browser that's just a skin of chrome...
Again, they had the chance to take the pro customer lane and succeed, but they were too inept.
It isn't just ineptitude. Of course executives at Microsoft know that they could be good and be successful with consumers. But they don't need to please consumers, they have far more important customers: the surveillance state, and the military industrial complex.
Once corporations have a near-monopoly position, they do not need to make good products anymore. Microsoft has enough money already to completely fail at everything for centuries and they'd be just fine. So they can focus on other goals, such as dismantling online anonymity for the benefit of the ruling class, who owns and controls Microsoft.
they have far more important customers: the surveillance state,
Except Microsoft is also losing the whole EU market because of Trump
It's a wave of sewage, few users want to ride it in the first place
sewage that they caused , to backup. by backing OPENAI, ORACLE and nvidia. now they are desperate to get governments to fund thier ponzi scheme.
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You didn’t miss the “mobile wave”. You purposely gave up. Idiots.
We were lucky and dodged that future enshitification bullet.
They freaking gave up on anything quickly if they are not immediately the leader in the market.
They're the present day IBM, complete with supporting the present day version of the NAZIs whilst they commit their very own version of the Holocaust.
True. As much as I hate to admit it, the Windows phones were actually pretty good.
Had they not botched app adoption and then immediately given up, they could have done fairly well.
Agreed I have been a Linux Stan since the 90s and even I thought windows phone was pretty good.
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They tried; it must've been 4 times. But unless it's a sure thing, they'll give up.
I worry they don't know how to compete on a level ground, slowly building trust and business on success after success.
I used a Windows Mobile PDA (Dell Axim X50v) for years before the iPhone came out. It was great at the time. Few other things could provide video, games, music, and a web browser in your pocket at the time but WM2003 with the Opera browser and some other apps did quite well. I kept using that thing even into the Android and iPhone era.
It also didn't help that they did a complete rebuild of Windows Phone OS 3 times, making old apps incompatible and forcing the very little support of app developers to get alienated from the platform. Why would you completely rebuild your app 3 times for a super low market share product.
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They didn't miss the "wave", they discovered it's just hype and a bubble. They spent a fortune and damaged their core products to try and get in on AI, and have realised it was fools gold that their actual paying customers don't want. This really sums the problem up well:
Out of Microsoft’s 450 million Microsoft 365 user base, the company has only managed to convert roughly 15 million paid Copilot seats. This means a staggering 96.7% of users are rejecting the premium AI features, yielding just a 3.3% paid adoption rate. When viewed against Microsoft’s estimated $37.5 billion quarterly AI spending, this is an alarmingly low adoption rate.
I'm sure I'm like many people - I tried Copilot a couple of times; it's ok to make an email or even document text a bit more concise, but that's really it. I don't find it useful; I do all the actual work and then occasionally get an AI to help make it a bit easier to read very similar to a spell check and grammar check. It's not good enough to do anything else; it bullshits and is error ridden and like all the AI I've tried it's really plateaued. I just really don't see where the value in that $37.5bn spent by Microsoft is.
I certainly wouldn't pay for copilot myself. Instead I object to it being rammed down my throat at work, and Windows 11 just being generally awful but not improved. Microsoft are finally making the right noises but the damage is already done.
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The article touches on a bunch of valid points, but re the headline, I don't really think that a failure to generate excitement about AI integration into Windows 11 is because they missed the boat. It's because they're shoehorning it into places it doesn't belong.
They have the ability to make it useful. Ethical concerns aside, GitHub Copilot is as good as any AI development assistant, and better than most. Hopes that they'd gain ground with Bing would have needed them to be way ahead of the curve (and for AI search result summaries to be more useful than the top results, which they rarely are).
But for Copilot to be useful in the desktop environment, it needs to be there quietly in the places it's needed. Improve your help tools, make Grammarly irrelevant, infer document context to make search better. Don't rename half of your products "Copilot", don't put flashy buttons in every app, just use the benefits of applied AI to improve your products.
Oh, and make it optional, for fuck's sake. If I don't feel like I have control over my OS any more, I'm not likely to stick around when other options are available.
The entire "AI" wave (and I use quote to distinguish it from what was previously called AI and from ML in general) was almost entirelly hype driven by greed, not just from run-of-the-mill grifters and speculative investors, but also ultra-rich types and gigantic companies.
As I see it, Microsoft went at pushing it in Windows in exactly that spirit - ultra-greedilly, insanelly and almost desperatelly pushing in any way they could think of no matter how maladapted for as fast as possible public adoption of "AI" to quickly go from investment stage to the cash-out stage.
The spirit of a grifter burning previously built up name and goodwill to push their own "coin" as hard as possible to cash out of it before people figure out it's all a con, not the well thought out roll-out of a long term strategy of a dominant company.
The whole thing feels like MS being used as a vehicle for a giant grift (curiously, kinda like the Trump presidency).
The entire "AI" wave (and I use quote to distinguish it from what was previously called AI and from ML in general) was almost entirelly hype driven by greed, not just from run-of-the-mill grifters and speculative investors, but also ultra-rich types and gigantic companies.
As I see it, Microsoft went at pushing it in Windows in exactly that spirit - ultra-greedilly, insanelly and almost desperatelly pushing in any way they could think of no matter how maladapted for as fast as possible public adoption of "AI" to quickly go from investment stage to the cash-out stage.
The spirit of a grifter burning previously built up name and goodwill to push their own "coin" as hard as possible to cash out of it before people figure out it's all a con, not the well thought out roll-out of a long term strategy of massive company guaranteeing their Future.
this is a decent read. theres honest criticism and not a "m$ sux lol" rant. a someone who can agnostically enjpy tech history, i would like to see how this plays out.
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