Big tech companies trip in race to take AI mainstream
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Illustration: Annelise Capossela/Axios
Recent high-profile stumbles by Microsoft and Google in the corporate rush to deploy generative AI are the result of known flaws, not surprise problems.
Why it matters: The more half-baked AI features and products tech giants unleash upon the public, the less the public is going to trust and embrace the new technology.
Driving the news: Microsoft late last week delayed the broad release of its Recall feature over privacy and security concerns.
- Google has faced blowback over its move to widely incorporate AI summaries atop search results, and has reportedly ramped down the volume of AI-generated summaries it's providing users.
In both cases, the products' problems were predictable.
- The snapshots of user activity that Recall takes are a form of surveillance, even if they're meant to help users find and remember things. It's no surprise that the public harbors deep doubts about ubiquitous AI tracking.
- Google's AI Overview has been in public testing for months in many users' search results, and it has had problems all along delivering accurate, relevant results and crediting sources for the texts it often rewrites or lifts.
The big picture: Today's genAI — even with its many limitations — is capable of doing important work, but it can be unstable and inconsistent, and its impacts cut across disciplines and markets. Responsibility requires extended testing and thoughtful pacing of rollouts.
- It's hard to imagine there weren't people inside each company making the case for caution.
Zoom in: Recall takes frequent screenshots of users' work and stores both the optical character recognition of the text in images of the screen and a description of other images.
- Microsoft made things worse by initially storing the records unencrypted in an easily accessible database. It also planned to have the feature be "on" by default, rather than letting users turn it on if they chose.
Zoom out: Hundreds of billions of dollars are pouring into the AI market, and those investments are driving a competitive frenzy that's causing companies to floor the pedal on product rollouts.
- Microsoft saw an opportunity to add a Windows-only twist to the venerable PC and offer buyers something they couldn't get from Apple or anyone else.
- Google's move to rapidly deploy AI overviews across the U.S. market was likely intended to head off challengers, like Perplexity and others, that hope to unseat traditional search with AI tools.
The other side: Plenty of tech executives believe that getting to market quickly and early is so important that doing so trumps everything else.
- In this view, there's always time to apologize and fix bugs.
What we're watching: Apple has yet to allow the public to get its hands on the Apple Intelligence features it showed last week — some of which will only show up over the course of the next year.
- Apple's use of genAI is more targeted, but it's too soon to say that it won't encounter challenges of its own.
