Which is why MS and every other company keeps pushing half-baked garbage AI products onto the public at every opportunity. So much money has been sunk into AI that they need something to show for it. They also hope that as people use it they can improve the AI they have so that maybe one day it can become something worthwhile. As a bonus it's one more way for them to collect your data and get you used to asking an AI for what you need instead of using your brain.
Thank you for the laughs :D
OT: I wonder if we'll see some "core personalities" that are innate to each mega-LLM (Claude, O3, Copilot, Gemini)... methinks this has comedic potential.
Sure the api link and permissions and yada yada plays a part, but thats exactly how they can trap us into office365, with already use azure permissions and everything.
Again I'm sure it's harder than it looks, but it's not an AI problem anymore, and they're throwing billions at it.
In very few use cases it is acceptable to have non-deterministic result for computation tasks. It does not matter if you are a normie or an advanced user.
I would argue that they implicitly do, as any user expects the same action performed on a computer or similar system to provide the same outcome.
> For another, if they give the same task to three different people they're going to get three different results
Give the same three tasks to a single user to be executed three times separately, and he will get supremely annoyed if his actions do not give him the same results.
They would quickly adapt to “reload it a few times if it doesn’t work right away”.
Isn’t this what people are already doing when they browse the web? I know I am.
do you mean users?
Aren't they just pattern recognition and regurgitation machines? How would it analyze and interpret unique data with a pattern it's never seen?
Some of the AI stuff is very useful, but it's been massively oversold. In my experience, it's great for working on documentation or creating a one-time-use script to query an API, but it's not good at the "big picture" tasks they want for a sales pitch.
> How would it analyze and interpret unique data with a pattern it's never seen?
Of course this is a can of worms for a product because we can still not guarantee accuracy.
1. https://support.google.com/docs/answer/15820999
Disclaimer: Googler, opinions my own.
A company with an actual rationale names products PlayStation, PlayStation 2, PS3, PS4, PS5
Microsoft called their rival products XBox, XBox 360, XBox One, XBox Series
Asked to put six animals in order, some might figure Anteater, Bear, Elephant, Fox, Goose, Pigeon makes sense - alphabetical order, English names. Others might try to rank them by size, the Elephant is definitely bigger than a Bear, but is the Fox bigger than a Goose? Not sure. You might give them Latin names, there are several reasonable things you might do or at least attempt
But Microsoft are like that's easy: Elephant, Dog, Squirrel, Another Squirrel, Sparrow, Bear, Elephant. And like, that's not even six animals, and it's the wrong animals, and your order makes no sense, what is wrong with you?
Anyway, now it's Office 365 Copilot! What does that mean? It means it's Office, but with an AI which you didn't ask for, which doesn't really do much for you practically, and also which costs 50% more, and you can only opt-out by trying to cancel your subscription entirely.
You can tell AI is a grift because it's all dark patterns and lies with these people.
To be fair to Microsoft, they do keep trying over and over again.
(Gemini is proving excellent for coding, but it shocks me how poor the integration is for other uses.)
The "AI" integrations I've tried in other tools (Figma, Gamma) are pretty much garbage too.
The things that aren’t shit are harder than they thought.
Anything they can think of. Honestly, anywhere they think that they could put AI to try to convince people that it's a real thing to care about, they put it there. Google is doing the same thing; I get popups any time I try to access any Google thing, like mail, docs, or the Google Cloud console. I don't care, Gemini, and I don't trust you.
Even Apple is jumping in on the AI train, presumably just to avoid getting beaten up in the press for being "behind the times", but thankfully they seem to be trying to start slow and make a good product out of it (which they have yet to do) rather than telling everyone that it can revolutionize everything that anyone ever does and forcing people to hear about it at every opportunity.
They also randomly time out mid-task, e.g. in image generation, without an obvious way to pay for more compute time.
The amount of repetitive data manipulation at companies is literally insane, just ask anyone in accounting, operations, hr, etc… just being able to automate repetitive task in excel for people that can’t code or aren’t excel/Vba super users would be incredibly valuable.
> The amount of repetitive data manipulation at companies is literally insane
You pretend it’s AI, but in reality you’re just building literally power automate flows which you can call through an LLM lmao
Thanks Microsoft, for giving me yet another reason not to use Edge beyond browser compatibility matrixes in project delivery.
Unfortunally this is also coming to all their developer tools, VS, VSCode, PowerShell, Windows Terminal, .NET Aspire, Azure,... everything is getting AI there somehow, as each team struggles to meet their AI OKRs, and reason of existence among endless layoffs.
They have 50 different offers, all with their own pricing, and they all suck, and Microsoft themselves don't like their results in that field.
Let me solve it for you Microsoft: the money maker you're sitting on today, is "hey excel, make a summary of those 8 sheets to identify our 5 most profitables products and their evolution in sales the past 3 years, add that on a new sheet at the end with a visual graph". None of their product does that right now, instead they tell you the step on how to do it.
Instead of making a bazillion different weird thing, Excel and Office already have their API, just make your "AI" bridge natural talk to excel common task and see every company register it for their employee. I'm not even exagerating, I would in an instant.
I tried many AI tool for excel and none of them come anywhere close to that. It must be much harder than I first thought, but then again they spent BILLIONS on this.
For a company that own business logic as a basic idea, they're really terrible at exploiting it with new ideas. Even just natural talk to power query steps would be worth it.