Yesterday Moment 2 was released and I wrote a large post about it. This update to Windows 11 was a large feature update and came with numerous changes to our familiar Windows 11. From Phone Link to Studio Effects there was a lot in this release.

But waking up this morning, the Kool-Aid had worn off a bit, and I was searching for deeper meaning in the announcement. The iPhone Phone Link is only for a select few “Cool Kids” right now, and the Studio Effects are really only special if you have an NPU on your computer. Buried in my post was this little nugget of information:

This moment introduces the integration of this AI-powered Bing into the desktop. That’s right if you turned off “Search” on your desktop they turn it back on for you and you can use it to search Bing using the AI powered chat engine.

Well it seems as though that search bar isn’t actually AI powered. It’s just the plain simple search that it always was. It just has a new icon indicating Bing, but it isn’t AI powered. It’s pretty simple it searches your local computer for documents and apps matching your search term and if it can’t find anything it does a Bing search for it. Basically there’s no difference between typing in that search box and just pressing the Start button and type away. It’s the same.

This hype train of AI took me for a ride and from the state of Twitter today it seems that I wasn’t the only one. I think in this era of every news item coming out of Microsoft including some form of AI, we should really do a reality check, or an AI wake up call on everything we read. Until now AI has just been a ton of if statements. Now we are looking at trillions of if statements making up the newest batch of AI engines. They truly are amazing works of art. However, it’s important to remember that not everything is AI powered.

So, I turned it off again. Maybe someday it will be useful, but for now it’s just an annoyance and a task bar clutter monger.