Comment by devjab | Hacker News Reader

Comment by devjab | Hacker News Reader

For the most part I think it’ll mainly further Microsofts dominance in the office space. You can see this with the recent EU anti-trust and Teams, where it makes little sense for enterprise organisations to not chose Teams when they already have Office365 licenses. You see the same to some degree in RPA (robot process automation ) already. Why would your organisation shell out a couple of hundred thousand dollars for UIPath licensing when Power Automate is $15 a month and $250 for the big VM bots?

I think it’ll be the same with AI. GPT writes all our non secret documentation and it has a lot of options for use in non-programming automation as well. I know Microsoft is a major investor in it, but once those tools become basic Office365 tools then every other AI seller is going to become obsolete in many cases. It’ll be interesting to see how the world handles that dominance in the office space, because so far, we really haven’t.

So I think this is going to be much more a question of how we’re all going to be paying a Microsoft “tax” to use AI efficiently, than it’ll be about non-AI vs AI. I mean, you could probably use iSheets (or whatever the Apple Excel is called), Google Sheets, LibraOffice or similar, but I’ve never heard of an EU enterprise org that doesn’t use Microsoft Excel.

> GPT writes all our non secret documentation

Who read it? LLM may be great at coughing up seemingly good long chunk of text, but human is not capable of reading all of these verbose text because of the simple fact that GPT can generate texts faster than human reading speed.

So I bet what will happen in that case is, humans use LLM to summarize these LLM-generated verbose documentation. What a wonderful bureaucratic world will that be?

It writes better JSDoc than any of us. Anyone who consumes a Typescript method is likely to read it, it’s the tiny text that pops up if you code in VSC.

If you go through my history here on HN (you don’t have to I’ll sum it up), you’ll see that I’m not a fan of LLMs for code generations. In fact I’m not convinced they will ever be good enough to be useful for it. For documentation, however, at least for JSDoc GPT is incredible. I really mean it when I say that it writes it better than we do. It’s able to figure things out and describe it in ways that still amazes me from time to time.

It does require you to be good at naming things.

That was google's demo for the AI in gmail. You write 3 words explaining what you want to say to an AI, which inflates it; and on the other side another AI goes back to hopefully the same 3 words that were originally written.

Tons of pollution for this shit.

This is an opportunity to mention that LibreOffice constitutes a solid and worthy alternative to MS Office, which does not require you to be chained to Microsoft or any sort of licensing. It will also _not_ send your data silently to MS or the US government or any other third party.

For online versions, Collabora (a commercial company) offers a FOSS online office suite based on LibreOffice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collabora_Online

and if anyone wants to integrate AI use in an office suite, those are the most interesting avenues. Perhaps together with free LLMs.

Caveat: I ain't seeing that the LO code is very pretty, mind you (they like ABI stability so many things aren't allowed to break.)

I wish we’d see more adoption of alternatives, but I work in non-tech enterprise where it’s not even called “spreadsheets” but rather “excels”.

I’m not sure the value is really there in the office platform if it wasn’t because it’s what every new hire is used to. This is very anecdotal but I’m really not a very good consumer of IT, to the point where I often stun people with my profession because I really suck at using digital devices for most things, and I never had a hard time using one of the office alternatives. The tie in with Teams and OneDrive/Sharepoint is nice and all, but it’s also often sort of terrible.

I don’t expect things to change though.

> because it’s what every new hire is used to.

LibreOffice and MS Office are quite similar. Unless you're a VBA programmer, you will get used to it very quickly. In fact, you can even change the UI to be similar to MS Office' ribbons:

https://hexus.net/tech/news/software/127301-libreoffice-62-n...

But there also lies the rub, because MS Office' ribbon mechanism has, in my experience, reduced typical users' proficiency with the application, and they are less likely to be aware of more advanced functionality.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com