Get users hooked with free access. Wait few years. Start having lawyers tweak terms of service. Charge corporate customers a shit ton of money as free users sell their junk. Yank “free” tier, with none to minimal notice due to ToS. Cite limited resource constraint. Stick previously free users with $99/month access.
Or perhaps “chat” just isn’t the best use of LLMs. Autocomplete-based integrations, rather than chat, could be better. I know I love and get great utility from GitHub Copilot, but not really any online or offline LLM chatbot.
Also, from a UX perspective, I feel an autocomplete-based UI encourages me to make sure the thing “I’m saying” is actually what I mean to say - ie, to not implicitly trust LLM hallucinations.
LLM-based generative text everywhere, in every app, could be useful, very straightforwardly integrated at an OS level into all text controls, something MS is well-poised to do, and “Copilot” a very good brand for that. (And I would be shocked if Apple and Google aren’t working on the same.)
I use llms to write text for me sometimes simply to rewrite it myself because sometimes having something to criticise is better than having to create from scratch
Given the relative simplicity of integrating LLM autocomplete into OS text fields (compared to other integrations supported in modern OSes), I would be shocked if a state entity with balls (like the EU) doesn’t introduce laws enforcing that OSes must have open support for third-party LLM/generative text integrations.
That said, that’s almost certainly Microsoft’s short-term strategy until then! And probably part of why Apple made their sudden priority shift towards LLM features.
MSFT stock pumps hard for the next few years.