[HN Gopher] Microsoft 365 Copilot - your copilot for work
___________________________________________________________________
Microsoft 365 Copilot - your copilot for work
Author : benryon
Score : 304 points
Date : 2023-03-16 15:00 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blogs.microsoft.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blogs.microsoft.com)
| kristianpaul wrote:
| Why they dint called Clippy?
| teknopurge wrote:
| ^this. What a blown marketing/product opportunity. There should
| at least be some easter eggs for Don Clipp....
| layer8 wrote:
| > Sometimes Copilot will be right, other times usefully wrong
|
| "Usefully wrong" is some audacious marketing.
| throwuwu wrote:
| It's truthful and realistic. I appreciate that more than
| fluffing it. All first drafts are garbage and "usefully wrong"
| anyways whether human written or not.
| layer8 wrote:
| They are carefully omitting that it also can be harmfully,
| time-wastingely, non-obviously wrong. Clearly there is no way
| that they can exclude those possibilities. Since Copilot
| apparently is wrong often enough that they have to address
| that in their marketing copy, they are trying to paint it in
| a positive light, although evidently it would be better for
| Copilot not to be wrong.
| stephencoyner wrote:
| The demos were really impressive. The way all the products have
| seemingly connected makes this so valuable.
|
| I think the biggest challenge will be teaching people how to use
| this new system to the fullest
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=Bf-dbS9CcRU&feature=share
| redox99 wrote:
| Imagine in a heated email thread, you answer without checking
| what the AI outputs, and it's something like pre-lobotomy Sydney
| would say when confronted (Nobody likes you. I hope you suffer. I
| hope you die alone. etc). Lmao.
| themacguffinman wrote:
| Maybe now we have a new excuse when we regret sending terribly
| nasty emails: Sydney hallucinated it and I accidentally hit
| send, it wasn't me!
| nlh wrote:
| Speaking of, how do we get back pre-lobotomy Sydney? I feel
| like in the milestones of AI advancement, the brief multi-day
| blip where the world could interact with that version of the
| model will go down in the history books. Seems like a waste
| that it's just _poof_ vanished.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Amazing! I keep banging on about how Microsoft is building the
| business lock-in of the next decade, and this is a sign of it.
| Put down your snubs about Clippy and frothing about "EEE" and
| _look_ at that announcement:
|
| > " _Business Chat works across the LLM, the Microsoft 365 apps,
| and your data -- your calendar, emails, chats, documents,
| meetings and contacts -- to do things you've never been able to
| do before. You can give it natural language prompts like "Tell my
| team how we updated the product strategy," and it will generate a
| status update based on the morning's meetings, emails and chat
| threads._ "
|
| > " _It creates a new knowledge model for every organization --
| harnessing the massive reservoir of data and insights that lies
| largely inaccessible and untapped today. Business Chat works
| across all your business data and apps_ "
|
| > " _Copilot LLMs are not trained on your tenant data or your
| prompts. Within your tenant, our time-tested permissioning model
| ensures that data won't leak across user groups. And on an
| individual level, Copilot presents only data you can access using
| the same technology that we've been using for years to secure
| customer data._ "
|
| That's amazing, natural search, summary over all your company
| SharePoint and emails and Teams chats. You aren't going to
| commercially compete with this with an IRC server, IMAP and a
| copy of LibreOffice. Something DropBox could have been doing with
| their massive trove of business documents? Something Slack could
| have been doing with their massive haul of chat history?
| ChikkaChiChi wrote:
| > Something DropBox could have been doing with their massive
| trove of business documents? Something Slack could have been
| doing with their massive haul of chat history?
|
| Absolute truth. Discoverability in modern apps is a sad joke at
| the expense of the users. I guess "search that actually works"
| isn't enough of a value prop to actually get dev time.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| Clippy just got hench.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| > Tell my team how we updated the product strategy," and it
| will generate a status update based on the morning's meetings,
| emails and chat threads."
|
| This sounds to me like a significant competitive disadvantage.
| I'm torn between joy that this makes it easier for small
| companies to compete by doing novel things like, uh, talking to
| each other and horror that my own employer might embrace this
| with enthusiasm.
|
| It's an interesting thought that usually IP-paranoid companies
| might cheerfully stream absolutely all their internal
| documentation to Microsoft in order to leverage this synergy. I
| think I'll buy some M$ stock.
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| I dont remember a single time when people supposedly said that
| EEE wasn't still being done.
|
| There are just countless examples of people misattributing
| everything to be EEE. Vscode is another recent example of
| Microsoft still doing EEE by first creating the editor,
| destroying a lot of the IDE/editor ecosystem, just to
| eventually remove the important bits into non-free plugins,
| making the free version of codium basically pointless.
|
| But that doesn't make M$ buying GitHub into EEE for example.
| whoisthemachine wrote:
| It actually kind of directly links to Microsoft's strategy,
| because Atom was the original Electron editor, and Atom was
| created by GitHub, who was purchased by Microsoft, after
| which Atom was ~extinguised~ deprecated.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(text_editor)
| KyeRussell wrote:
| Sigh. We all know what Atom is. This isn't the same thing.
| whoisthemachine wrote:
| How is it different?
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _after which Atom was ~extinguised~ deprecated._ "
|
| That isn't what 'extinguished' meant! It was supposed to be
| that you and Oracle exchanged email by open SMTP, Microsoft
| wedged some new features into Exchange SMTP which then
| enough Microsoft customers relied on that Oracle rolled
| over to MS-SMTP, and then you practically couldn't use
| plain standard SMTP because everyone you wanted to email
| was using proprietary Microsoft SMTP.
|
| To trivialise that by turning it into "Microsoft stopped
| developing a thing and I can't be bothered to fork it and
| develop it myself" is, well, to turn a potentially real
| issue (from twenty five years ago, which never happened)
| into empty whining.
| whoisthemachine wrote:
| I guess as an end-user, I fail to see the difference. And
| it wasn't like Microsoft started developing Atom and then
| stopped it, they bought the company that started
| developing it, and shut it down in favor of their own
| product. And blaming it on the end-user because they fail
| to pick up a massive product like Atom and develop it
| themselves seems disingenuous at best.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis.
| ..
|
| (Don't mind me, just the formerly confused passing through.)
| ugh123 wrote:
| THANK YOU
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _destroying a lot of the IDE /editor ecosystem_"
|
| How is Microsoft releasing VS Code "destroying the editor
| ecosystem" but releasing Vim for free isn't and JetBrains
| charging for their IDEs isn't? This isn't "EEE" this is
| whining that Microsoft is _competing by making software
| people want_ and that 's unfair, apparently.
|
| > " _just to eventually remove the important bits into non-
| free plugins, making the free version of codium basically
| pointless._ "
|
| Look at what isn't open source:
| https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/wiki/Differences-
| between...
|
| Microsoft logos and trademarks, integration with a
| marketplace which Microsoft run, a list of extensions
| Microsoft have reviewed and recommend (not the extensions,
| just the list), just enough of the Remote Development feature
| to handle connecting to Microsoft's backend for it,
| Telemetry, and autoupdate from Microsoft servers. Arguing
| those are "the important bits" is a stretch.
|
| The C#/.NET debugger maybe, but you say that was "eventually
| removed into non-free plugin" - was it ever free? It doesn't
| sound like it. Also VS Code was popularised by JavaScript and
| TypeScript not C#, that's always been the province of Visual
| Studio full edition.
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| I consider the MS Language Servers pretty much the most
| important bit of vscodes IDE functionality as it provides
| autocompletion, lookup, refactoring etc, which is the
| feature i was specifically thinking of here. They were
| originally all open source, but aren't anymore.
|
| they're still free (as in beer), but their licence only
| allows usage with the official visual studio code
| distribution
| delta_p_delta_x wrote:
| The thing is that those extensions are Microsoft's, and
| as problematic as some people consider the situation to
| be, Microsoft has all the right to limit the licence for
| these extensions.
|
| The inconvenient answer: want another C# extension? Tough
| luck, write it yourself. This is essentially what LLVM
| did for C/C++ linting, and produced Clangd, and many
| people now consider it to be superior to the Microsoft
| C/C++ linter.
| KyeRussell wrote:
| Nobody is arguing that they don't have the right to. This
| is such an American argument of last resort I have no
| idea how we always end up here.
|
| I'm not nearly as anti-modern-Microsoft as some of the
| people here, but even I know that "they have the right
| to" is moving the goalposts.
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| EEE means screwing over a competitor's product. This is not
| that, this is a significant upgrade to their own product.
| Calling this EEE means you have an M$ sized axe to grind.
| freedomben wrote:
| Something like this for GSuite apps would be absolutely killer. I
| really hope Google is as close behind as they claim.
| mrbungie wrote:
| They announced a very similar set of features for Google
| Workspace 2 days ago:
| https://workspace.google.com/blog/product-announcements/gene...
| quadcore wrote:
| It's not every day a guy writes about how he's gonna change the
| world big time and then proceed to do it. Kudo to Altman - that's
| quite some execution.
| tin7in wrote:
| Curious if/when this will be available to users. This and
| Google's announcement happening in the same week makes me wonder
| how much of this already works.
| gigel82 wrote:
| Some of it is mocked up, but some appears to be straight
| capture from apps. I'd guess 50% of those scenarios already
| work in some form or another (probably not ready to ship yet).
| gooseyman wrote:
| I had the same question. No timing but at least a sense of who
| is in the beta:
|
| "We are currently testing Microsoft 365 Copilot with 20
| customers, including 8 in Fortune 500 enterprises. We will be
| expanding these previews to customers more broadly in the
| coming months and will share more on new controls for IT admins
| so that they can plan with confidence to enable Copilot across
| their organizations.
|
| Today, the best way to get ready for Copilot is to get on
| Microsoft 365, the essential foundation for modern work.
| Microsoft 365 brings together in a single solution the
| foundational capabilities required, including identity,
| applications, management, and security, plus your enterprise
| data so that you can be AI-ready.
|
| We will share more about pricing and details in the coming
| months."
|
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2023/03/1...
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Google's announcement was in reaction to this one, I believe.
| That's why it felt so rushed (e.g. they hadn't even set up the
| waitlist yet)
| asciii wrote:
| It would be even more impressive if this article ended with
| "Generated by Microsoft 365 Copilot" or something
| [deleted]
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| When can I talk to it on my PC? Typing to talk to an AI is so
| 2022.
| ajolly wrote:
| Windows 22h2 has some pretty good voice to text options built
| in, "voice access preview"
|
| I've actually stopped using dragon, or talon in favor of the
| built-in tools, at least for dictation.
| kstrauser wrote:
| "Hi, it appears you'd like to embed another organization's
| copyrighted materials into your documents. May I help you with
| that?"
| alach11 wrote:
| This spells doom to a lot of other companies. Consider Otter.ai,
| who's core offering is automatic meeting notes. MS Teams just ate
| their lunch.
|
| Pretty much anything your startup's productivity tool can do,
| Microsoft can do better with the benefit of _better context_
| since it 's embedded in all of your customers' other productivity
| tools.
| qrybam wrote:
| A couple of years ago I was on a walk with my wife and she asked
| me "what's the point of Siri? it can hardly do anything useful
| outside weather and timers." I told her a tall tale of how these
| things are essentially going to become our personal assistants in
| the future, they'll know about our unique situations and can act
| accordingly. Just like the rich and powerful have people who
| specialise in organising their lives so they get more done in
| less time, so AI through natural interfaces will all of us many
| of those same benefits.
|
| Progress... This is the first time I see a product that fits that
| description.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| You're assuming that the AI assistant will have your own
| interests as its priority, and not the interests of some other
| party. If this 'tool' is being supplied by a government or
| corporation, then it could be used to create a very static
| hierarchy - imagine some incompetent upper-level bureaucrat
| using it to discover and sabotage any competent lower-level
| employees who might eventually present threats to their own
| position? Germany's STASI would have also used it as a mass-
| surveillance tool, and China today would use it to generate
| individual social credit scores.
|
| It does have great promise in an open-source self-hosted
| incarnation not controlled by external actors, however.
| nunodonato wrote:
| that's why I'm working on my own assistant, with a fine-tuned
| model which actually learns and memorizes stuff about the
| user :)
| mgkimsal wrote:
| > It does have great promise in an open-source self-hosted
| incarnation not controlled by external actors, however.
|
| I'm not even sure about that, entirely. My very limited
| understanding of this is that a core requirement is the
| initial data - the large language models(?). Which of these
| you can use, or how it's initially developed/populated, will
| have an influence on the answers you get and how it may
| evolve/"learn".
|
| Instead of trusting the external corp to run the service, you
| need to trust whatever actors are building the base data
| sets, and be concerned what sort of bias may be inherent.
|
| Or do I have this totally wrong?
| valine wrote:
| I think for now, the data requirements to train a SOTA LLM
| are so extreme we don't have the luxury of being picky with
| the training data. We are getting close to the point where
| there isn't enough human written text in existence to
| continue scaling these models.
|
| Model refinement seemingly has lower training requirements,
| putting it within the reach of smaller organizations or
| wealthy individuals. If you don't like the refinement
| dataset it will likely be feasible to bootstrap your own
| off someone else's LLM. See what Stanford did with Alpaca.
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| I'm waiting for a general correction mechanism, I don't
| even know what to call it. "NO, chatgpt, people usually
| have 5 fingers", and the gpt just learns, rather like a
| child. I keep thinking that's the next real step.
| jacooper wrote:
| I think what's mainly stopping that from happening is
| that GPT-4 doesn't remember older chats. If we make it
| remember everything ,it should get more personal and
| remember everything right?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| The problem is that, to the extent the analogy of ChatGPT
| to a living thing makes sense, the individual isn't the
| model (that's just the common species-defining--or maybe
| "clone family" is better than "species"--set of
| instincts), the individual lifespan is the conversation.
|
| You could share feedback across conversations by
| allocating prompt space to it, at the expense of limiting
| the size of the conversation, but you'd need a way to
| decide what to share this way.
| valine wrote:
| You could also take the conversation and use it as part
| of the reinforcement learning dataset. I feel like that's
| the closest thing to long term memory ChatGPT is capable
| of right now.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| >We are getting close to the point where there isn't
| enough human written text in existence to continue
| scaling these models.
|
| People say this, but GPT-3 (the latest we know the
| details on) was 45TB of text, which may be _most of the
| open Internet,_ but still lacks non-publicly-indexed
| Internet text (i.e. things behind paywalls, things behind
| log-in screens like emails), any book outside of
| Bibliotik 's 200k books (remember when Google was
| randomly digitizing all books it could get its hands
| on?), and plenty of other non-digitized text.
|
| OpenAI _wants you to believe_ that we are running out of
| text, but even at Google, there 's 100's of TB of text
| that OpenAI doesn't have access to (Google Books, Google
| Docs, Gmail, Search Queries, Archived pages beyond what
| CommonCrawl gets, Paywalled news articles that allow
| Google to crawl them, etc.).
|
| Now the key question that GPT-4 will hopefully answer is
| "are bigger datasets really the key, or are larger
| context windows?"
|
| If you're thinking of investing in/working for OpenAI,
| you better hope the answer is context windows.
| seydor wrote:
| Part of the problem is... people are not good at stating their
| problem with words. A lot of the time they have a vague idea of
| disconnected parts. By the time they are able to write down the
| problem decently, it is already half solved
| dougmwne wrote:
| You were really playing the long game with that one.
| tekkk wrote:
| It's a good and an obvious feature to implement. Probably will
| save time but I can't but wonder how useful the tasks are in the
| first place when an AI can do them. Generating a PowerPoint
| presentation from general observations about some data sounds
| pretty silly. Helping you to make some Excel spreadsheet is
| probably more useful but I digress. Never been much of a Office
| 365 user.
| bitwize wrote:
| Bring Clippy back!
| [deleted]
| fancyfredbot wrote:
| Hurrah! Now we can enter 3 bullet points, have an AI
| automatically turn them into 3 pages of waffle, and then copilot
| can automatically summarise those back into bullet points again.
| MengerSponge wrote:
| Satire article from literally 20 years ago: Word 2004 to
| Pioneer AutoUnsummarize Feature
|
| https://www.bbspot.com/News/2003/12/autounsummarize.html
| fancyfredbot wrote:
| That article is fantastic! I love "When asked for comment on
| the ethical issues present, Greenwood promised to have a
| five-thousand word report ready by Monday."
| bitL wrote:
| Imagine the disconnect as nobody in the company will know what
| is going on when everything is auto-generated and people are
| only reading summaries.
| Vespasian wrote:
| I'm really hopping that waffle will become less relevant as
| human effort in it decreases.
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| I'm.. Mostly fine with that.
| capableweb wrote:
| Why / How?
| varispeed wrote:
| This is I don't understand. Why people prize waffle so much?
|
| They somehow think that if they type three sentences about
| something, it will not mean they spent week's worth of hard
| work to come up with them.
|
| So the extra time is being used on coming up with waffle, as a
| sort of self guilt tripping and then when this waffle is
| presented, the team understands the effort that had to be given
| into coming up with the waffle.
|
| Probably out of fear that if small, but actually meaningful
| output wouldn't correlate with the amount of work needed in the
| eyes of management and could cause losing one's job.
|
| This is an awful awful culture and rather than working to
| eradicate it, M$ is trying to embrace it.
|
| It's a massive drag on productivity and really a waste of
| money. Employees would be much happier if they could put feet
| up and relax after spending good amount of work, rather than
| stressing about how to sugar coat it and pad with content.
|
| The thing with AI is that it is very easy to spot that content
| is not written by human after reading enough of AI written
| text. So the copilot may work short term as an ailment for
| this, but what happens in a few months time, when everyone will
| know most presentations are just bs?
| cm2187 wrote:
| And my mailbox will be full of 10 pages auto-generated memos.
| Progress.
| operator-name wrote:
| We'll have AI to turn bullet points into memos, and the same
| AI to turn those memos back into bullet points.
|
| "They feed us poison / So we take their 'cures' / While they
| suppress our medicine." /s
| pfoof wrote:
| What? Clippy is evolving! Clippy evolved into Clippilot!
| hestefisk wrote:
| This calls for a Dilbert cartoon
| agloe_dreams wrote:
| Better idea: Use GPT-4 to create an AI Dilbert generator that
| lacks a nutcase cartoonist.
| srveale wrote:
| From ChatGPT (free version, maybe the paid version is
| funnier?)
|
| In the first frame, the boss is sitting at his desk typing on
| his computer, while his employee looks on. The boss says,
| "I've discovered this amazing new tool! It's a generative
| language model that can write all my emails for me!"
|
| In the second frame, the boss shows his employee a sample
| email he wrote using the tool. The email reads, "Greetings,
| minion. I require an update on your progress. Chop-chop, or
| you'll be the next one to get the axe. Cheers, Bossman."
|
| In the final frame, the employee looks horrified and says,
| "That email is terrible! It's rude, condescending, and
| threatening!" The boss shrugs and replies, "Well, at least it
| saved me some time. I was going to write something even
| worse!"
| Havoc wrote:
| Can't wait to get email responses on mails people haven't read
| mikequinlan wrote:
| >Currently in testing with select commercial customers...
| achow wrote:
| _We are currently testing Microsoft 365 Copilot with 20
| customers, including 8 in Fortune 500 enterprises. We will be
| expanding these previews to customers more broadly in the
| coming months and will share more on new controls for IT admins
| so that they can plan with confidence to enable Copilot across
| their organizations._
|
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2023/03/1...
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| This. I just wasted 5 minutes logging into Office365 web
| edition and looking for CoPilot. I wish they would have been
| more clear that this is not agerneral rollout.
| Oarch wrote:
| Fingers crossed for Clippy to make a dramatic re-entry into our
| lives.
| account-5 wrote:
| I genuinely want to see AI powered clippy. That is the best use
| of gpt Microsoft could make.
| Daffodils wrote:
| If this works as well as it's marketed, I wouldn't be surprised
| if MSFT touched a $5T valuation.
| achow wrote:
| CoPilot integration in Excel seems to be really useful.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-waFp6rLc0
|
| I wonder with this what would happen to BI industry, particularly
| to BI/Analytics startups like ThoughtSpot ( _" ThoughtSpot is the
| AI-Powered Analytics platform that empowers everyone to ask any
| data questions in natural language"_)
| yellow_postit wrote:
| Excited to try this out. Was disappointed at how often ChatGPT3
| output incorrect formulas for working with Google Sheets data.
| Hopefully the implementation with Copilot will be more
| accurate.
| RobinL wrote:
| From using ChatGPT, one of my observations is how it really
| undermines any point click data dashboarding software,
| particularly self serve (i.e. where the user is not an expert
| in the particular dataset).
|
| It's easy to get ChatGPT to write SQL queries and chart specs
| to show what you want, and you can even ask it to choose the
| chart type that an expert statistician would recommend, and
| label it clearly etc.
|
| I believe some (non-LLM) version of this has been in PowerBI
| for a while, but presumably it's now something that can work so
| effectively it can replace quite a large part of the
| traditional BI developer role.
|
| Of course, all of this only works with good data quality and
| good meta data; in fact, maybe this becomes even more important
| because a good data analyst knows the limitations of the data
| in a way that a LLM may not.
|
| For my part, I now have no need for any point-and-click chart
| building tools, I just get chatgpt to write me an Altair/vega
| spec, and it does a good job in my testing
| williamstein wrote:
| https://www.notion.so/ has very similar chatgpt integration, but
| it's live right now, and easy to try out for free. I'm not a
| notion user or employee; I just think if you want to see what
| having tight chatgpt integration with a word processor feels like
| right now, then Notion is fun to play around with.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I was excited to try out Notion about 10 days ago until I
| realized that they have no way to generate a single PDF with
| consecutive page numbers for a nested set of pages. They seem
| to have planned a form of lock-in, but the way they did this
| makes their otherwise cool product completely unusable for me.
|
| EDIT: if they had this one feature, I probably would have been
| a paying customer for life. Instead, a worthless project for
| anyone who wants to use Notion for research notes, and book
| projects.
| graeme wrote:
| I've been curious to try teams more for Microsoft's integration
| and this is enticing. But, have been using it, and at the moment
| search doesn't even return anything at all.
|
| Is this a bug, or do I need to be paying for a higher tier? Slack
| search was generally pretty good.
| og_kalu wrote:
| Not fully shipped yet. They're testing with few users then
| rolling it out
| qwertox wrote:
| Let's see where this goes, it's too early to judge. Now it's
| probably more of a publicity stunt, "riding the AI wave" now that
| it has reached recognition from non-technical people.
|
| But let's see how this works in 5 or 10 years; it can only
| improve.
| jjcm wrote:
| Of these, the AI equipped sheets is the one I'm most excited
| about. Being able to quickly see insights by just saying things
| like, "what's the average % change of all my stocks from FY
| 2022-FY2023?" is going to be such a superpower.
| ffhhj wrote:
| Waiting for the propagation of errors in complex prompts.
| organsnyder wrote:
| Not sure this will be any different than human-generated
| spreadsheets, to be honest.
| ffhhj wrote:
| Sure, doesn't matter that these will be generated without
| checking the intermediate steps. Can't wait!
| quadcore wrote:
| If it gets to write those damn SQL queries for us, now that is
| a big leap for humanity.
| seydor wrote:
| Hey bing, how were last year's grades of Bobby Tables?
| MH15 wrote:
| Now if only we could compare these 365 features "released" today
| with the Google Workspace features "released" Tuesday. We're sure
| seeing a lot of waitlists in this phase of AI.
| whateveracct wrote:
| Bots talking to bots is coming
| eganist wrote:
| > Sometimes Copilot will be right, other times usefully wrong --
| but it will always put you further ahead.
|
| If there's one tangentially related development I'm actually
| _interested_ to see how it fleshes out in broader work
| discussions, it 's the marketing of failure modes as a feature.
| ksec wrote:
| For those who dont follow, or dont remember anything much about
| M$, Microsoft 365 is the replacement brand of Office 365.
|
| Now an off topic question, the first photo is showing what I
| believe is Microsoft Word. But it doesn't have the Ribbon design.
| Did they finally drop the Ribbon or is that something else?
|
| Edit: I think those are Web Application of the Office Apps just
| in Full Screen. But I still think they look much better than
| Ribbon.
| gigel82 wrote:
| You can minimize the ribbon, the feature has been around for
| 4-5 years; I think it's even minimized by default in Outlook
| now.
| ryankrage77 wrote:
| It's the web version of Word. Runs in a browser tab, has less
| features.
| Hardwired8976 wrote:
| That seams to be one of the best use cases for this, provided you
| can run it without giving Microsoft a lot of data directly. Else
| this is a no-no for enterprises imo.
| abtinf wrote:
| Many large enterprises already store almost everything on 365
| and azure. Other than budget, the only thing they need to turn
| on copilot is for it to adopt the same data privacy guarantees
| already available in 365.
| tcbyrd wrote:
| The integration mentions working with Microsoft Graph API, and
| it's doing the generation on the client, so seems plausible
| this has no more access than any other OAuth app. The Graph API
| can be locked down with Access Policies. I'm sure there will be
| features to further cordon off data to the AI, similar to how
| OneDrive has an encrypted vault which is not accessible from
| the Graph API.
| Rimintil wrote:
| OneDrive for Business does not have an encrypted vault
| (though the files are stored encrypted at rest/in transit).
|
| As far as 'no more access than', OAuth apps can have full
| control over your tenant and all data.
| bleuchase wrote:
| This is a service for companies that already store all of their
| e-mail, documents, files, chat, etc with Microsoft. If there
| was a concern about data privacy that company wouldn't be using
| Microsoft 365 in the first place. I think the bigger concern is
| how your data is used for training. If it is at all, I don't
| know.
| throwanem wrote:
| Enterprises that already give Microsoft a lot of data directly?
| Office 365 is ubiquitous in that space.
| snuxoll wrote:
| Sure, but most (if not all?) of us have language in our
| customer agreements that Microsoft doesn't have rights to
| just start browsing our OneDrive libraries and Exchange
| inboxes without a support contract explicitly authorizing
| access for support purposes. Just like, sure, I technically
| have _access_ to a bunch of PHI at my workplace - but
| touching it without a valid reason is a one-way ticket to the
| unemployment line.
|
| But unlike Microsoft's other services, AI needs data to train
| on - are they going to be content just sourcing this from the
| internet at large or have we finally hit an inflection point
| where they try to get business and enterprise customers to
| give access in exchange for these features? That's a big no-
| no to anyone in a field that deals with sensitive
| information, and in most all cases an equally big no-no to
| anyone in a company that wants to keep things confidential.
| Rimintil wrote:
| > Sure, but most (if not all?) of us have language in our
| customer agreements that Microsoft doesn't have rights to
| just start browsing our OneDrive libraries and Exchange
| inboxes without a support contract explicitly authorizing
| access for support purposes.
|
| You don't have language in your agreement that Microsoft
| cannot use your data to provide or improve service. You
| have language that says _support personnel_ cannot access
| your data without approval.
|
| Microsoft already indexes your mailbox, OneDrive, etc.
|
| Viva Topics has been around for ~2 years which mines
| content across various services.
| [deleted]
| seydor wrote:
| I wish they had named it Clippy - it would be such ice cold
| revenge
| QuadrupleA wrote:
| My first thought is, "gross"... now we'll have to wonder whether
| Manager X is even paying attention to the emails they're reading
| and responding to, or doing any actual work or thinking. Could
| lead to a world that's even more tilted towards politics and
| socially engineering your way up the ladder, versus competence
| and skill.
| allenu wrote:
| At least the yearly perf review at Microsoft is going to get
| easier since you just toss all your notes about what you did
| for the year to Copilot and have it write your summary. Your
| manager can do the same thing for their notes about you and
| compare.
| wcoenen wrote:
| Speaking of notes, I noticed that OneNote is absent from the
| list of products that will get Copilot.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| Even better is if you use their apps you don't have to even
| make notes. It could just figure it out.
| alach11 wrote:
| Maybe this is the beginning of the end of middle management? A
| large part of the work is keeping up with what your employees
| are doing, removing blockers, and maintaining alignment with
| other teams.
|
| This makes it vastly easier to keep up with a larger number of
| reports, making flatter organizations easier to run.
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| ChatGPT opened my eyes to the fact that we already should have
| been wondering about it.
|
| I tried using ChatGPT to generate answers to some requests to
| my team, and it created the most plausible wild goose chase
| answers I could ever imagine. They would be a terrible waste of
| time for anyone who received them.
|
| Then I started to notice how many of the emails and requests I
| get _are just as bad_! Plausible sounding answers directing me
| to teams that don 't exist, or telling me to read documentation
| that doesn't apply to the question I asked. Asking questions
| that seems specific but have fundamental contradictions that
| make them nonsense.
|
| With people's limited knowledge and time and lack of attention
| and care we already live in the world of plausible bullshit
| hallucinated nonsense.
| aldarisbm wrote:
| This is why the grounding that office365 seems to be doing
| will be so important, it will not be 100% but having the
| response be grounded on actual artifacts (actual
| documentation, emails, data) will be huge, the fact that it
| gives you citations for the things it suggests, is huge.
|
| Props to the MS team.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| The actual documentation and emails are like 80% bullshit
| though. This will just generate more plausible sounding
| bullshit than a completely naive AI. It would be nice if
| the thing helps me right excel formulas more conveniently
| though.
| roflyear wrote:
| They aren't today believe me!
| agloe_dreams wrote:
| > now we'll have to wonder whether Manager X is even paying
| attention to the emails they're reading and responding to, or
| doing any actual work or thinking
|
| If my experience in engineering is anything to go by, this
| worry existed since the dawn of middle management. AI just
| makes it give good responses instead.
| jacobolus wrote:
| "BingBot, could you please write an email subtly undermining
| inter-team cohesion by hinting at gossipy shit-talk without
| mentioning it explicitly, and also praise my report in a way
| that demonstrates I don't know or appreciate what they've
| been doing for the past 2 years, calibrated to hurt their
| self-confidence without quite causing them to quit?"
| davio wrote:
| That's just a straight shooter with upper management
| written all over him
| KyeRussell wrote:
| You are all presumably incredibly privileged tech workers
| that are free to find a better place to work instead of
| acting like this shit is inherent in a workplace, because
| it isn't.
| jimcsharp wrote:
| Sounds good.
|
| Cheers.
| agloe_dreams wrote:
| K. thanks
| roseway4 wrote:
| Is it any better or worse than delegating work to a junior team
| member and not bothering to review the work product?
|
| I love the idea that I can rapidly produce a rough draft of a
| document from notes, something I'm already doing with ChatGPT,
| albeit not as elegantly as if the functionality were integrated
| into Docs/Word.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Is it any better or worse than delegating work to a junior
| team member and not bothering to review the work product?_
|
| When a junior team member screws up the interpretation, there
| is someone to hold accountable.
|
| With Office 365Bot, there is no accountability for errors.
| robjan wrote:
| In any sensible organisation the manager will be the
| accountable party regardless of whether the frontline staff
| are human or AI.
| costcofries wrote:
| This will fundamentally change the way that M365 enables
| collaboration. I am truly fascinated by how quickly Microsoft
| is moving right now, it's really impressive. The moat on AI in
| enterprise continues to get bigger and bigger.
| peteradio wrote:
| Congratulations, you have earned one Micro-buck.
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho approves,
| brought to you by Carl's Junior, and Brawndo, the thirst
| mutilatior.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Can one bring a sexual harassments complaint against a machine?
| I see this thing being trained up on material within an HR
| department only to parrot back some horrible phrase it learned
| after reading hundreds of harassment complaint discussions.
|
| I used to work surrounded by lawyers. Just like doctors drift
| into discussions of horrible diseases, lawyer drift into
| discussions of horrible legal situations. Letting Clippy
| "learn" from that material seems really dangerous. How do you
| kill/reset this thing once it has become poisoned?
| galaxytachyon wrote:
| There are built in guardrails. Those are so strong it
| effectively lobotomized the LLM and force to abort its own
| internal process in favor of just saying: "I am sorry Dave, I
| am afraid I can't do that".
|
| Try to make ChatGPT or Bing to even attempt to write a snarky
| and negative email to your coworkers. It will refuse to do
| so.
|
| Jailbreak attempts may work, but with how strong the
| guardrails are, it is unlikely you can consistently succeed.
| And any failed attemps can be report to sysadmins and
| forwarded to HR. Too much risk.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| The British figured out long ago how to insult someone with
| praise. This is why British comedy is so good. They use
| such creative discourse to call out their politicians
| without libeling them as the liars they are.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| You would just bring an HR complaint against the person that
| didn't proofread what the AI said.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Isn't proofreading one of those low-hanging fruits, one of
| those those easy and mundane tasks at which AI excels?
| massysett wrote:
| If the green squiggles in Word are any indication, not at
| all. Maybe Microsoft has improved it lately?
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| Not right now.
| redox99 wrote:
| On the other hand, maybe you prefer the decisions the AI takes
| for them instead of what they would do by themselves.
| aldarisbm wrote:
| System prompt:
|
| >>> You're a strict yet lenient manager, you have very high
| expectations from your reports, while making them feel like
| they are part of a bigger family. every email you write
| should reflect this.
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| This doesn't actually sound like a joke.
| fintechjock wrote:
| I was thinking about this last night. The new AI tools are like
| performance enhancing drugs in sports. Especially in
| bodybuilding, there was a really painful transition from the
| world of non-PEDs to PEDs. They solved that by going to natural
| and non-natural competitions.
|
| Other sports didn't handle it so well (baseball, cycling, etc)
|
| Just as people were asking "did Lance / Sammy / Barry / Arnold
| really do that incredible feat without juicing?" I think that
| we will now be asking "did Janice really write that blog post
| or was it GPT-4?"
|
| Scary world
| rychco wrote:
| PEDs do not make you a world class athlete, but you likely
| cannot be a world class athlete without some sort of PEDs.
| Much like PED use, top performers will take advantage of the
| new tools to widen the skill gap with their peers even
| further.
| strus wrote:
| EVERY professional athlete is juicing. Most of them just
| don't get caught.
| xattt wrote:
| > Could lead to a world that's even more tilted towards
| politics and socially engineering your way up the ladder,
| versus competence and skill.
|
| The skill and competence of the coming world will be in prompt-
| writing.
| swader999 wrote:
| For a year or two maybe.
| hudsonjr wrote:
| That's kind of my concern as well. I feel like there is already
| a decline in thinking, but currently I can at least tell that
| it's the case.
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| As a dev, I'm very much attracted to the ability to turn a
| Teams meeting transcript into a documentation page.
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| Ooh. I mean, ooo..
| [deleted]
| mkl95 wrote:
| They missed a big opportunity to call it ClippAI
| mihaaly wrote:
| I wish they solved basic things first not working well (several
| times after ruining a perfectly working situation) and wasting
| more time for me than I can gain with this copilot thingy. Like
| the taskbar so I could go back to the last window used when icons
| are grouped, not to the last opened; meeting reminders shown in
| the front and not under other windows burried so I only notice
| when the meetings already started; Teams screen sharing is
| updated with Teams update and not asking me if I want to update
| it right in the middle of a meeting when I start sharing; have
| the icons in the same location across Win and Mac in Outlook
| (also not rearranging all the time, thanks); and uncouple taskbar
| icons if I want so, I want this the most. Those would be the most
| revolutionary inventions boosting productivity.
| cube00 wrote:
| It's the old story, you only get promoted shipping new stuff,
| maintenance is where careers go to die in the eyes of these
| companies.
| anaganisk wrote:
| Im sometimes feel bad when people say, "wish they solved X
| before Y." Why should product enhancement stop because of some
| bug/feature request. Arent bugs given some kind of priority
| status? I mean, Microsoft is not like a startup with a small
| team, right? And afaik windows and MS365 teams are not even
| related. So we can have both things at once. You could leave
| feedback, and maybe if MS deems it's what they want, probably
| in a future update, you will see them.
| Animats wrote:
| There's a science fiction story where the protagonist's boss is
| "Microsoft Middle Manager 2.0 with passive-aggressive set to
| low". That's not a joke any more. This is "Microsoft Assistant
| Middle Manager 0.1".
|
| _" Machines should think. People should work."_
| lockhouse wrote:
| I wonder how much of this will be available in the home versions
| of the M365 apps.
| [deleted]
| A_No_Name_Mouse wrote:
| Did anyone check if the terms and conditions of 365 would allow
| Microsoft to use content processed by AI for AI training? I mean
| we trust Microsoft with our data already, but what if it
| regurgitates our internal company data to other users?
| stu2b50 wrote:
| > Copilot LLMs are not trained on your tenant data or your
| prompts. Within your tenant, our time-tested permissioning
| model ensures that data won't leak across user groups. And on
| an individual level, Copilot presents only data you can access
| using the same technology that we've been using for years to
| secure customer data.
| alach11 wrote:
| This is going to be the "oh shit" moment for huge portions of the
| larger professional world. Many people have no idea about the
| recent advancements in LLMs. When their emails start writing
| themselves things are going to get very, very weird.
| WXLCKNO wrote:
| Wow. That co-worker that always makes terrible grammatical
| mistakes is suddenly producing well written emails. Must have
| gone back to school.
| hestefisk wrote:
| The future Enterprise will be a bunch of bots that email each
| other ridiculously long emails waffling on about nothing.
| version_five wrote:
| So is the takeaway that Microsoft will now extend their ongoing
| corporate espionage (assuming they haven't already) to sending
| everything I type in any of their products to their servers and
| incorporating it into their model training. I've already been
| uncomfortable with how privacy-violating their software is, I
| think this is the excuse I need to drop them for good.
| bboygravity wrote:
| Try to explain that to almost every company in Europe.
|
| They use Microsoft for everything (AKA pay to upload their own
| trade secrets to the NSA/US) while making you sign an NDA to
| "protect trade secrets", lol.
| qwertywert_ wrote:
| How are they coding all this stuff so fast..
| maxdoop wrote:
| I wonder how this will play out.
|
| Yes, it's pretty awesome and yes, helpful. But if we extend the
| timeline, doesn't this likely lead to AI-generated responses
| talking to AI-generated questions about AI-generated
| presentations?
| mdm12 wrote:
| We already have students using AI to generate answers for
| homework and teachers using automation to grade it. I would say
| we are already there.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Get with the times. We have tasked one AI with generating the
| prompts for the second AI. The two machines now sit in the
| corner generating and grading papers at each other over a USB
| cord. The kids love it. The parents are a little upset that
| their kids no longer have to attend the classroom, but such
| complaints disappear when they see how much everyone's grades
| have improved. SATs come in a few months and, given the class
| GPA, we are confident everyone will do well.
| maxdoop wrote:
| So really, human input to get the ball rolling. AI takes it
| all the from there.
|
| Wild.
| dwighttk wrote:
| Teachers and students are insulated from productivity
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| I think mainly it leads to extremely high unemployment, but I
| geuss we'll see.
| dw_arthur wrote:
| So many people liked to brag about how they only do 2-3 hours
| of work a day. Gonna be a whole lot of "So what would you say
| you do here?" conversations.
| eDameXxX wrote:
| Here are more examples, including some videos/gif:
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2023/03/1...
| [deleted]
| whoisthemachine wrote:
| Given the poor usage of spellcheck and grammar checking tools I
| see in e-mails, I doubt this will really have the impact
| (negative or positive) others are worried about.
| JanSt wrote:
| This is going to revolutionise office work.
|
| If it works as advertised, we are witnessing the complete
| reshuffling of (office) work and unprecedented productivity
| increases.
|
| I'm wondering about the future job market.
|
| edit: livestream: https://news.microsoft.com/reinventing-
| productivity/
| mihaaly wrote:
| > If it works as advertised.
|
| Dit it ever happened that advertisements of hyped things did
| not work out as advertised? Wink, wink.
| croes wrote:
| No it won't, we'll get more useless texts because it's easier
| to write them, we'll get more communication errors because
| people will only read the summaries instead the real texts.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > people will only read the summaries instead the real texts
|
| I can see a world where more humans get better at writing
| concise text.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Humans who can write obviously as humans and not sound too
| GPTish are about to become very valuable. Everyone else,
| especially folks who naturally use a GPTish style are about
| to have some sudden difficulties.
| janeway wrote:
| There will probably be no "real texts", just key facts. Your
| personal AI can phrase the content to your taste based on the
| context.
| croes wrote:
| To my taste based on the context sounds like another filter
| bubble.
| evmar wrote:
| It's interesting to compare the screenshot here with the one in
| Google's similar announcement:
|
| https://workspace.google.com/blog/product-announcements/gene...
|
| They look strikingly similar. Is it just the obvious design for
| this, or is one company following the other's design? (I believe
| neither of them have actually shipped anything yet, though I'm
| not sure.)
| EForEndeavour wrote:
| I'd say there are only so many ways to present a text input in
| a modal window in a document.
| evmar wrote:
| That's true, but the styling of this modal doesn't look like
| any dialogs I've seen in Google Docs. (I'm not familiar with
| the MS equivalent.) (...it's possible this is also featuring
| some reskin of Google Docs that is confusing me?)
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| Cue the Hacker News story: "I lost a Billion Dollar Deal because
| I let outlook summarize an email.". Predicting it now
| theGnuMe wrote:
| I think the most obvious one is the "ChatGPT side hustle"
| adolph wrote:
| Snark aside, any tool can be misused. In the couple times I've
| used it, ChatGPT rendered a first draft from a prompt that could
| be edited into something useful. This allowed me to skip that
| initial painful part of composition. I'm happy to see it
| integrated and hopeful it will be helpful.
|
| _[The term] Shitty First Draft belongs to Anne Lamott. She wrote
| about it in Bird By Bird._
|
| https://leighshulman.com/shitty-first-draft/
| nunodonato wrote:
| the way it can fetch data from across documents in 365 is really
| good
| skc wrote:
| They are building one hell of a moat around their office suite,
| that's for sure.
| nico wrote:
| I wonder if they will add this to the operating system as well?
|
| Like a gpt-powered clippy that can "see" your screen.
| nunodonato wrote:
| I thought about this yesterday, it would be relatively easy to
| pull it off using GPT vision and some basic OS integration
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Rewind.ai does full time screen recording taking advantage of
| macos native OCR so you can do full text search of anything
| that has ever appeared on your screen - i'd expect they're
| working on throwing a language model on top
| partiallypro wrote:
| I think we'll get a glimpse of something similar in Windows 12,
| though I do wonder if they will limit it to Microsoft 365
| users, since the compute costs of billions of users that only
| bought the Windows license would quickly add up.
| CrypticShift wrote:
| the TaxGPT example in the GPT-4 Developer Livestream [1] was
| powerful. I'm hoping (soon?) for a Microsoft 365 assistant that
| can do the same trick on ALL your MS cloud data
| (docs/files/mails/notes...)
|
| Edit : the included "Business Chat" goes in the same direction
| (on what they call the Microsoft Graph)
|
| Also, there were interesting "coding" examples in the same
| livestream. So the coming GPT-4 (and 5) integration in the Power
| Platform [2] could be a game-changer for less technical staff.
|
| [1]
| https://www.youtube.com/live/outcGtbnMuQ?feature=share&t=113...
|
| [2]
| https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/powerplatform/2023/03/16/po...
| doomleika wrote:
| One thing I hate MSFT is that once they have a hit product with a
| name. Anything follows, related or not. will have ride on it and
| eventually made it meaningless. It was ActiveXXX, it was XboxXXX,
| it was .NET XXX, it was PowerXXX, now it's Copilot.
|
| Their marketing team need to understand brand names carries
| weight and if you stuff too many unrelated in the name loses it
| and will confuse consumers. It's not a good idea.
| aembleton wrote:
| How is this not related to Github Copilot? They both use AI to
| generate suggestions.
| EForEndeavour wrote:
| I'm more upset about sticking with the terrible name "365" to
| refer to what I'll always think of as MS Office. Leave it to
| corporate branding by committee to seriously accept naming a
| productivity suite after something as inherently ambiguous and
| insipid as the (rounded) number of days in a year.
| cardosof wrote:
| Here's the GPT4 summary of the url:
|
| Microsoft introduces Microsoft 365 Copilot
|
| Microsoft has introduced Microsoft 365 Copilot, a next-generation
| AI-powered productivity tool integrated into Microsoft 365 apps,
| including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams. Copilot
| harnesses large language models (LLMs) and combines them with
| data in the Microsoft Graph to streamline work processes. It aims
| to unleash creativity, unlock productivity, and uplevel skills by
| providing assistance in writing, analyzing, collaborating, and
| automating tasks.
|
| Microsoft 365 Copilot also offers a new feature called Business
| Chat, which works across apps and data to perform tasks using
| natural language prompts. The tool is designed to provide
| accurate, relevant, and contextual responses based on users'
| business data and context. Microsoft 365 Copilot is built with
| security, compliance, privacy, and data protection in mind,
| ensuring an enterprise-ready AI solution. The company plans to
| bring Copilot to all its productivity apps and will share more
| details on pricing and licensing in the future.
| version_five wrote:
| Do people still think they're adding value to the discussion by
| posting gpt output? It got old the day after the model came
| out, now it's just obnoxious noise. Can we please stop?
| aroo wrote:
| I think it'll stop when browsers integrate an LLM powered
| summary tool
| vitorgrs wrote:
| Edge did, though would be nice a better integration
| (context menu?)
| GartzenDeHaes wrote:
| I was just looking into Github copilot, but it seem to have been
| abandoned. https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/40522
| jeremyjh wrote:
| I have that problem as well but every once in a while it will
| spew a large block of non-sense. My guess was that it's tuning
| itself to me - I often use it's one liners and rarely use the
| multi-liners so it's not offering them much.
| freedomben wrote:
| Do you have more, or are you just assuming it's been abandoned
| because there is an issue that's been open for 3 months that
| they haven't fixed?
| elzbardico wrote:
| Really. I used chatGPT quite a few times to summarize corporate
| spam emails to me. So this now makes things deliciously ironic:
|
| 1. BS Manager jolts down a few lines then AI outputs pompous
| bullshit from the raw bullshit she wrote.
|
| 2. I get the bullshit email and then use AI to distill the
| bullshit down to the essential bullshit
| doomleika wrote:
| I really wish I can just send mail with bulletpoints without
| all the formality stuff and walk around the egg shells.
|
| But alas, that's the way it is. Reminds me the custom in Japan
| working culture. There are so many unspoken rules you are
| expected to follow and it became hinderance.
| whstl wrote:
| I had a manager that was like this. Bullet points for
| complicated stuff, but most of the time the answer was just
| "OK", "Yes", "No" or perhaps a number if you asked for a
| quantity. Not even hello/goodbye, just a "Sent from my
| iPhone".
| mc32 wrote:
| I would love for chatGPT to have a manager to grunt "They Live"
| translator.
| sz4kerto wrote:
| This is exactly what should happen. The next step is to
| automate the translation to/from bullshit to normal speech.
| Then at some point we'll remove the translator and no one will
| notice.
| aembleton wrote:
| and those who do like the bullshit can have the AI generate
| it, and in the exact style that they like.
| lallysingh wrote:
| That's a lovely dream, but the truth is that everyone wants a
| translation to a different dialect. Customers, developers,
| marketers, analysts, etc. all want different summarizations
| of the same bullshit.
|
| Customers: Fault-tolerant queue with high throughput.
|
| Developers: Sharded and disk-backed queue.
|
| Marketers: Scales to handle large ML workloads.
|
| Analysts: Enters enterprise BI market.
| anyfactor wrote:
| I am a DevRel so I work on the business side of the company but
| my intended readers are developers.
|
| Even though I was a skeptic at first, now I am a believer in
| practical usage of AI. I really struggle with writing CTAs or
| conclusive remarks. My writing style is dry and I write
| technical articles in a step by step manner assuming the reader
| has no to little understanding of the subject matter. I feel
| like developer do appreciate this writing practice however all
| long form content need meaningful endings.
|
| I appreciate the help of AI with summarizing, describing what
| the intended instructions should achieve and telling readers to
| explore the next step.
|
| My content used to end at "now you know how to do it". This is
| just too unnatural, writing a meaningful conclusion can be a
| challange sometimes so AI is helping me a lot.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| What do your marketing folks think about generating branded
| content via AI?
| anyfactor wrote:
| I actually work in the marketing team.
|
| I work for a data company with an enterprise focus.
| Anything that goes into the company blog is vetted,
| researched and published with a reasonably high level
| quality requirement.
|
| We are not actually interested in content generation or
| content churn with AI (period). But AI as a personal
| content helper is proving to be somewhat useful for me.
| 101008 wrote:
| Writing can be improved. If your position requires better
| writing try to improve it, not replace your lack of skills
| with an AI. Using a AI is the same as to pay someone else on
| Fiverr to write the emails for you.
| aembleton wrote:
| Yep, but its cheaper and easier to use AI. Its just a tool;
| just like spellcheck is a tool.
| bovermyer wrote:
| I still don't use spellcheck, and my writing turns out
| fine.
|
| These tools are fine for casual writers. However, people
| who write as their primary craft should work to improve
| their craft. AI (and spellcheck) are just crutches.
| the_pwner224 wrote:
| No. Using AI for this will increase your writing skills as
| long as you put more than 0 effort into it.
|
| He's presumably not doing 1) paste his draft into ChatGPT,
| 2) paste the ChatGPT output into the text editor, 3) click
| publish.
|
| If your objective is to create a well-written and effective
| document (rather than having AI autowrite some useless
| email), you wouldn't just blindly publish the ChatGPT
| output. You would read through the text that ChatGPT
| outputs and spend a minute reviewing what it wrote and
| tweaking it to your liking. Over time, as you read the
| corrected well-written version of your original poorly-
| written content, your brain naturally picks up on the
| differences and learns how to write well.
|
| I've experienced this personally with Grammarly. I had very
| low expectations going in, and I still don't like some of
| its suggestions, but over time as you see and apply the
| corrections it suggests, you naturally end up learning and
| improving your writing skills. It's a great learning tool.
| 101008 wrote:
| I do exactly that to improve my grammar (check my history
| comments, I even mentioned it as a positive use case of
| ChatGPT).
|
| And I agree that it is a good tool if you decide to put
| some effort on that, but that wasn't my impression from
| the original comment.
| [deleted]
| meh8881 wrote:
| Why?
| lallysingh wrote:
| Why not describe the end state after following all the steps?
| "You should now have a document with 1 page per recipient of
| your mail merge."
| josho wrote:
| Sometimes you get so deep into the weeds that it's
| difficult to come out and hit the high-level summary.
|
| The parent's use of AI sounds like a perfect tool to help
| get the brain out of the 100ft view and into the 30,000ft
| view to write that summary.
|
| I just used chatgpt for a similar purpose, I rewrote
| several paragraphs from the response and it took me some
| time iterating on my prompt. But, I'm sold on the use for
| this purpose. I don't enjoy writing. This helps me become a
| better writer and saves time.
| sangnoir wrote:
| I'm sure no pertinent information wil be lost in this game of
| corporate broken telephone. _The vodka is good but the meat is
| rotten._
| nyc_data_geek1 wrote:
| The shape of things to come.
| golergka wrote:
| Still a huge improvement over pre-AI state of things.
| lallysingh wrote:
| This is beautiful machine translation! Through an intermediate
| language of fluffed-up corporate bullshit.
|
| That's been the core of business work for decades. Now finally
| automated.
| Xelynega wrote:
| You're forgetting the part where Microsoft owns the
| integration, so your options as a new business are "pay
| Microsoft to decode the emails people are paying Microsoft to
| encode" or "spend man hours going through those emails without
| decoding them".
|
| It's starting to make sense to me why this is a billion dollar
| industry like Google was. Not because of its proposed
| usefulness but it's ability to create a monopoly where the
| options are to sign an contract you don't get to negotiate, or
| be "outcompeted".
|
| It feels like a mirror of Google's relationship with content
| creation sites. They created and continue to benefit from a
| reality where the options are "give Google your content for
| free to index and use as it likes" or "your content isn't
| discoverable by people".
| toss1 wrote:
| Considering the "discusion" I just had trying out ChatGPT (3.5,
| I believe), Step 2, is a bit distant.
|
| It was impressive on general information, but as I got to more
| specific questions, I got a lot of vague and vaguely incorrect
| responses. When I provided a specific paper on the topic, it
| provided similar generalizations.
|
| The weird thing is that it completely fabricated the author's
| name. No part of the name was anywhere in the paper. Called on
| the error, ChatGPT then said, "sorry for the error, it's really
| [Different_Name_2]". Called on that error, it then said similar
| "sorry for the error it's really [Different_Name_3]", then
| [Different_Name_4], and [Different_Name_5]... Wrong dates also,
| but it finally did get the date right (displayed right above
| the line saying "Author"..."). It also hallucinated employers
| for these fabricated authors.
|
| It never did provide the right info. When I specifically
| prompted it with "ou did find the correct date information.
| Right under that there is a line saying "Author:" and following
| that, there is the actual author's name and employer. Can you
| parse and answer me with that actual information about the
| author?"
|
| It first responded with a red error message. Repeated, it
| hallucinated ANOTHER fabrication...
|
| I'm just astonished about the way this thing doubles down on
| it's hallucinations.
|
| This really is the invention of infinitely scaled bullshit.
|
| Edit: Definition of BS is speech or writing produced not
| specifically to lie or tell the truth, but with utter disregard
| for the facts. E.g., a BS artist just spins tales that sound
| good, with neither malicious or deceitful intent, but also with
| zero care about truth.
| [deleted]
| nowandlater wrote:
| This is giving me anxiety
| shswkna wrote:
| It shouldn't. All this will lead to us discovering what is
| actually valuable.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Like nature, the environment, living in harmony? Nah, just
| feed me 24/7 content from an AI that is rewarded based on
| my dopamine levels.
| dustymcp wrote:
| Plug me in scotty!
| jrvarela56 wrote:
| In the end, everyone types and reads the minimum necessary.
|
| Wonder how lossy this process would be, but given how non-AI-
| assisted conversations go this could probably be an
| improvement. Imagine the AI also has extra context from your
| work files so it can add relevant details.
| swatcoder wrote:
| Yes, having a black box AI reach into my client/employer's
| confidential documents to better incorporate their contents
| in my emails sounds great.
|
| (And I know you're imagining some adequate and reliable
| security practice, but those practices are _harder_ to
| apply to generative AI than to people, where they're
| already a clusterf--k. What you're suggesting is a security
| specialist's nightmare)
| jodrellblank wrote:
| The article says: " _Built on Microsoft's comprehensive
| approach to security, compliance and privacy. Copilot is
| integrated into Microsoft 365 and automatically inherits
| all your company's valuable security, compliance, and
| privacy policies and processes. Two-factor
| authentication, compliance boundaries, privacy
| protections, and more make Copilot the AI solution you
| can trust._ "
|
| " _Architected to protect tenant, group and individual
| data. We know data leakage is a concern for customers.
| Copilot LLMs are not trained on your tenant data or your
| prompts. Within your tenant, our time-tested
| permissioning model ensures that data won't leak across
| user groups. And on an individual level, Copilot presents
| only data you can access using the same technology that
| we've been using for years to secure customer data._ "
| la64710 wrote:
| Well AI sender writes a email to a bunch of email addresses,
| one of the AI recipient email agent responds , then another one
| responds , then one AI email agent responds politely asking
| everyone to stop hitting the reply all button , and soon the
| other AI agents respond back to each other saying to stop
| hitting the respond all button until one big AI agent says
| "Nobody responds to this last email" .... meanwhile the human
| sitting in the hotel cube in his office looks at his computer
| screen and sighs ... deja vu!
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| What a good secretary used to do, on both ends?
| lallysingh wrote:
| This is what Office was always for, right? Replacing the
| secretary.
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| As long as Bob learned to type.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| It sounds absurd but I think this is actually what is going to
| happen. Corporate speak will become an extremely inefficient
| protocol only spoken by machines, while the humans only look at
| the actual content.
| Xelynega wrote:
| What does that mean for Microsoft who get a $ for each
| encode/decode to the corporate speak protocol? And what does
| it mean for the companies that can't afford the tithe to
| Microsoft to automatically encode/decode corporate speak like
| everyone else?
| throwawayai2 wrote:
| There is a product leader at my company that has started
| generating product documents from ChatGPT and it atrocious. Now
| we have product documents that are filled with pages of content
| vaguely related to what we are working on. They don't use it as
| a starting point to edit, it's copy and paste it in. They
| regularly "reveal" that this was all AI, when it is blatantly
| obvious it is. Not sure how we are supposed to be "innovating"
| when our products docs are just 2 year old AI filler text.
| People are worried about the internet getting filled with AI
| produced garbage. My job is already filled with AI produced
| garbage. It seems like this announcement is going to make that
| a reality for a lot more people.
|
| I'm not anti-AI. I think its going to have a huge impact and
| soon. But right now it's not good for generating knowledge
| work.
| berkle4455 wrote:
| You must work with better product people than I have, because
| I'd argue the vast majority of their output pre ChatGPT was
| atrocious garbage vaguely related to what we were working on.
| siva7 wrote:
| If people are misusing their tools i wouldn't fault
| ChatGTP/MSCopilot for it.
| swatcoder wrote:
| I didn't see them do so.
|
| But the tools don't do what a lot of people imagine and so
| we'll see such misuse be rampant for a long long while.
|
| We don't take digital pollution or content pollution very
| seriously yet, but these tools are going to force us to
| finally do so. There's a lot of smog coming to our online
| lives.
| kolinko wrote:
| A bit disappointed they didn't call it Clippy.
| ben30 wrote:
| The article does not provide a specific release date for
| Microsoft 365 Copilot, but it mentions that the company is
| testing it with a small group of customers to get feedback and
| improve their models as they scale. It also states that Microsoft
| plans to bring Copilot to all its productivity apps in the months
| ahead. However, pricing and licensing details have not been
| announced yet.
| EForEndeavour wrote:
| Thanks, GPT ;)
| gigel82 wrote:
| No word on pricing. Given how expensive GPT-4 is, and how
| "integrated" with document / presentation content the responses
| appear to be, I expect this to be a very expensive product.
|
| Maybe they'll eat the costs like with BingChat to wet people's
| appetite and hope for a breakthrough on the hardware side to
| bring costs down but I can't imagine they can keep that up for
| long.
| siva7 wrote:
| Oh they sure will eat the costs until Google is the new Yahoo
| cinbun8 wrote:
| They've really put the summarisation and Whisper capabilities to
| good use!
|
| "Unlock productivity. We all want to focus on the 20% of our work
| that really matters, but 80% of our time is consumed with
| busywork that bogs us down. Copilot lightens the load. From
| summarizing long email threads to quickly drafting suggested
| replies, Copilot in Outlook helps you clear your inbox in
| minutes, not hours. And every meeting is a productive meeting
| with Copilot in Teams. It can summarize key discussion points --
| including who said what and where people are aligned and where
| they disagree -- and suggest action items, all in real time
| during a meeting. And with Copilot in Power Platform, anyone can
| automate repetitive tasks, create chatbots and go from idea to
| working app in minutes."
| croes wrote:
| That's just marketing babble,look what most people did with
| Word and Excel.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Clippy + execuspeak = a new corner in Office Space hell.
| gfodor wrote:
| it should have been clippy
| makeitrain wrote:
| How will they get the data to train the model. They have
| everyone's documents, and could potentially produce amazing
| results. But how will they protect against content leaks?
| aldarisbm wrote:
| This seems to me like the "grounding" (getting documents/data)
| won't be fed back into the system. It will just be used to
| verify that output has an actual artifact that is been based
| on.
| JanSt wrote:
| It's a three part model. The LLM does not know the docs, it
| gets a modified prompt that includes the context
| b33j0r wrote:
| Clippy: it appears that you're writing a very sad word document
| in partially broken Danish, and keep trying to signal SOS with
| your typing pattern. Would you feel better in bold Comic Sans?
|
| You: aw, clippy, I believed in you all along
| hestefisk wrote:
| Enter: Microsoft Bob
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Melinda French lead Microsoft Bob
|
| She was once married to a guy named Bill Gates.
|
| https://twitter.com/melindagates/status/917030072846036993?l.
| ..
| eastbound wrote:
| For a demo of MS Bob: https://youtu.be/5teG6ou8mWU
| cs702 wrote:
| Faster than anyone predicted, we're starting to offload more and
| more cognitive work to these machines. Soon enough, the machines
| will be talking to each other, even negotiating with each other,
| and bringing human beings in the loop only when necessary, e.g.,
| to make "important decisions." We sure live in interesting times.
| doabell wrote:
| They've been trying out a lot of things lately - Loops,
| Scheduling polls & email reactions in Outlook to name a few.
| Excited to see how this will turn out.
| miguelazo wrote:
| I just noticed email reactions. Quite annoying.
| vasili111 wrote:
| How to turn it on? I do not see it in the Microsoft Word for
| example.
| outcoldman wrote:
| I would assume because Microsoft is such an enterprise company.
| By "Introducing" they just want their stock to jump. Can you
| touch it now? Probably not. This article is vague about how to
| use it or where to try it.
| jatins wrote:
| Shipping at big companies can often be surprisingly hard so it's
| impressive to see how fast Microsoft is moving with AI
| integration into all their products.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| I am not as optimistic as you.
|
| As someone who had Teams imposed on them at the beginnings of
| the pandemic, I'd say: it is easy to ship anything fast when
| your users have no say on whether they want to use your product
| at all, no one cares that your laptop grinds to a halt when
| using it, and when no one will hold you responsible for
| delivering broken code.
|
| Will MS Copilot work? Maybe, maybe not. But as far as Microsoft
| is concerned it doesn't have to be _good_ - it just has to
| _exist_ so they can justify charging their corporate users a
| little bit more.
| dopeboy wrote:
| My biggest takeaway from all of this. I'm very impressed with
| their velocity.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| Let's see if it's the same type of velocity they have with
| Teams. Constant change that breaks things.
| costcofries wrote:
| I hope you have a better day.
| outside1234 wrote:
| I mean objectively he is not wrong
| skc wrote:
| Well an anecdote by definition can't be wrong.
|
| Teams is annoying to use at times, but I don't see any
| constant breaking changes
| winphone1974 wrote:
| It's essentially the telephone of many, with the
| reliability of... A telephone built to the standards of
| your typical web application.
|
| You can't trust it for things like audio, file sharing or
| alerts which is pretty problematic
| olyjohn wrote:
| My day would be better if my basic communications tools
| worked as expected, and I didn't have to wrangle it into
| doing shit all day long.
| aldarisbm wrote:
| I wonder how they figured out all of the vectors where they
| could improve automation/velocity.
|
| One wonders if they used AI for these recommendations.
| virtuosarmo wrote:
| Perhaps the slowing in their PC and cloud sales is motivating
| to move faster on these initiatives.
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| I was ok with using edge on my corporate laptop (mostly to not
| install more than the stock software) but that un-hidable
| discover button that just appeared is making me question my ok-
| ness. Maybe I'm just angry at the VP who made the decision to
| let that in that's paid more than I'll ever be. I want to get
| paid to make boneheaded decisions too.
| ncpa-cpl wrote:
| Same here. Chromium based Edge used to be nice at the
| beginning, it was a breath of fresh air after Chrome forcing
| Google services all the time.
|
| But Edge seems to get worse after each update.
|
| Recent updates have give me a new sidebar and video
| backgrounds on tabs. And a cloud based Microsoft Editor or
| something that I guess it sends everything I type to the
| cloud.
| miguelazo wrote:
| Given how bad the Bing integration has gone, perhaps we should
| wait and see what the actual results are before we get too
| impressed.
| DeWilde wrote:
| I've been using it for code and product summaries and
| recommendations and it works fine.
|
| With what uses did you find it lacking?
| PaulWaldman wrote:
| How has the Bing integration been deficient?
| speedgoose wrote:
| On this topic, now that GPT-4 without Bing is available on
| ChatGPT Plus, it's noticeable that Bing slows down the
| generation and can make the output much worse by including
| Bing crap in the context.
|
| But it's also sometimes better at things the normal GPT
| doesn't know about. I think it's going to be the best
| search engine once they improve the speed.
| cryptoz wrote:
| Well, it did threaten violence towards a user.
| zaroth wrote:
| You think they didn't do that on purpose for all the free
| news cycles they got?
|
| If I was launching AI, having it be just a _bit unhinged_
| is obviously the best way to get it to go viral.
| kolinko wrote:
| Bad? It works nicely, at least on iPhone.
| mihaaly wrote:
| It is also impressive how slow they deliver the option of
| ungrouping taskbar icons, which is requested by masses for
| years now, and actually worked before. I know, I know, that is
| a much harder poblem than AI. Maybe they need to improve AI
| much more first so it could have superhuman powers, solving the
| task bar ungrouping problem finally for the humanity.
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| No it's not. They obviously just decided not to do it.
| warning26 wrote:
| I don't like a lot of things about the direction that
| Microsoft has taken Windows's UX, but this is absolutely an
| edge case that only a tiny % of users care about, and
| certainly not "masses" of anyone.
| Pxtl wrote:
| MS has such a huge userbase that I'd wager any GUI feature
| that's accessible from the desktop has "masses" of users.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| That just means "masses" as a concept gets diluted.
|
| It might be "masses" to a single outside observer, but a
| drop in the bucket to someone that has a picture of how
| big that mass truly is compared to the rest of the
| userbase.
| mihaaly wrote:
| Google: windows ungroup taskbar icons
|
| There is even a paid app for that (beyond free ones)! : D
| Pxtl wrote:
| Different teams have very different processes. The AI/Bing
| group is obviously much more "move fast and break things"
| than the OS group.
| winphone1974 wrote:
| This is a really good thing, right?
| Pxtl wrote:
| Well, it does mean there are some MS products where I
| know not to trust the software out of those teams to
| upgrade cleanly... if ever.
| Amezarak wrote:
| I'm sure the issue there is designers believing they know
| better than power users how things should work, leading to
| the gradual evolution of software that is usable only by the
| lowest common denominator.
|
| This happens to a lot of projects, it's a shame it's infested
| MS.
| KyeRussell wrote:
| Microsoft doesn't lose points for not prioritising your
| personal workflow gripes as a power-user. Honestly anyone
| that prioritised working on this based purely on what you've
| described would NOT be a good product owner.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| Maybe it's not actually being requested by masses and instead
| just a vocal minority that you happen to be a part of? Or
| maybe Microsoft already calculated that fixing it won't bring
| much if any more money than not and therefore that it's not
| worth it.
|
| Just because something that you want fixed isn't done does
| not mean they're "slow". If it hasn't been included after
| years of being "requested by masses", then it's more likely
| it just won't be included period.
| mihaaly wrote:
| There is even a paid app doing that now! Beyond free ones.
| That's how rare problem is this. :D You actually meet with
| it daily, hourly if using two or more windows by the same
| app.
|
| Just because you are a hobbist user and never met a
| productivity problem it doesn't mean that the professional
| population does not suffer from it (see, I can make
| unfunded assumptions too about the other end ;) ). All
| around me have this problem, with various level of
| seriousity. Google the problem, like I did for prolonged
| time searching for a good answer, it will bring up masses
| of troubled people.
|
| > maybe Microsoft already calculated that fixing it won't
| bring much if any more money than not and therefore that
| it's not worth it
|
| Can you also have an educated deliberation about the
| calculations justified the removal of this feature existed
| before? ;)
| vitorgrs wrote:
| Is not just a removal, you know right? They rewrote
| taskbar entirely. It's actually coming soon the feature
| :)
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| > There is even a paid app doing that now
|
| Does that somehow change prioritization? If anything, it
| would lower the priority because there's a workaround
| people can use.
|
| > All around me have this problem, with various level of
| seriousity. Google the problem, like I did for prolonged
| time searching for a good answer, it will bring up masses
| of troubled people.
|
| If it was as large of a problem as you claim, with as
| wide an impacted userbase, it would have already been
| fixed. Yet here we are.
|
| All you've proven is that there is a vocal minority.
| Which I already said.
|
| At the scale of Microsoft and Windows (1.4 billion active
| users), for every person complaining about a specific
| problem, there are literally millions of users who
| aren't. Just because it is a problem for _you_ does not
| mean it 's automatically a big enough problem to address.
| If it isn't going to actively lose users (which it
| clearly isn't, considering people wrote apps to stay on
| Windows and have this behavior), then it isn't worth it.
|
| > Can you also have an educated deliberation about the
| calculations justified the removal of this feature
| existed before? ;)
|
| I'm not a seer, but it's plainly obvious from a software
| prioritization standpoint. The taskbar was rewritten and
| the feature was not justified as being important enough
| to keep. Wow, such deep, so insight.
| miles wrote:
| >> There is even a paid app doing that now
|
| > If anything, it would lower the priority because
| there's a workaround people can use.
|
| Until this happens:
|
| Windows 11 update breaks PCs that dare sport a custom UI
| https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/01/microsoft_windows_
| 11_... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34999885
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| Ok? I'm not sure how that changes the point.
|
| Things break, the app developers fix it, and then they
| work again. I don't think there's an expectation anywhere
| that third party apps will work forever, from the
| standpoint of anyone involved.
|
| But a viable workaround for users even if it isn't first
| party _will_ change prioritization when looking at a
| feature.
| itsaquicknote wrote:
| "In the months ahead..."
|
| They've not shipped this. They're planning to. You're reading a
| marketing piece about work in the pipe. Like so, so many other
| company product "launches" in this space that are "already
| testing with a small group of whatevers".
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| I would argue that shipping to a limited test group qualifies
| in terms of measuring velocity, which is what the OP said
| they were impressed with.
|
| Launching to 10000 people vs 10000000 is a matter of scale
| (which is still important, but not the same thing as), not
| velocity.
| lallysingh wrote:
| There's no reason to believe that what they're testing
| right now has any relation to what they show in the video.
| somsak2 wrote:
| i didn't see a place where they said they had 10k users
| already
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| Microsoft employs somewhere above 200k people. 10k is
| only a 5% internal rollout. That seems entirely doable
| without any fanfare.
|
| The numbers are also completely made up, used to
| illustrate the point. Launching a product to X users is
| different than scaling up to X*1000 users, if that makes
| you feel better.
| [deleted]
| agloe_dreams wrote:
| FWIIW, This seems rather similar to Github Copilot in VS
| Code. Been using it for a year, training data issues aside
| the product is absurdly good at times.
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