I agree. The only two examples I've seen of embedded AI that "works" is Bard in search results, and generative AI in Adobe's. Everything else feels tacked on.

Edit: And on my iPhone, the offline photo categorization and image OCR

It is hilarious that people are trying to portray MSFT's moves in AI as "desperate" lol

They are oversaturating their products with internet-based LLMs. It is a desperate attempt to milk all possible potential value from their smart investment.

A careful plan for a product would be less hamfisted and include more flexibility to deal with the backlash.

MS got the score of the century. They're selling the shovels and access to the mines.

MSFT's main benefit their chokehold on corporate software. They can provide high priced software, deals etc. due to sheer force of Office and Azure. Even Amazon does not have that.

The GPUs that Nvidia is selling to Microsoft, Google, Meta and the venture-backed AI bandwagon are arguably the shovels.

This is true, but most big AI companies are the ones selling shovels, and tons of money is pouring into the field because everyone wants to get in on shovel selling... but I don't know if it's yet determined that there are enough motivated shovel buyers.

Microsoft haven't really taken any deep interest into the (say) Office suite in decades so now they have no intuition at all for where its value is, thus the "umm copilot?"-ing everywhere.