Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work
blogs.microsoft.com
blogs.microsoft.com
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2023/03/1...
> "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?
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.
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.
> "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.
Yes, welcome to the elephant in the room of Open Source, 'many eyes makes bugs shallow', and the other pretenses we don't question. But at least the principle stands - you can still get the Atom source code[3] and pay someone as a contractor to change it for you, employ some people to work on it, start up a foundation, beg someone. Compared to a closed source program built on patented algorithms when the company shuts down and nobody can practically or legally improve it, or compared to a multiplayer game with online servers which the company shuts down and you can't use the game ever again, it is different.
[1] If you think it's impossible for Microsoft to reach into your Linux machine and take your Atom editor away, you'll see why EEE is a moral-panic rather than a real thing which could ever happen.
[2] you know, like Google actually does with HTML/Chrome strong-arming through Google-custom extensions, AMP pages, and the like. You'll see that this still hasn't resulted in other people being unable to make browsers or webservers or web-like protocols (Gemini).
It is just a business strategy, that's all. And it's one that Microsoft employed successfully, and which people who join likely learn of or know of, and some of whom try to emulate to be successful at Microsoft now. And many of us don't like the effect EEE has on our industry, when Microsoft or any other entity does it. And just because Atom may not fit the strategy exactly, doesn't mean the unmistakable parallels which I already mentioned should be ignored. I personally used Atom, but more than that, I liked the world more when there was more than just one Electron based editor competing out there in the world, and we are seeing the fruits of VSCode winning so completely (both good and bad), whether through aggressive corporate strategies or not.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
I'm still using HTML today. It hasn't been extinguished because it still exists. It's like complaining that someone murdered your dog, and I point out that your dog is still alive and you say "I'm confused what that has to do with anything".
Extinguish: "To put an end to or make extinct; destroy: synonym: annihilate."
You can still use Atom, it isn't extinct, destroyed or annihilated, and that's related to it being Open Source because there is no way for anyone to annihilate it when you can have your own copy of the source.
Compare that to the proposed "kill HTML by extending it" where, if webservers only served compiled ActiveX and you could only view that on Windows with IE and IE wouldn't render HTML, no amount of 'having the source' would let you use HTML to make web pages your customers could view. You'd put HTML on your webserver and your customers couldn't view it. You'd look at the IE source code and you couldn't distribute it. HTML would be killed as an interoperable standard, It's a difference in kind.
> "It is just a business strategy, that's all."
> "We factually know that Netscape's downfall was a result of the EEE strategy [0]"
We know that Microsoft made a product good enough that nobody bothered to install Netscape. If that's all EEE means it wouldn't have been an attempt to kill HTML. From your link "Extinguish: When extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant market share, they marginalize competitors that do not or cannot support the new extensions." - is anyone seriously saying it was ActiveX which people loved and that's why they dropped Netscape? I don't remember ActiveX playing much of a part in the internet.
The large company I work for still mandates IE11. Why do you think that is? If your corporate strategy gets you 20-30 years of vendor lock-in, then I would say it was a successful strategy.
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.
they're still free (as in beer), but their licence only allows usage with the official visual studio code distribution
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.
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.
(Don't mind me, just the formerly confused passing through.)
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.
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.
Case in point, I currently work in a relatively niche cybersecurity company, so naturally, most customer stuff is done and stored on-prem for security reasons since we handle a lot of customer sensitive data and storing it in anyone's cloud is a big no-go for any customer.
By far the biggest issues are managing the on-prem environment and moving the data back and fourth between the O365 environment and the on-prem environment, as the O365 environment is actively used by the customers, C-suite, business, sales and upper management, while the on-prem environment is used by the engineers, lower and middle managers, which is the biggest PITA that I have ever dealt with.
Nextcloud, Thunderbird, Libre Office, Element chat etc. are great but what Microsoft offers with the O365/sharepoint ecosystem is something else and copilot will move the goalposts even further.
Also, I'm not aware of Microsoft having had any data leaks or breaches, so maybe they have gained enough trust in the corporate space that makes companies at ease storing all their stuff in Microsoft's cloud for the sake of convenience.
This whole announcement is "look how good we are at reading your internal documents" and I still don't think it's going to register on the threat model.
Fortunately we can definitely trust Microsoft not to do anything unethical in the name of profits.
P.s. I had a totally unsuccessful conversation with a security person who believed that the AI powered network scanning stack they used kept them safe. Secret software stack running CI on AWS, email through Microsoft. All the IP they cared about literally stored outside their fortified local network.
One wonders if they used AI for these recommendations.
Teams is annoying to use at times, but I don't see any constant breaking changes
You can't trust it for things like audio, file sharing or alerts which is pretty problematic
If I was launching AI, having it be just a bit unhinged is obviously the best way to get it to go viral.
Sure, not your run of the mill stupidity, but even ML scientists do not understand why would a model make a particular choice.
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.
With what uses did you find it lacking?
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".
Launching to 10000 people vs 10000000 is a matter of scale (which is still important, but not the same thing as), not velocity.
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.
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.
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? ;)
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.
> 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
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.
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.
There is even a paid app for that (beyond free ones)! : D
When you make a change like this where there is no configurable option to go back to the old style of working you cause issues for tens of millions of people who developed a workflow that depended on that.
There have been dozens of little things like this. Some got fixed in Win11 eventually (so they were obviously bugs). My example: in Windows Explorer you can start typing the name of a file and as long as you keep a quick pace, you will end up with that file highlighted. When Win11 shipped, it stopped matching at the first letter.
This happens to a lot of projects, it's a shame it's infested MS.
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.
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.
"They feed us poison / So we take their 'cures' / While they suppress our medicine." /s
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?
You: aw, clippy, I believed in you all along
She was once married to a guy named Bill Gates.
https://twitter.com/melindagates/status/917030072846036993?l...
>>> 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.
The skill and competence of the coming world will be in prompt-writing.
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.
Props to the MS team.
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.
Cheers.
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.
When a junior team member screws up the interpretation, there is someone to hold accountable.
With Office 365Bot, there is no accountability for errors.
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?
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.
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
All pro golfers?
Nor do the muscles (from the point where you are strong enough so the ball can reach the basket), and yet you will not see a basketball players that is not muscular.
PEDs allow you to gain muscles faster and have greater stamina, all of which is beneficial.
> All pro golfers?
Of course I was talking mainly about sports where physical performance matters. Although PEDs exists even in e-sport (Adderall).
This makes it vastly easier to keep up with a larger number of reports, making flatter organizations easier to run.
Progress… This is the first time I see a product that fits that description.
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?
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.
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.
Not to mention the added cost of using the full 32k tokens. OpenAI is charging $0.12 a token which would quickly add up. It’s prohibitively expensive unless you have a very very compelling business use case.
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.
Google announced a handful of LLM-based features. This is Microsoft adding LLM-based features to all of their core office software.
For big companies being able to ask questions and get answers informed by all your documents, emails, chats, etc is huge. For small companies the features in Excel, Teams, and perhaps Power automate will be big. Maybe the Word features too depending on how fundamental writing is to the core business.
Google's haphazard and unfocused product development is going to really hurt them. MS must have coordinated thousands of people to build this stuff. As for Google, well they are undeniably at or near the top when it comes to research, but they are not good at product and execution. I am not optimistic.
I am no lover of Microsoft. I use their products as little as possible and I still have plenty of gripes. But this could be the biggest step change since email, word processing, and spreadsheets became widely available in the later 80s/early 90s.
i think this is incorrect. take another look at this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DaJVZBXETE its clear they are infusing ai in all their workspace stuff.
now whether or not they do it fast or do it well, that is a different story.
I still believe MS is going further. Business Chat will be a very big deal if it works well. Google didn't announce anything similar.
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.)
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.
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.
"Machines should think. People should work."
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.
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?
Wild.
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/
I can see a world where more humans get better at writing concise text.
Dit it ever happened that advertisements of hyped things did not work out as advertised? Wink, wink.
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...
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
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.
(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)
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's been the core of business work for decades. Now finally automated.
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".
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.
But let's see how this works in 5 or 10 years; it can only improve.
[The term] Shitty First Draft belongs to Anne Lamott. She wrote about it in Bird By Bird.
“Usefully wrong” is some audacious marketing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
"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...
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.
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")
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
I think the biggest challenge will be teaching people how to use this new system to the fullest
Is this a bug, or do I need to be paying for a higher tier? Slack search was generally pretty good.
Like a gpt-powered clippy that can “see” your screen.
I've actually stopped using dragon, or talon in favor of the built-in tools, at least for dictation.
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.
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.
As far as 'no more access than', OAuth apps can have full control over your tenant and all data.
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!"