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Comment by logicallee | Hacker News Reader

For anyone who writes Excel formulas, it is one of the use cases for ChatGPT (a currently free chatbot that appears highly intelligent in some contexts) that users rave the most about. The next time you're writing an excel formula, give chatgpt a try. It might just get it right the first time.

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Or it might get it wrong, but not obviously so. Who's job is it to debug/prove the ChatGPT-authored formulas that business people will certainly start using (if they haven't already). I have enough trouble debugging code I write myself. Debugging other people's code is much harder.

When a company makes a multi-million dollar error because an analyst used ChatGPT formulas in Excel, I expect we'll get the answer.

This almost certainly is GPT. OpenAI has an exclusive licensing agreement with Microsoft.

Why do you think it isn’t due to the programming by example work that MSR have been doing for over 5 years and which already partly made it into excel as flash fill?

You're right, "almost certainly" is far too strong. I was unaware of that research, and read a lot into that this is only being released in the web version. And am just generally anticipating a wave of LLM applications to eat everything that could be even remotely, abstractly reframed as an "autocomplete" task. That it only works in English is also evidence against, with GPT-3 you'd get every language it knows pretty much for free.

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