[HN Gopher] SpreadsheetLLM - Microsoft's new AI system
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SpreadsheetLLM - Microsoft's new AI system
Author : amai
Score : 54 points
Date : 2024-07-18 15:22 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Ah yes, Excel, the piece of software that already famously
| mangles data, is now going to be glued to software that also
| famously mangles data.
|
| Honestly, though, I kind of kid - I _love_ spreadsheets, and if
| this _actually works_ , it could be interesting. God help whoever
| needs to troubleshoot the hallucinated results - it's already
| hard enough to figure out what byzantine knotwork someone created
| using existing Excel functions, but now we'll have to also guess
| and second-guess layers of prompts that were used to either
| generate those same functions, or just generate output that got
| mulched through some AI black-box.
| Obscurity4340 wrote:
| Spreadsheets have such a way of making chaotic things more
| clear. I wonder if there's any work on spreadsheets as a
| multidimensional thinking tool
| laborcontract wrote:
| Indeed. I accidentally taught myself linear algebra through
| spending a ridiculous amount of time in excel. I only
| realized that after taking a linear algebra class and feeling
| helpless.. until I mentally remapped the concepts into excel
| space, after which it all became easy.
| mettamage wrote:
| Could you give an example?
| laborcontract wrote:
| Sure. So back in an old finance job I was given a whole
| bunch of portfolio modeling spreadsheets that was a huge
| mess of ad hoc column so which drove me nuts so
| everything started with me learning how to use arrays,
| which significantly reduced the complexity of basic data
| transformations.
|
| But then I wanted to analyze all our portfolio data over
| time so i had to figure out then how handle multi
| dimensionality in my spreadsheets. Then I figured out how
| to integrate and transform and reduce portfolio
| characteristics into sensible components for risk
| management and portfolio optimizations across different
| asset classes.
|
| I figured out how to do some absolutely ridiculous stuff
| in excel, it's tough for me to think of tools that
| scratch the surface me if l that is nearly as good at
| helping working through
| surfingdino wrote:
| I am calmly waiting for the SEC to rip them a new hole the size
| of Manhattan when hallucinated spreadsheets inevitably make their
| way into listed companies' reports.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Well you'll be waiting a very very long time.
| rsynnott wrote:
| That would be on the companies (or their auditors), not
| Microsoft, in general. Clearly, no-one should ever _use_ this,
| should it ever make it out of research-land, but there's not
| that much obvious risk to _making_ it as long as they're honest
| about the risks.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| If it could spit out the analysis as spreadsheets that used
| standard formulas and only use the LLM to generate the
| formulas, it could be verified. Errors would slip through,
| but no worse than people applying the wrong formula based on
| a quick internet search that calculates a close but incorrect
| answer.
| bsenftner wrote:
| I've found that all the top foundation models already understand
| spreadsheets very well, as well as all the functions, as well as
| all the common spreadsheet problems people run into using them.
| The Internet is chock full spreadsheet support forums and
| tutorials, and the foundation models have all been trained on
| this data.
|
| With not very much effort, one can explain to an LLM "here is a
| spreadsheet, formatted as..." which takes about 150 word tokens,
| and then not much more mental effort in your favorite language to
| translate an arbitrary spreadsheet into that format, and one gets
| a very capable LLM interface that can help explain complex
| arbitrary spreadsheets as well as generate them on request.
|
| I've got finance professionals and attorneys using a tool I wrote
| doing this to help them understand and debug complex spreadsheets
| given to them by peers and clients.
| fimdomeio wrote:
| Congratulations everyone, we can now automate the next global
| financial crisis.
| lainga wrote:
| Now imagine an LLM trained on LLM web content. We call that an
| AIslop-squared.
| victor9000 wrote:
| Why on earth would you task a non-deterministic technology with
| data persistence?
| ffhhj wrote:
| Waiting for the hallucinate formula:
|
| =HAL(9000)
| chatmasta wrote:
| At Databricks summit there was a nice presentation [0] by the CEO
| of V7 labs who showed a demo of their LLM + Spreadsheet product.
|
| The kneejerk reaction of "ugh, LLM and spreadsheet?!" is
| understandable, but I encourage you to watch that demo. It makes
| clear some obvious potentials of LLMs in spreadsheets. They can
| basically be an advanced autofill. If you've used CoPilot in
| VSCode, you understand the satisfaction of feeling like an LLM is
| thinking one step ahead of you. This should be achievable in
| spreadsheets as well.
|
| [0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=0SVilfbn-HY&t=1251 (queued to
| demo at 20:51)
| Kiro wrote:
| Thank you. Tired of the usual jokers in threads like this.
| Right now the majority of comments are all sarcastic snark.
| delusional wrote:
| I don't think I understand that demo. It shows him using some
| built-in workflow thing (which isn't generally considered a
| core part of a spreadsheet) and then asks some LLM about the
| total price (I guess asking it to do math, which LLM's are
| notoriously bad at), but instead it looks like he gets some
| responses telling him what the term "total price" means, in
| prose that doesn't fit in the cells.
|
| What was i supposed to take away from that demo?
| jemmyw wrote:
| The llm doesn't do the math. It outputs something the app
| then interrupted into a cell configuration with sums filled
| in. This is an area where llms can be quite good, you type
| out how you want to report the data like "give me subtotals
| of column F at every month of the date column E and a grand
| total of F at the bottom"
|
| Except sometimes you can't seem to stop the prose.
| christianqchung wrote:
| Goodness, I've been making a joke that AI companies are going to
| spend 500 billion dollars to make spreadsheet generators since
| 2023, and now it's becoming real. Gemini has a limited form of
| this too.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| How will it work?
|
| I open an Excel spreadsheet and also the AI Copilot. Then
| whenever I want to do something with Excel like "Show me which
| cells have formulas" CoPilot will interact with Excel and issue
| some command I cannot remember to do that for me?
|
| Menus are good but often hard to navigate and find. So the
| CoPilot can give me a whole new (prompt-based) user-interface to
| any MS-application? Is that how it works?
| skywhopper wrote:
| Uhh, this is a paper about how to compress spreadsheet data to
| fit inside an LLM's token limits, including such novel approaches
| as ignoring exact values of numbers, meaning of data types, and
| any context outside of a detected table of values.
|
| The paper doesn't speak at all to actual uses of this approach,
| but that doesn't stop the article writer from assuming this is
| probably a big step towards automated tools that analyze
| spreadsheet data for non-numerically inclined users.
|
| This is not that.
| jimkoen wrote:
| @ludicity 's head is going to explode.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| DNA rEsearchers HAD TO STOP USING their preferrdd letter
| sequences because excel would autocorrect its typs.
|
| This.will not end. Well
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