Musksoft?
Elon Musk is using a familiar playbook. When things get a bit difficult, create a diversion. With intense Chinese competition on the AI front pushing non-Chinese companies to open sources their models, its time for a little distraction. Musk is looking to create software that will rival Microsoft’s (MSFT) Office Suite and similar products, but not the way Microsoft did it. Musk wants to create agents, imbued with functions and goals that are decided by those at his new company. Rather than have his engineers slave over billions of lines of code, interface designs, and testing, the agents will continuously run the model through iteration after iteration, until they are able to meet those functions and goals.
Of course, Microsoft has been accumulating user-knowledge for many years, not always a pleasant task, and has been making modifications to meet many (certainly not all) of those demands, but in the Musk system, the agents will move the model from a bizarro Office at the onset to an AI based facsimile of Office using the AI tools at his disposal. It is a challenge to Microsoft and to the software industry generally, but while it sounds like something AI should be able to do, while AI is certainly able to assist software developers, most code needs to be reviewed and tested by humans, and many consider AI coding to be a help but not a savior when it comes to complex problems.
We know the biases embedded in Microsoft’s products. They are oriented toward pushing the user toward some sort of recurring revenue stream as they develop a routine with Office and similar products, and the software itself is bloated from years of tweaks that give the user a slight workflow improvement but slow down the ability of the software to perform its basic functions. We know those biases, as does Microsoft, but with the code so ingrained in the products, making big changes would likely disrupt user workflow and cause no end of panic across the Microsoft user base.
What we don’t know are the biases that will appear in MuskSoft. We will have to deal with the functions that Musksoft engineers believe are most important, but more so, the biases that are built into the code by the Ai itself. Agents learn how to do things by being told. If you don’t tell them what to do and where to find the resources they need, they don’t do anything, so thinking that this group of agents will create a Microsoft Office without significant human ‘assistance’ is a mistake. One could always have the agents try to ‘decode’ office and replicate it, but what point would that serve? Perhaps another path might work better. Don’t show the agents anything associated with Office and let it come up with what it thinks Office should look like, but no matter what you tell the agents, what they do is going to be governed by those who build them and that is where we have issues.
We think Musk should build agents that can watch all of his employees use Microsoft products and log what they do down to the keystroke and use that as training data, rather than base anew product on thoughts of a group of engineers. Wouldn’t that be the ultimate way to understand what users really want? If you are going to let AI develop a product for you, don’t make it the same product that already exists just to prove AI can do it, make it something that has value to those who might use it by watching how they use the existing product, what things work and what doesn’t.
AI’s are good for that kind of thing. They can look at huge datasets and find relationships that we humans don’t notice. For example, “34.3% of the times that a user opens a new spreadsheet in Excell, the first thing they do is remove all the lines around cells”. Is that true? We don’t know but after watching thousands of users for weeks or months, the AI would know whether that statement was true, along with billions of other relationships, and that could be very valuable in creating a new “Office”, only we are still unsure if Musk is refocusing eyeballs or serious about creating something more than an AI Office clone. We are sure money will be thrown at it, but not quite sure of the objective.
Of course, Microsoft has been accumulating user-knowledge for many years, not always a pleasant task, and has been making modifications to meet many (certainly not all) of those demands, but in the Musk system, the agents will move the model from a bizarro Office at the onset to an AI based facsimile of Office using the AI tools at his disposal. It is a challenge to Microsoft and to the software industry generally, but while it sounds like something AI should be able to do, while AI is certainly able to assist software developers, most code needs to be reviewed and tested by humans, and many consider AI coding to be a help but not a savior when it comes to complex problems.
We know the biases embedded in Microsoft’s products. They are oriented toward pushing the user toward some sort of recurring revenue stream as they develop a routine with Office and similar products, and the software itself is bloated from years of tweaks that give the user a slight workflow improvement but slow down the ability of the software to perform its basic functions. We know those biases, as does Microsoft, but with the code so ingrained in the products, making big changes would likely disrupt user workflow and cause no end of panic across the Microsoft user base.
What we don’t know are the biases that will appear in MuskSoft. We will have to deal with the functions that Musksoft engineers believe are most important, but more so, the biases that are built into the code by the Ai itself. Agents learn how to do things by being told. If you don’t tell them what to do and where to find the resources they need, they don’t do anything, so thinking that this group of agents will create a Microsoft Office without significant human ‘assistance’ is a mistake. One could always have the agents try to ‘decode’ office and replicate it, but what point would that serve? Perhaps another path might work better. Don’t show the agents anything associated with Office and let it come up with what it thinks Office should look like, but no matter what you tell the agents, what they do is going to be governed by those who build them and that is where we have issues.
We think Musk should build agents that can watch all of his employees use Microsoft products and log what they do down to the keystroke and use that as training data, rather than base anew product on thoughts of a group of engineers. Wouldn’t that be the ultimate way to understand what users really want? If you are going to let AI develop a product for you, don’t make it the same product that already exists just to prove AI can do it, make it something that has value to those who might use it by watching how they use the existing product, what things work and what doesn’t.
AI’s are good for that kind of thing. They can look at huge datasets and find relationships that we humans don’t notice. For example, “34.3% of the times that a user opens a new spreadsheet in Excell, the first thing they do is remove all the lines around cells”. Is that true? We don’t know but after watching thousands of users for weeks or months, the AI would know whether that statement was true, along with billions of other relationships, and that could be very valuable in creating a new “Office”, only we are still unsure if Musk is refocusing eyeballs or serious about creating something more than an AI Office clone. We are sure money will be thrown at it, but not quite sure of the objective.
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