The Verge: “Microsoft’s AI CEO thinks Copilot will age and ‘have a room that it lives in’”

Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft’s AI CEO, has a vision of Copilot that involves it being so highly personalized that “it will age”. Microsoft has been increasingly pushing Copilot to be a personalized AI assistant, with a big redesign last year that included a conversational voice mode. Now, Suleyman’s Microsoft AI team is launching a new Copilot virtual character that will interact in real-time with you.

Copilot will certainly have a kind of permanent identity, a presence, and it will have a room that it lives in, and it will age, says Suleyman on an episode of The Colin & Samir Show this week. I’m really interested in this idea of digital patina. The things I love in my world are the things that are a little bit worn or rubbed down, and have scuff marks. Unfortunately in the digital world we don’t have a sense of age.

Tom Warren

While the analogies to Clippy are beyond obvious, this description reminded me instead of Tamagotchi and their rudimentary digital pets you had to care for and interact with constantly to raise. There’s a certain measure of gamification involved in this idea of an always-present AI assistant, an unspoken tactic to anthropomorphize and create emotional connections with these digital constructs. These tactics have a long history in the tech world to boost engagement; the fact that they’re being introduced to drive AI adoption reveals that AI assistants don’t provide much inherent value to their users, otherwise people wouldn’t need artificial incentives to come back to them.

Copilot Appearance will smile, nod, and act surprised. Image: Microsoft

This isn’t even a novel concept from Mustafa Suleyman, who co-founded Inflection AI around this idea, then jumped ship to Microsoft presumably when things got rough at his startup.

Beyond the personalized aspects of Copilot, Suleyman has also hinted that the Windows desktop might be where Microsoft turns its AI attention next. I hate my desktop, said Suleyman on the podcast episode. I look at my screen and I’m like shit man I have a billboard in front of me. It’s just so noisy, so neon, and it’s all competing for my attention. It just looks ugly.

While Microsoft AI is improving voice and video, Suleyman says he wants a quieter, simpler, optimized working environment and that he’s thinking about improving his “workshop” in the future. That might be a hint at potential changes to the Copilot app on Windows in the future, or even bigger changes with Microsoft’s Copilot Plus PCs.

Suleyman said he has customized his phone UI so much to avoid distractions that it’s basically a black and white theme designed to hide things. I use a little rose tint so everything else is noised out, most of the apps are moved to the left and right, and my home screen is really just two or three primary apps, he said.

Honestly, I cannot take anyone seriously who proves himself so obtuse in the space of a couple of sentences, complaining about the complexity of Windows and then describing how he tailored his phone to his needs. So, what’s preventing him from customizing the desktop as well?! Regardless of its real or perceived flaws, Windows is highly customizable, and removing distractions is easily achieved – provided you are willing to make minimal efforts to (gasp!) learn how things work before you diss them publicly! His whole attitude appears immature and self-centered; does he ever stop to think that other people have different needs and preferences for a desktop, other styles of working? On second thought, of course he doesn’t; arrogance and lack of empathy are after all entirely on brand for the Silicon Valley tech class.

I shudder to think what a future version of Windows will look like when someone so dismissive of the product is being asked for input on its future development. Although it would not be the first time that happens: after leading the development of Windows 7 and 8, Steven Sinofsky morphed into the biggest Apple shill I’ve seen and constantly slammed Windows. I have always found that an odd move that suggested pent-up frustrations and mostly discredited his criticisms: if you hated working on Windows so much, why not search for a different job?