🧠 Neural Dispatch: Microsoft’s AI chaos, Perplexity’s moment, and Firefox’s cool approachThe biggest AI developments, decoded. November 19, 2025.
Hello! Cognitive warmup. Earlier this year, much to cheers from the shortsighted and unintelligent, Microsoft claimed that as much as 30% of the company’s code is now written by AI. Fast forward and snapshot the months since, Windows 11 updates have been an absolute mess. The October update breaks the Windows Recovery Environment by preventing input from USB keyboard or mouse accessories. The August update caused hard drives to become inaccessible or data to be lost. The big 24H2 update had installation failures. Along the way, websites failing to load, random app crashes or freeze behaviour, and even Windows’ inability to understand the “update and shut down” command have been noted as highlights. I’ve said this before, but perhaps a repetition is in order — Humans > AI. Fact. ALGORITHMWe talk about why everyone’s willing Perplexity to fail, Satya Nadella’s commentary on defining destiny and importance of sovereignty for AI companies, and is the Rabbit out of the dodgy hat? Thanks for reading Neural Dispatch! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Perplexity’s “most likely to fail” moment
I’d say two themes stand out most at the Cerebral Valley Conference 2025 — there is significant investor unease with all things AI, and secondly, Perplexity which is perpetually trying to get Google’s attention whilst also in a legal wrangle with Amazon now, has been voted as the likeliest to fail by attendees. And mind you, the audience included investors and founders. Basically, the question asked was this — If you could short a $1B+ valuation startup, which would it be? Perplexity won the gold medal, followed by OpenAI, and bronze achieved by the collective of Cursor, Figure, Harvey, Mercer, Mistral and Thinking Machines. This may well be an informal survey, but explains the pulse of the matter. So much for an AI bubble anymore. Perplexity can be cynical all they want (Businesses Insider reports Perplexity spokesman Jesse Dwyer replied in an email: “Geeze, it sounds more like the judgmental valley conference.”), but the reality is simple. The perception of being a winner or leading the way, but they very much have to contend with the reality of the broader AI space — ballooning investment needs, spiking power requirements and in Perplexity’s ecosystem, competing in the same space as Google and OpenAI (who, mind you, are also facing headwinds) for search and AI browsers. Estimates suggest Perplexity processes 780M queries monthly, whereas Google handles 13.7 billion daily. If Perplexity thinks search is easy (simply become the second largest behind Google), it isn’t so. Microsoft baked ChatGPT into Bing in February 2023. In 2025, but market share has only inched from around 3.4% then to 4.31% as of October 2025, and this for a tech company with much deeper pockets and presence on millions of devices globally. The reality is Perplexity is burning cash, and battling Amazon in court. It seems investors love the swagger but quietly worry about the unit economics, the bandwidth bills, and whether AI search as a business model can sustain itself. Some may think it is the hottest story in AI search, but signs point to a simple truth — higher the hype, harder the landing. Don’t shoot the messenger. Satya Nadella’s warns about extractive AI…
Friday night in that timezone (peak get-work-done vibes in Silicon Valley), Saturday morning for us, Microsoft’s CEO posted a thoughtful note about the dangers of “extractive” AI partnerships. Even invoked the learnings of Bill Gates, defining platform and economic value. “Even in our somewhat zero-sum mindset industry, we can create partnerships that create value for all parties involved. Our partnership with OpenAI is a great example. Our investment helped them scale; their research accelerated our own innovation. That’s what healthy platforms and partners do—they catalyze and compound progress,” he wrote. Admirable sentiment, except for the part where Microsoft invested $13 billion in OpenAI over the years, for exclusive hosting of OpenAI’s commercial API products on Azure, supercomputing infrastructure, prime position with multiple generations of frontier training, and so on. Satya warns every firm must make sure they have control of their own destiny and sovereignty versus a press release with a Tech/AI company or lose value through what may seem like a partnership, that’s actually extractive in terms of value exchange in the long run. The point Nadella is missing is simple — consumers don’t care about corporate moralising. They care that Windows 11 is forcing AI into their face (more on this in a bit) while simultaneously not helping with utility. Rabbit’s “we can’t pay you, but trust the vision” eraRemember that time when everyone thought AI wearables would be a big deal? It is being reported that Rabbit, the company behind the ill-fated R1, is months behind on salaries. And at the same time, teasing a new piece of AI hardware. A hardware teaser suggests they’ve decided the best way to solve a financial crisis, by trying to build another expensive gadget. In 2025’s AI winter-with-heatstroke, none of this is surprising. PROMPTMozilla has launched something refreshingly un-gimmicky in an otherwise AI-drenched browser wars: the AI Window in Firefox. But should you care?
Instead of pushing “AI everywhere” like Microsoft or the new crop of “AI browsers”, or models sitting behind telemetry data like Google’s approach is, Mozilla insists they want to be respectful. That leads us to an AI Window, which is essentially a browser window with an AI Chatbot in the sidebar, and something that’s being built with user feedback. This will sit alongside the standard window (or Current Window) and Private Window. “In Firefox, you’ll never be locked into one ecosystem or have AI forced into your browsing experience. You decide when, how or whether to use it at all,” the company says. The AI Window feature for now requires you to join a waitlist. It is an approach that may simply work. Mozilla talks about model flexibility, which means the choice of AI models that you can access via the chatbot, is arriving at some point in the future. For now, no specifics are shared. The vision is an AI Window that can summarise pages, rewrite text, translate, brainstorm — but only when invoked, and only using the model you select. If you want to balance AI in a browser without sacrificing privacy or control, yes (I wouldn’t recommend a typical AI browser if you want to keep your internet banking passwords safe, for instance), as well as an AI-free experience, Firefox may have just found the right balance. It’s the closest thing we’ve seen to AI that actually respects the user — which probably explains why no other AI company… let it be. THINKING“The team (and I) take in a ton of feedback. We balance what we see in our product feedback systems with what we hear directly. They don’t always match, but both are important. I’ve read through the comments and see focus on things like reliability, performance, ease of use and more.”
Windows 11 is turning into the world’s most expansive (and expensive) beta test, except almost none among the million strong user base, actually signed up for this. These comments from the Windows boss come after something he’d posted a few days ago on X garnered such constructive feedback, he’d to turn off replies on that post altogether. The reality is, Microsoft has changed things with Windows 11 so much and so often, it has no identity anymore. The context: It all started a few days prior, when Davuluri posted, “Windows is evolving into an agentic OS, connecting devices, cloud, and AI to unlock intelligent productivity and secure work anywhere.” As I said, the replies didn’t hold back. “It’s evolving into a product that’s driving people to Mac and Linux,” wrote one user. “Stop this nonsense. No one wants this. You live in a Twitter bubble where AI will create tons of wealth and you will perish unless you adopt it now. But your users are not in this bubble. They don’t care about any of this sh*t,” said another, clearly mincing no words. “Microsoft is going to die because of these investor driven moves that abandon customers,” another opinion. These are some of the nicer ones I’ve curated for this family audience. This push towards an AI obsession isn’t new. For more than a year now, Windows has had AI features creep up on unsuspecting users. Most of them only get in the way, feel half finished, and slow down the process and the system. Windows users are clearly tired. The backlash is clear — stop loading AI features people neither asked for nor benefit from. Suddenly, the dream of “AI PCs” (oh yes, Microsoft forced PC makers to rebrand their entire portfolios around the AI theme) feels like a forced march rather than an upgrade cycle. A Reality Check: Microsoft may well not be wrong that AI will be central to the next decade of personal computing. Equally, it could be. No one knows, why throw caution to the wind at this point? Shipping half-cooked features, nagging users into AI workflows, and treating the OS as a billboard for AI and cloud upsells, is eroding trust faster than perhaps Microsoft realises. Or maybe it does, who knows. Windows 11 doesn’t need more AI — it needs stability, performance, a cohesive user experience and a return to the simplicity of Windows 7. The real problem isn’t AI in Windows. It’s the belief that every feature must be AI-shaped, even when the user clearly does not want it. Neural Dispatch is your weekly guide to the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence. Each edition delivers curated insights on breakthrough technologies, practical applications, and strategic implications shaping our digital future. Written and edited by Vishal Mathur. Produced by Shad Hasnain.Thanks for reading Neural Dispatch! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
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मंगलवार, 18 नवंबर 2025
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