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I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

simonwillison.net

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Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#41

Post by gadflyinyoureye »

Simulacra wrote: post #16
AmbroseBierce wrote: post #3

Brenda has been getting slower over the years -as we all have-, but soon the boss will learn that it was a small price to pay for knowing well how to keep such house of cards from collapsing.

And then the boss will make the decision to outsource her job, to a company that promises the use of AI to make finance better, and faster, and while Brenda is in the unemployment line, someone else thousands of miles away is celebrating a new job

We are setting AI deployed in the US, but actually Indians. They are not better, but they are cheaper. They are probably worse, but they are cheaper.

Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#42

Post by Aeolun »

quixoticaxolotl wrote: post #39

I find the contrast between two narratives around technology use so fascinating: 1. We advocate automation because people like Brenda are error-prone and machines are perfect. 2. We disavow AI because people like Brenda are perfect and the machine is error-prone. These aren't contradictions because we only advocate for automation in limited contexts: when the task is understandable, the execution is reliable, the pro…

> We disavow AI because people like Brenda are perfect and the machine is error-prone.

No, no. We disavow AI because our great leaders inexplicably trust it more than Brenda.

Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#43

Post by Esophagus4 »

7thaccount wrote: post #33
Esophagus4 wrote: post #25

Hmmm the Brendas I know look a little different. “There are two Brendas - their job is to make spreadsheets in the Finance department. Well, not quite - they add the months and categories to empty spreadsheets, then they ask the other departments to fill in their sales numbers every month so it can be presented to management. “The two Brendas don’t seem to talk, otherwise they would realize that they’re both asking e…

That's a pretty specific example when there are a lot of good "spreadsheet people" out there who do a lot more than spreadsheets (maybe they had to write SQL queries or scripts to get those numbers), but commonly need to simplify things down to a spreadsheet or power point for upper management. I'm not saying you should have multiple people doing redundant work, but this style isn't entirely dumb. What would this be…

Fair - I was creating a straw man mostly to make a point. The people I’m thinking aren’t running SQL queries or scripts, they’re merely collection points for data.

So one good BI developer who knows Tableau and Salesforce and Excel and SQL can replace those pure collection points with a better process, but they can also generate insight into the data because they have some business understanding from being close to the teams, which is what my hypothetical Brenda can’t do.

In my example, Brenda would be asking sales leaders to enter in their data instead of going into Salesforce herself because she doesn’t know that tool / side of the company well enough.

I was making the point that, contrary to the article, the Brendas I know aren’t touched by the Excel angels, they’re just maintaining spreadsheets that we probably shouldn’t have anyway.

Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#44

Post by oytis »

Esophagus4 wrote: post #25

Hmmm the Brendas I know look a little different. “There are two Brendas - their job is to make spreadsheets in the Finance department. Well, not quite - they add the months and categories to empty spreadsheets, then they ask the other departments to fill in their sales numbers every month so it can be presented to management. “The two Brendas don’t seem to talk, otherwise they would realize that they’re both asking e…

And then you end up with a team of five people each tree times as expensive as Brenda, and what used to be an email now takes a sprint and has to go through ticket system.

Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#45

Post by maccard »

danielbln wrote: post #12
glimshe wrote: post #9

This reminds me of a friend whose company ran a daily perl script that committed every financial transaction of the day to a database. Without the script, the company could literally make no money irrespectively of sales because this database was one piece in a complex system for payment processor interoperability. The script ran in a machine located at the corner of a cubicle and only one employee had the admin pass…

If your mission critical process sits on some on-site box that no-one knows about, copilot being good or not is the least of your problems.

Everywhere I’ve ever worked has had that mission critical box.

At one of my jobs we had a server rack with UPS, etc, all the usual business. On the floor next to it was a dell desktop with a piece of paper on it that said “do not turn off”. It had our source control server in it, and the power button didn’t work. We did eventually move it to something more sensible but we had that for a long time

Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#46

Post by Havoc »

That mirrors my experience as well. LLMs get instantly confused in real world scenarios in Excel and confidently hallucinate millions in errors

If you look at the demos for these it’s always something that is clean and abundantly available in training data. Like an income statement. Or a textbook example DCF. Or my personal fav „here is some data show me insights“. Real world excel use looks nothing like that.

I’m getting some utility out of them for some corporate tasks but zilch in excel space.

Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#47

Post by trenchpilgrim »

self_awareness wrote: post #40
simonw wrote: post #6

This quote is pulled from a TikTok, I recommend watching the whole thing here: https://www.tiktok.com/@belligerentbarbies/video/75683800086... (I pulled the quote by using yt-dlp to grab the MP4 and then running that through MacWhisper to generate a transcript.)

I can see that MacWhisper uses parakeet v2 as the model (although it allows choosing another model). Is MacWhisper a $60 GUI for a Python script that just runs the model?

> Is MacWhisper a $60 GUI for a Python script that just runs the model?

Yes, a large genre of MacOS apps are "Native GUI wrappers around OSS scripts"

Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#48

Post by Forgeties79 »

brazukadev wrote: post #31
evolve2k wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed this bit “.. and then the AI is gonna fuck it up real bad and he won't be able to recognize it because he doesn't understand because AI hallucinates.”

Brendas have fucked it up multiple times, by themselves or because their boss demanded

The underlying assumption is that Brenda generally does her job pretty well. Human errors exist but usually peers/managers (or the person who did it) can identify and correct them reliably.

If we have to compare LLM’s against people who are bad at their jobs in order to highlight their utility we’re going the wrong direction.

Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#49

Post by misnome »

Aeolun wrote: post #42
quixoticaxolotl wrote: post #39

I find the contrast between two narratives around technology use so fascinating: 1. We advocate automation because people like Brenda are error-prone and machines are perfect. 2. We disavow AI because people like Brenda are perfect and the machine is error-prone. These aren't contradictions because we only advocate for automation in limited contexts: when the task is understandable, the execution is reliable, the pro…

> We disavow AI because people like Brenda are perfect and the machine is error-prone. No, no. We disavow AI because our great leaders inexplicably trust it more than Brenda.

“Let’s deploy something as or more error prone as Brad at infinite scale across our organisation”

Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#50

Post by oytis »

quixoticaxolotl wrote: post #39

I find the contrast between two narratives around technology use so fascinating: 1. We advocate automation because people like Brenda are error-prone and machines are perfect. 2. We disavow AI because people like Brenda are perfect and the machine is error-prone. These aren't contradictions because we only advocate for automation in limited contexts: when the task is understandable, the execution is reliable, the pro…

> So, then - why don't people embrace AI with thinking mode as an acceptable form of automation?

"Thinking" mode is not thinking, it's generating additional text that looks like someone talking to themselves. It is as devoid of intention and prone to hallucinations as the rest of LLM's output.

> Can't the C-suite in this case follow its thought process and step in when it messes up?

That sounds like manual work you'd want to delegate, not automation.

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