Comment by donmcronald | Hacker News Reader

Comment by donmcronald | Hacker News Reader

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> "hey excel, make a summary of those 8 sheets to identify our 5 most profitables products and their evolution in sales the past 3 years, add that on a new sheet at the end with a visual graph"

Aren't they just pattern recognition and regurgitation machines? How would it analyze and interpret unique data with a pattern it's never seen?

Some of the AI stuff is very useful, but it's been massively oversold. In my experience, it's great for working on documentation or creating a one-time-use script to query an API, but it's not good at the "big picture" tasks they want for a sales pitch.

  > How would it analyze and interpret unique data with a pattern it's never seen?

That's called unsupervised learning, and it was field of study in machine learning long before LLMs were anything near viable. Surprisingly, LLMs are good at it too.

I would give the LLM statistical tools that work to find general anomalies, distributions etc. from the spreadsheet. Then it's about an LLM interpreting (or not) those results in natural language.

Of course this is a can of worms for a product because we can still not guarantee accuracy.

That makes sense to me in terms of tech, but I don't get how the economics will work. If one company has an agent that's a great statistical tool, another is great for making charts, another is great for grammar and spelling, etc., I'm guessing it'll cost a bazillion dollars in subscriptions.

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