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Comment by mattlondon | Hacker News Reader

I think the dream goes beyond just that sort of simple "do something in this spreadsheet because I can't be bothered to think".

I think the end game is you open excel and say "Work out what our budget is for the FooSnaggit event based on what Tim said in his email yesterday, and what we spent last year." (for example) and it will go off and read your email and read your other sheets and generate the right thing based on that prompt and that context from your other documents.

I think that will be incredibly powerful ... if it can be trusted. Trouble is now I can't trust these things to get these sort of things correct, so you end up having to double check everything and make corrections etc so you are not really saving that much time.or effort.

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These tools can be great for discovery and speed up one's learning curve but there is no replacement for knowing your tools if you're going to master your craft.

In a way, after you devote many years of your life mastering your toolset, you become a very efficient intelligent machine.

But you do also so make mistakes and you also are told to do things by somebody else who guess what didn't spend their life mastering the skills you mastered (otherwise they wouldn't be paying for your services).

From their point of view, you're also some kind of opaque machine that can be trusted to some extent but must be double-checked too. You also can rat them out if they ask you silly things and you also expect to be treated decently as a human being and that's not something many other humans know how to do well.

Unsurprisingly many people cherish the possibility of having to talk to a non-human entity and let them do some tasks they wouldn't know how to even approach. Especially if this entity can be pestered with questions without ever being annoyed.

It's all about POV

So far all my interactions with AI in production have involved me trying to figure out the right prompt to be able to talk to a real person who could then actually solve my problem rather than offer me useless text and no concrete action towards solving my issue.

>>I think that will be incredibly powerful ... if it can be trusted. Trouble is now I can't trust these things to get these sort of things correct, so you end up having to double check everything and make corrections etc so you are not really saving that much time.or effort.

This is the thing for me. I hear about people building apps and stuff but I can't get a working correct script from ChatGPT. Maybe it's me, maybe it's improved, IDK, but the last few times I tried to grab a script for something I was working on, that script had multiple errors.

Will output quality of an average excel user go down, if the job duties will evolve into verifying LLM output and not performing low-level tasks over and over?

Laziness is a safe bet, so we will see :)

You can't trust an intern with that command either, yet that's exactly the type of task an intern would be assigned today in many large groups.

Of course you'd want to verify the report, but verifying it will probably be simpler & faster than building it, for many tasks. And AI can help you verify as well.

For personal use and small businesses your example is a good look at what CoPilot can do.

For larger enterprises it is unlikely that this amount of data will be allowed to be sent for CoPilot processing.

The overarching question is: Do you want to transfer this much control over your data to a single entity ?

Well for large enterprises that already have their data in the Microsoft ecosystem (Exchange email, Sharepoint etc), Copilot has access to that pool and it's supposed to be isolated within your own environment.

Are we still talking about a language model?

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