Apparently not, though there seem to be two distinct stories about where it _does_ come from:
> Amazon developers chose the name Alexa because it has a hard consonant with the X, which helps it be recognized with higher precision. They have said the name is reminiscent of the Library of Alexandria, which was also used by Amazon Alexa Internet for the same reason.
“Excuse me. I invented the term artificial intelligence. I invented it because we had to do something when we were trying to get money for a summer study in 1956, and I had a previous bad experience”
(The whole debate is interesting, I would recommend if you like that type of historical things)
I use Linux so I didn't care about copilot stuff. But recently at work I got dell workstation. It costs around 5k usd. The specs are great. But it has single Ctrl key on the left side, copilot button took its place. I can't jump between words with one hand, I have to press Ctrl with my left hand, and use arrow keys with right hand.
This single choice made the machine piece crap
Absolutely. Even worse, the key doesn't have its own scancode, but instead acts as lshift+lmeta+f23, so rebinding it is a real pain. I know about Hanlon's razor, but there's only so much incompetence one can accept...
I have a laptop with a copilot key, this maps it to right Ctrl on Linux. How well it works depends on how your specific keyboard implements the Shift+Meta+F23 keypress so your mileage may vary. https://github.com/mishoo/exorcise-copilot
It may or may not be easy, depending on your environment, but you can remap keys. I have `input * xkb_options "caps:backspace,compose:ralt"` in my ~/.config/sway/config, for example, plus `input ‹laptop keyboard identifier› xkb_file "~/.config/sway/keymap.xkb"` with that file fixing XF86AudioMicMute (which has key code 256, but X only supports up to 255 and I’m still not quite sure why this was necessary), and now remapping RShift to LCtrl which died early this year.
But… ouch. From https://itsfoss.com/remap-copilot-key-linux/ and other sources, sounds like the Copilot button is LMeta+LShift+F23. Why a combo when using an esoteric key not on anyone’s keyboard anyway? Ugh. That’ll make it harder to sort out, though still possible.
I wish laptops would come with a standard TKL layout. I really need those navigation keys. Ctl-end, ctl-shift-home, ctl-shift-left, all of those things I am constantly using and feel like I'm wearing mittens when using pretty much any laptop.
> Could’ve added more gpu or cpu or cache and people would’ve been happier.
I actually wonder about this - my regular dev workstation is a Qualcomm ARM laptop - by-and-large my bottleneck for CPU-bound tasks is thermal. Would adding more CPU or cache instead of the NPU help with performance/watt?
When these came out, I thought, what is the average PC user going to get out of this? Faster image touchups, and...? You can't run an LLM chatbot of any comparison to free cloud models.
Yes, you can. Of course relatively limited, but you absolutely can run local models.
Based on my own testing, the Windows drivers are a bit restricted to do some more advanced stuff, and it may be due to some security issues in the past? at least that is what I gathered from exploring this issue with GLM 5.3
I was unaware that that brand was alive in the first place. Does Microsoft just call _literally everything_ 'Copilot' now? Nadella will be changing his name to Copilot, next.
The problem with CoPilot+ is that it was negative value on a PC because of the way Microsoft entrenched the related (system) services into Windows. I got a mid range laptop (Core Ultra 7, 16GB RAM, integrate Arc GPU) that I would consider ideal in terms of build quality, specs, etc..
That is until Microsoft’s bloatware starts using a ton of RAM and CPU. Something like 10% CPU use doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s massive on a laptop because it destroys the battery life. And all it’s doing is running things I don’t want that consume RAM. I’m talking 16GB of RAM 50% used up by Microsoft bloatware.
Microsoft doesn’t think, or care, about PC users anymore. Everything they’re doing with Windows makes your PC consume more resources with the goal of trapping you into another pay forever service.
They didn’t even make the CoPilot+ stuff “not suck” before abandoning it. Now it’s just another crappy Windows service gunking up your PC. Vendors should have never agreed to it and IMO the degradation it causes is enough that most of the PCs with it fall into the range of false advertising. I can’t imagine anyone’s battery claims are taking the CoPilot+ trash in Windows into account.
I don’t think so. I haven’t tried it personally, but claims online say it’s part of Windows 11. There are hacks to get rid of it, but supposedly Microsoft is really aggressive about having it running.
The laptop was for a younger person that’s fairly tech-savvy, so it’ll work out. I’d never buy one for my parents now that I know what to watch out for.
For testing, yes, but it’s also my primary development system, so for dogfooding, and for providing a local dev environment for the things that we’re deploying from ARM-based CI/CD to ARM-based servers.
Not even for developers, it is only available via the WinRT crappy tooling on top of Win32 (WinAppSDK), still behind what was originally available in UWP.
We laugh at Google being deadly behind with Gemini but is there a place that has fumbled it like Microsoft? I guess Apple comes close, but with them you get the feeling they were never in it to begin with.
(At the point where Yahoo was in fairly severe decline, it made a large investment in Alibaba at a very low price; Yahoo continued to advance towards complete irrelevance, but the chunk of Alibaba buoyed it up for a while.)
This would be really cool and I’m afraid, like my iPhone 13 Mini and numerous other things I like, bought by a small amount of people compared to the masses. But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t exist.
This is the first time a corporation has spoiled a word for me.
"Copilot" is a term like any other and when I first heard the name, I thought it was an alright, if uninspired, choice.
Now I can't hear the word "Copilot" used in any context without having negative feelings due to Microsoft's saturation campaign.
Speaking of this, I also wonder about present and future people named "Claude", a mainstream name in some parts of the world.
This happens all the time. Mercedes is a fairly common first name for girls in Spanish countries. Then, of course Alexa, etc.
Mercedes was a name of an actual lady, a daughter of a businessman who brought the first Daimler-Benz cars to the market.
I wonder if there existed a real Alexa after whom the AI assistant was called.
Apparently not, though there seem to be two distinct stories about where it _does_ come from:
> Amazon developers chose the name Alexa because it has a hard consonant with the X, which helps it be recognized with higher precision. They have said the name is reminiscent of the Library of Alexandria, which was also used by Amazon Alexa Internet for the same reason.
Fair enough, although nobody thinks Mercedes cars will possibly replace/destroy humanity.
Nobody ever thought Copilot could replace/destroy humanity, it can barely butter its own toast.
No, but it was bound to replace everything that Microsoft touches, by virtue of having its buttons everywhere displacing everything else.
Thanks to MS stopping, the next Word is just not a huge COPILOT button in the middle to who you have to chat to write your stuff.
Although they definitely contributed to climate change through their cars so.. at least negatively impact humanity.
Yes, the people who bought the cars had nothing to do with it. It's the manufacturer's fault.
Please don't give them any ideas.
"crypto"
How often were you using copilot before hand?
More often than I was using the words Gemini, Claude or Alexa.
Happens frequently. I can't hear tremendous anymore. Just considering ai I'm fed up with load bearing, wrinkle, catch...
It got to the point where I feel irrationally hostile to a message when it claims I'm right :).
Even just the term AI is now so cancerous!
A bit unrelated to that thread but I love that clip from a debate where John McCarthy interjects: https://youtu.be/pyU9pm1hmYs?t=152
“Excuse me. I invented the term artificial intelligence. I invented it because we had to do something when we were trying to get money for a summer study in 1956, and I had a previous bad experience”
(The whole debate is interesting, I would recommend if you like that type of historical things)
Hey now, I love Claudish! That's my honest load bearing assessment that I'd like to flag.
Really? A word?!
It looks like this one flew over your heads. Would you like having it explained to you?
For something to be considered dead, it must have been alive in the first place, which was never the case with the Copilot PC brand.
I use Linux so I didn't care about copilot stuff. But recently at work I got dell workstation. It costs around 5k usd. The specs are great. But it has single Ctrl key on the left side, copilot button took its place. I can't jump between words with one hand, I have to press Ctrl with my left hand, and use arrow keys with right hand. This single choice made the machine piece crap
Absolutely. Even worse, the key doesn't have its own scancode, but instead acts as lshift+lmeta+f23, so rebinding it is a real pain. I know about Hanlon's razor, but there's only so much incompetence one can accept...
I have a laptop with a copilot key, this maps it to right Ctrl on Linux. How well it works depends on how your specific keyboard implements the Shift+Meta+F23 keypress so your mileage may vary. https://github.com/mishoo/exorcise-copilot
It may or may not be easy, depending on your environment, but you can remap keys. I have `input * xkb_options "caps:backspace,compose:ralt"` in my ~/.config/sway/config, for example, plus `input ‹laptop keyboard identifier› xkb_file "~/.config/sway/keymap.xkb"` with that file fixing XF86AudioMicMute (which has key code 256, but X only supports up to 255 and I’m still not quite sure why this was necessary), and now remapping RShift to LCtrl which died early this year.
But… ouch. From https://itsfoss.com/remap-copilot-key-linux/ and other sources, sounds like the Copilot button is LMeta+LShift+F23. Why a combo when using an esoteric key not on anyone’s keyboard anyway? Ugh. That’ll make it harder to sort out, though still possible.
Can't you replace the keyboard? (I'm assuming "workstation" != laptop). I have mechanicals laying around that I would just haul with me into work.
I wish laptops would come with a standard TKL layout. I really need those navigation keys. Ctl-end, ctl-shift-home, ctl-shift-left, all of those things I am constantly using and feel like I'm wearing mittens when using pretty much any laptop.
The sad part of this is that all those powerful NPUs are basically paperweight.
35-50 low power TOPS taking 1/5 of the die area and not being used by anyone...
Local speech recognition is something useful that runs well on a (power efficient) NPU.
Dragon Naturally Speaking used to cost real money and wasn't as accurate as an open model like Whisper.
These things are a waste of sand.
Could’ve added more gpu or cpu or cache and people would’ve been happier.
> Could’ve added more gpu or cpu or cache and people would’ve been happier.
I actually wonder about this - my regular dev workstation is a Qualcomm ARM laptop - by-and-large my bottleneck for CPU-bound tasks is thermal. Would adding more CPU or cache instead of the NPU help with performance/watt?
When these came out, I thought, what is the average PC user going to get out of this? Faster image touchups, and...? You can't run an LLM chatbot of any comparison to free cloud models.
Oh yeah, and Recall. That worked out well.
Yep… massive waste. A dsp coprocessor hobbled by npu workflows.
We cantnrun local models on them? They must have some sort of api exposed right? Qualcomm has the Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine iirc
You can do cool experiments with them. But nothing a typical consumer is likely to care about.
Yes, you can. Of course relatively limited, but you absolutely can run local models.
Based on my own testing, the Windows drivers are a bit restricted to do some more advanced stuff, and it may be due to some security issues in the past? at least that is what I gathered from exploring this issue with GLM 5.3
I was unaware that that brand was alive in the first place. Does Microsoft just call _literally everything_ 'Copilot' now? Nadella will be changing his name to Copilot, next.
The problem with CoPilot+ is that it was negative value on a PC because of the way Microsoft entrenched the related (system) services into Windows. I got a mid range laptop (Core Ultra 7, 16GB RAM, integrate Arc GPU) that I would consider ideal in terms of build quality, specs, etc..
That is until Microsoft’s bloatware starts using a ton of RAM and CPU. Something like 10% CPU use doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s massive on a laptop because it destroys the battery life. And all it’s doing is running things I don’t want that consume RAM. I’m talking 16GB of RAM 50% used up by Microsoft bloatware.
Microsoft doesn’t think, or care, about PC users anymore. Everything they’re doing with Windows makes your PC consume more resources with the goal of trapping you into another pay forever service.
They didn’t even make the CoPilot+ stuff “not suck” before abandoning it. Now it’s just another crappy Windows service gunking up your PC. Vendors should have never agreed to it and IMO the degradation it causes is enough that most of the PCs with it fall into the range of false advertising. I can’t imagine anyone’s battery claims are taking the CoPilot+ trash in Windows into account.
Can you reinstall a generic non-OEM Windows ISO to get rid of the bloatware, or does it reinstall/re-enable itself?
I don’t think so. I haven’t tried it personally, but claims online say it’s part of Windows 11. There are hacks to get rid of it, but supposedly Microsoft is really aggressive about having it running.
The laptop was for a younger person that’s fairly tech-savvy, so it’ll work out. I’d never buy one for my parents now that I know what to watch out for.
You're telling me all those laptops with the keyboard, trackpad and screen askew are tainted in another way?
Who is buying these?
What forecast suggests these BOMs are profitable?
> Who is buying these?
I needed a Windows on ARM device, so no real other options available.
For testing? Why would a tech person buy one of these?
For testing, yes, but it’s also my primary development system, so for dogfooding, and for providing a local dev environment for the things that we’re deploying from ARM-based CI/CD to ARM-based servers.
> the purpose for Copilot+ PCs was to be able to deliver [NPU] experiences
Maybe for developers. Not sure ordinary consumers looking for a new tablet or laptop will be asking for “NPU experiences”
Not even for developers, it is only available via the WinRT crappy tooling on top of Win32 (WinAppSDK), still behind what was originally available in UWP.
We laugh at Google being deadly behind with Gemini but is there a place that has fumbled it like Microsoft? I guess Apple comes close, but with them you get the feeling they were never in it to begin with.
Microsoft has between a 27 and 32% stake in OpenAI
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2025/10/28/the-next-chapter...
Ah, the Yahoo approach.
(At the point where Yahoo was in fairly severe decline, it made a large investment in Alibaba at a very low price; Yahoo continued to advance towards complete irrelevance, but the chunk of Alibaba buoyed it up for a while.)
I pay for chatgpt and Gemini and I don't know why because you are correct.
The funny part? I'm afraid to cancel gemeni because maybe Google will retaliate by closing my Google account lol?
Apple "Intelligence" being behind is now being sold as a value add by the Apple fanbois.
I dunno about people that buy their products. But being behind on AI is absolutely a positive for their stocks.
I dont think Apple is sleeping on AI, they are trying really hard. Look at their recent announcements - AI features everywhere.
You can't be behind if you don't allow competition.
I buy cheap Android phones because they don't do AI.
so can we actually remap that useless coilot button that replaced the useful menu key?
Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49844896
Did his ever catch on to begin with?
Instead of AI slop they should have marketed a 'reliable PC' with ECC RAM and a more bug free windows.
This would be really cool and I’m afraid, like my iPhone 13 Mini and numerous other things I like, bought by a small amount of people compared to the masses. But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t exist.