Listen I know that having an opinion and using superlatives when describing something makes me intrinsically uncool for breaking the all-encompassing kayfabe of total glibness required to be one of the Very Smart People on the Internet, but I think it's a warranted distinction for a company that has consistently been behind a lion's share of both legal and technological innovations that have pushed our world toward dystopia and catastrophe in the last 30+ years. They have been repeatedly shown to engage in anti-competitive and customer hostile behavior, often inventing tactics used by other tech monopolies after they proved that you can get away with them. Their lawyers both drafted the policies of the DMCA and put considerable pressure on a staggering number of nations to adopt similar laws. TPMs are their innovation as well. Their explicit ethos and business model is about maximizing the degree to which intellectual property law stifles innovation from competitors, and their founder has extended this model into connections made doing ostensibly charitble work, notably acting to prevent at least one major vaccine from being open-sourced and made publicly available during a global pandemic, a decision which not only likely killed millions of people directly, but also likely allowed the current state of affairs where the thing can constantly mutate in a large swath of the population of the world which can't produce vaccines quickly because they are legally barred from doing so.
But even a commitment to a strong concept of IP isn't an obstacle when new fuckery can be done. In the new wave generative AI, Microsoft continues to innovate. Even without including anything done by open OpenAI, they probably win most shady data scam to train AI from their acquisition of Github and subsequent indiscriminate use of private repos to train models that will then regurgitate snippets of code (again, this coming from a company that is very litigious about its own code's IP rights), as well as using lots of code open-sourced under licenses that explicitly prohibit commercial usage or require code built from it to be open-sourced in turn to train models that are both themselves directly sold as a commercial product without making its source (let alone weights or datasets) available, but that also will regurgitate code from those repos without replicating those licenses, thus essentially laundering any arbitrary violation of those licenses (After all, copilot might have suggested that snippet of code with the developer using it never knowing that it was from a GPL-licensed codebase). So to summarize, after building an entire business on code as IP and spending a ton on everything from press to litigation to lobbying strengthening the inviolability of this IP, they then created the world's most effective tool for ignoring IP law for proprietary corporate code and open-source code alike in order to effectively sell this capability as a service
I fully stand by calling Microsoft one of the most dangerous and irresponsible companies currently active on this planet. Perhaps you've got a better argument against this claim than an oblique comparison to sexist depictions of housewives in old movies. Feel free to share it if you like
> Listen I know that having an opinion and using superlatives when describing something makes me intrinsically uncool for breaking the all-encompassing kayfabe of total glibness required to be one of the Very Smart People on the Internet
Sorry my dumbass fell asleep by the end of that rant. Also, I fucking hate "smart people" so i take that as a deeply personal insult.
But even a commitment to a strong concept of IP isn't an obstacle when new fuckery can be done. In the new wave generative AI, Microsoft continues to innovate. Even without including anything done by open OpenAI, they probably win most shady data scam to train AI from their acquisition of Github and subsequent indiscriminate use of private repos to train models that will then regurgitate snippets of code (again, this coming from a company that is very litigious about its own code's IP rights), as well as using lots of code open-sourced under licenses that explicitly prohibit commercial usage or require code built from it to be open-sourced in turn to train models that are both themselves directly sold as a commercial product without making its source (let alone weights or datasets) available, but that also will regurgitate code from those repos without replicating those licenses, thus essentially laundering any arbitrary violation of those licenses (After all, copilot might have suggested that snippet of code with the developer using it never knowing that it was from a GPL-licensed codebase). So to summarize, after building an entire business on code as IP and spending a ton on everything from press to litigation to lobbying strengthening the inviolability of this IP, they then created the world's most effective tool for ignoring IP law for proprietary corporate code and open-source code alike in order to effectively sell this capability as a service
I fully stand by calling Microsoft one of the most dangerous and irresponsible companies currently active on this planet. Perhaps you've got a better argument against this claim than an oblique comparison to sexist depictions of housewives in old movies. Feel free to share it if you like