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Microsoft admits people don't want AI in search, releases new tools to let you turn it off on Bing: "Users want to have the option to choose whether or not AI is involved" (www.windowscentral.com)
submitted 1 day ago by to c/microsoft@lemdro.id
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[–] 47 points 1 day ago (12 children)

I suspect the real reason is that LLM powered search is crazy expensive for no return, so this is a soft walkback under the guise of consumer choice. In 6 months, theyll have a "we've heard you, 60% of you dont want AI, we are going to switch it to opt-in", and phase out from there. Adjust numbers to whatever their marketers feels right.

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  • [–] 20 points 1 day ago* (7 children)

    LLM powered search is crazy expensive for no return

    Seriously, what return could they possibly be getting out of it? How are AI search results -- even in theory -- making them any more money than just giving regular old-fashioned search results? Users aren't being charged for it. Users aren't seeing more ads because of it. How is it supposed to make money?

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  • [–] 12 points 1 day ago (4 children)

    Lol, tech companies don't have to be profitable...

    The product is the stock price. Being the "biggest" search engine, means people buy your stock driving up the price. Soley because they figure the biggest search engine is making tons of money.

    Back in the day being profitable meant the stock went up, we've just skipped that part now. The numbers always go up, and the amount they go up is literally just based on vibes.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    Well, that is because of the AI-circlejerk bubble. At the center of that is Nvidia, so hopefully those days are over.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 day ago

    No, the bubble is because of vibe evaluations.

    That always result in a bubble.

    Anytime people stop valuing things on what they're worth, and start hoarding because they expect the price to always increase, a bubble appears.

    Eventually no one can afford it, and the bubble bursts. Once people realize that the price won't automatically go up forever, people start cashing out and it eventually stabilizing on what's it worth. For stock prices the company is usually bankrupt before it equalizes.

    Because everyone can just invest in something different.

    The people who did it with Nvidia, are just gonna do it with something else. It's a problem due to wealth inequality, too many people with too much disposal income who only care about short term returns. Their investments don't help anything but enriching each other.

    And they'll keep doing it until we take that wealth out of their pockets and put it back into social circulation.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 day ago

    In theory AI search results let's the user stay on your site (Bing) instead of clicking a link to somewhere else. You can then serve them ads. I don't know how this plays out in practice though, I use an ad blocker so I normally don't see much of them anyways.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 day ago (3 children)

    It is. There’s no ad clicks because the AI answered the query. Plus it’s orders of magnitude more expensive to run the inference than a search result.

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