this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024

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Microsoft's Pricey AI Assistant Copilot Leaves Early Adopters Feeling Cheated (www.ibtimes.co.uk)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Yeah it's a classic case of Microsoft marketing. So far I found the office integration to be the least useful and most over hyped in marketing. However what it is good at is actually helpful. Join a meeting late it already has an update for what's happened on the meeting so far and it's really good for summarizing a meeting especially a key topics and a summary of action items. Tedious tasks like taking data copied from a PDF file and reformatting it correctly in CSV. And my favorite is making custom graphics based on a specific colour palette, though most images are really good for entertainment, demos and samples, but not production quality for final products. Weird results include creepy human images just don't look right in a disturbing zombie-like way.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

My favorite are the gigantic companies falling all over themselves to buy this for their workforces before it's even clear what value a bot that can't reliably do arithmetic is going to add to Excel

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

According to the article, dow says they've seen significant productivity gains and are rolling it out to half the company.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

This is certainly not about finding fools who not only are beta testers but also provide training data... And not only for free, but they pay also for this.. Win win win for M$

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

Trash company once again dumps trash on the market and attempts to sell it to morons.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (4 children)

It’s funny that Microsoft fucked up the branding so bad that half of these comments are about GitHub Copilot — a specialized, useful tool for experienced developers to speed up rote tasks — and the other half about their whole “Shoehorn AI into everything.” strategy. And Bing Chat is also now Copilot, apparently? Is Cortana now Windows Copilot? Is there an Xbox Copilot that plays Starfield for you?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

There is a setting for Xbox Controllers to use two of them like it's the same one called Copilot.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Well copilot is the category of those assistants. Most other companies call them copilots too, even in B2B space

[–] [email protected] 12 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Remember that internal Microsoft video that leaked where a marketing person was begging them to use Apple’s iPod box designs instead of their usual ones: https://youtu.be/EUXnJraKM3k?si=3aAZ9xulggtHDVp6

It was apparently 17 years ago but it’s still true that Microsoft can’t brand things for shit.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://piped.video/EUXnJraKM3k?si=3aAZ9xulggtHDVp6

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Co Xbox Windows pilot

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

Co pilot pilot for Microsoft Flight Sim 2025

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I have not had a chance to test the office integrations (and the $30 price tag may keep it that way,) but I’ve been testing the web chat version, and once toggled to “precise” mode I find it close to chatgpt. Just a little more prone to lapse into acting like a bing chat app and very limited in conversation length…

I think the trick is to treat it like a junior assistant or maybe an intern who might make mistakes and not as a seasoned, experienced employee who always puts out perfect work.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

$30? Idk how it is in the consumer space, but in the Enterprise world the initial opening for copilot required 300 seats of E3 or better, and then a purchase of 300 seats of copilot 365 at $30 each. They were supposed to drop the 300 copilot 365 seat req q1 but I'm not sure if they did.

3030012=108,000 per year for copilot. E3 is 36 a month, 30012=129,600.

Big money.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I'm told they dropped the seat requirements. Yeah $30 is the business rate. No discounts for education. I suspect the backend costs on this are still rather high but should improve once hardware catches up to demand.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Ah. Well as far as I was told two months back, they didn't plan on dropping the E3/E5*300 seat requirements, only the 300 seat of copilot requirements. But I haven't kept on top of it, all my companies clients are too small fish to drop 100-200k a year on unproven tech

From what I'm told, Ms was basically running things at a loss when they first opened the doors.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

[redacted]

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago (1 children)

As far as I am concerned Copilot is a giant theft of open source code and breaches the license. I expect in the future a lot of repositories will be used to poison these AI agents just as is happening with images. The agents will get better but the quality of what they produce will also be poisoned and get worse precisely due to the theft.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Poisoning code should be ludicrously easy: They crawl pretty much everything and a random AST walk looks suspiciously like real code while it's the equivalent of showing an image generation model noise. Or maybe better: Mondrians that are indistinguishable from Vermeers. (I hope I didn't offend anyone by calling Mondrian abstract nonsense but it is abstract nonsense).

I don't think copilot will hold out for long anyway, the novelty is wearing off and even inexperienced programmers are beginning to see that it helps you write code faster that shouldn't have been written in the first place. Code is like 90% maintenance and excessive boilerplate doesn't make it easier.

OTOH please don't let that "Let's scam artists by selling them snake oil that if it wasn't trivial to circumvent would break naturally within a week" guy fool you. On the actually interesting side of poisoning attacks, people have made cars hallucinate radar blips I bet a couple of companies are getting quite tough questions from regulators right now.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 7 months ago

What part of "early adopter" did you not understand before you wasted your money?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago (1 children)

It's ChatGPT Open AI, but as Microsoft LoVES to do things, bloated as those old time web browsers infested of tool bars

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

It is multiple things, in chat it is just GPT4-turbo, with support to request data through Microsoft Graph API. So basically it can do API searches to data you have access.

In Excel, it can perform things like formulas, with context of your excel sheet. This is actually quite useful.

But still bit disappointed, the system prompt of copilot is in my opinion not as good as open AI's.

[–] [email protected] 45 points 7 months ago

Similarly, other users told the outlet that the AI hallucinated wrong answers or miscalculated spreadsheets. AI experts, including The Wharton School professor, Ethan Mollick accused Copilot of making bizarre suggestions for weekend meetings.

It seems these users never used GPT

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Yes, but when will it make porn?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

They already have porn chatbots.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

The bosses are airborne while I can’t work online, so I generate my porn on the company’s time.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 7 months ago (1 children)

So people are surprised that GPT-4 is performing as well as GPT-4 always has?

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