Microsoft: March Windows updates mistakenly uninstall Copilot By Sergiu Gatlan March 17, 2025

[Condobloke]

The title says it all.

Microsoft says the March 2025 Windows cumulative updates automatically and mistakenly remove the AI-powered Copilot digital assistant from some Windows 10 and Windows 11 systems.


The warning was added to updated support documents days after Redmond released this month's Patch Tuesday security updates.


As Microsoft explains, the update applies to all users who install the KB5053598 (Windows 24H2) and KB5053606(Windows 10 22H2) cumulative updates issued last week, on March 11th.


"We're aware of an issue with the Microsoft Copilot app affecting some devices. The app is unintentionally uninstalled and unpinned from the taskbar," the company explains. "This issue has not been observed with the Microsoft 365 Copilot app."


READ:

Microsoft: March Windows updates mistakenly uninstall Copilot

Microsoft says the March 2025 Windows cumulative updates automatically and mistakenly remove the AI-powered Copilot digital assistant from some Windows 10 and Windows 11 systems.

www.bleepingcomputer.com

 

[KGIII]

LOL That's kind of funny, though quite a few businesses use MSFT's AI in their business processes. This is true especially in the Fortune 500 companies with a 70% adoption rate and a large adoption among the Office 365 users. (This should not impact the latter, as it's an online thing.)

 

[theLegionWithin]

doesnt really sound like a problem to be honest

 

[Condobloke]

It could as easily be said, it is a plus/move in the right direction

 

[KGIII]

doesnt really sound like a problem to be honest

I've found it 'useful' in certain situations.

I'll sometimes use AI to summarize something for me, for example. I'll also use it to help me with an executive overview of a subject that I'm only a little interested in. It can also be handy for things like, "which older BMWs use a timing chain instead of a timing belt" type of thing.

You need to sanity check it but the results are much better than a search engine - and they provide supporting links. That's goof for doing a quick fact check or digging deeper into the subject.

I don't attach a whole lot to the 'AI' moniker. I just view it as an additional tool to learn things. Oddly, the Brave search engine can give you pretty good results. I use Brave to watch YouTube and I watch a lot of technical channels. Being able to search for a quick answer is pretty handy.

Again, don't trust it as a factual answer if you're doing serious research or if the subject has any nuance. A recent person posted to gloat how bad AI was with news. Really, humans can't even pick out accurate news. We like to think we can but blind testing shows we can't. So, trying to use AI to analyze the news is just silly.

That doesn't mean that it doesn't have benefits, just don't get too hung up on the "AI" label. Those behind the definition have decided it has multiple meanings along a spectrum (like 'self-driving cars' have). We're a long way from the AI predicted by science fiction.

 

[APTI]

Seems to me that this is not a problem but rather a time saver because now we don't have to uninstall it ourselves.

 

[KGIII]

I was thinking about this gaff and the implications. I was thus drawn to think of "AI" and, if I may, I'd like to add the following to this thread - mostly for information or discussion purposes. I think I've been fairly objective and I chose a subject where I'm able to have a reasonable opinion. That subject was of course, math.

I decided to poke at this "AI" thing for a bit, but I used Google's because that's what I had in an open tab.

Man, I wish I had tools like this when I was a young student. They'd have helped a great deal.

I decided to go with a fairly simply one - but one that's still debated by people who don't understand how math works.

The math I presented it with is a proof of the old statement: 0.999... = 1

For those that don't know, the ... means the number, or (expected to be understood) pattern, is repeated forever into infinity or until a set point. For example, you might see 2, 4, 6, ..., 100 and that would mean all the equal numbers between 2 and 100.

I went to Wikipedia and went to one of the proofs. I then went to the 'edit' page so that I could grab the math code used.

That was this:

<math display="block"> 0.999\ldots = 9\left(\tfrac{1}{10}\right) + 9\left({\tfrac{1}{10}}\right)^2 + 9\left({\tfrac{1}{10}}\right)^3 + \cdots = \frac{9\left({\tfrac{1}{10}}\right)}{1-{\tfrac{1}{10}}} = 1.</math>

I made no attempt to clean up the code or to translate it into symbols. I just pumped in the code with a single addition of 'explain' (then the code).

It spat out a very usable answer. It appears to have tailored the answer for someone who is at least a bit fluent in mathematics. It would have been an adequate explanation for me when I was a wee lad. It gave an accurate response but also a good conversational response.

It processed the code properly and "understood" the math involved.

I can see why businesses are making use of "AI" these days. I suppose someday I'll have to stop putting it in quotes. By the definitions for AI, it fits. It's definitely not the end of AI and it's absolutely nothing like what science-fiction writers and pundits have promised us. It's also not the first iteration of things called "AI" as the definitions are pretty broad. We're mostly seeing LLM and NLP at the moment.

I'll share the Wikipedia article here:

Artificial intelligence - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

One could argue that it's an overly broad definition. One could also argue that the definition shouldn't be set by science fiction authors and future-predicting journalists. I think I'll continue to use the quotes for the time being.

This would have been one heck of a great tool when I was still a student. Of course, you shouldn't use it instead of learning, but you can use it to help you learn. You can use it to speed up the process of learning.

 

[theLegionWithin]

"scifi AI" is MI - Machine Intelligence. this AI bubble is going to burst soon enough as it is, just like everything else

 

[KGIII]

this AI bubble is going to burst soon enough

I'm not sure that I agree. This one looks like it might have some stiction.

There's surely some PHBs involved but have you looked up adoption rates for businesses and academics? Adopting this tech has gone much faster than I'd have expected. I've found ways to make it useful. The adoption rates make me assume (for what that's worth) that they too are finding benefits in the tech.

I'm not sure if it'll burst or if it'll keep moving forward with more and more adoption as the tech improves and more people find a way to capitalize on it. I suspect the latter is what we'll see.

That's just my opinion, of course. I've certainly been wrong when making assumptions about the future.

How long do you think it'll go before it bursts? A year? Five years? A decade?

 

[Aristarchus]

One could argue that it's an overly broad definition. One could also argue that the definition shouldn't be set by science fiction authors and future-predicting journalists. I think I'll continue to use the quotes for the time being.

Actually, Wiki's definition (first paragraph) is quite good. It just confirms that AI is not yet here. These are individual tools that can do reasoning, knowledge representation, planning, natural language processing, perception and so on as single tasks but not all at once (as true AI) so these represents learned "flat" functions (as from database).
I still consider so called AI as great (for some tasks) search engine. Useful but if pushed down the throat quite annoying.

Nevertheless it looks like we are closer (with each Windows update) the day when mistakenly MS update uninstall Windows

 

[bob466]

windoze...who gives a quack.

 

[KGIII]

Actually, Wiki's definition (first paragraph) is quite good. It just confirms that AI is not yet here.

Yeah, that's why I mentioned that I'll continue to use quotes around it. I'll keep calling it "AI".

I don't know if we'll ever have 'true' AI, though I think it'd be devoid of emotional content. There's very much an 'emotional IQ' that's often overlooked and it helps to define our intelligence.

windoze...who gives a quack. View attachment 24739

Well... Umm... If we look at the statistics, a whole lot more people give a quack about this than there are desktop Linux users in total. There are a whole lot of people who continue to use Windows - some of 'em even aware of the alternatives.

I am not one of them. No... No, I am not.

But, an estimated 72% of the desktop market belongs to Windows (with most of the rest occupied by Apple) and the total estimates are 1.6 billion people.

So, I mean, I've got to assume a percentage of those people give a quack. Even a small percentage would be more than the entire install base of Linux on the desktop.

That makes me think... Just one percent of that Windows market is a whole lot of people. That number dwarfs the number of people who live in my entire state - by a huge amount. That'd be 16 million and Maine has 1.4 million residents.

If we could just get maybe 5% more desktop Linux users, I think that'd be enough to make things like software houses take notice of us Linux users. We'd need to get Linux users past the 'I want it for free' stage, which might be a challenge.

For a little while, the stats said Linux was up to 5% but that appears to have dropped back down to 4%. We'll see if there's more than a rounding error when Windows 10 expires. A part of me hopes so but a part of me looks back at history. We will have to wait and see - and be helpful for those testing the Linux ecosystem.

 

[bob466]

The reason more people use windoze than Linux is because they don't know any better.

I was once one of those years ago who thought there was only windoze but unlike them I did some research and found the light and freedom with Linux and if more did the same...the percentage for Linux users would be very much higher.

 

[KGIII]

The reason more people use windoze than Linux is because they don't know any better.

Yup. Though, a bunch of folks know there are other operating systems. They just don't care or they prefer Windows.

I don't begrudge them that. After all, I picked the OS I prefer. There's not much I can do in Linux that I couldn't do in Windows but I prefer Linux by a wide margin. I used Windows for years, more than a decade. But, I had used a lot of a few UNIX versions. So, moving to Linux (or a BSD) was right for me.

 

[bob466]

Yup. Though, a bunch of folks know there are other operating systems. They just don't care or they prefer Windows.

Exactly...so why do we talk or care about it...after all you made your bed now lie in it.

 

[KGIII]

Exactly...so why do we talk or care about it...after all you made your bed now lie in it.

It's that same old adage... "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink."

 

[bob466]

It's that same old adage... "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink."

As Laurel and Hardy once said...you can lead a horse to water but a pencil must be lead.