Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

simonwillison.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 346 posts

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

#101

Post by intended »

Everything is now about verification.

AI may be able to spit out ann excel sheet or formula - But if it can’t be verified, so what ?

And here’s my analogy to think about the debugging of an excel sheet - you can debug most corporate excel sheets with a calculator.

But when AI is spitting out excel sheets - when the program is making smaller programs - what is the calculator in this analogy ?

Are we going to be using excel sheets to debug the output of AI?

I think this is the inherent limiter to the uptake of AI.

There’s only so much intellectual / experiential / training depth present.

And now we’re going to be training even fewer people.

At the end of the day I /customers need something to work.

But failing that - I will settle for someone to blame.

Brenda handles a lot of blame. Is OpenAI going to step into that gap ?

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

#102

Post by dionian »

conductr wrote: post #67
Aeolun wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It’s not even greater trust. It’s just passive trust. The thing is, Brenda is her own QA department. Every good Brenda is precisely good because she checks her own work before shipping it. AI does not do this. It doesn’t even fully understand the problem/question sometimes yet provides a smart definitive sounding answer. It’s like the doctor on The Simpson’s, if you can’t tell he’s a quack, you probably would follow…

Brenda + AI > Brenda

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

#103

Post by Esophagus4 »

martin-t wrote: post #79
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…

Y'know why people don't automate their jobs? It's not a skill issue it's an incentives issue. If you do your job, you get paid periodically. If you automate your job, you get paid once for automating it and then nothing, despite your automation constantly producing value for the company. To fix this, we need to pay people continually for their past work as long as it keeps producing value.

Not always:

If you don’t automate it:

1a) your company keeps you hanging on forever maintaining the same widget until the end of time

OR

1b) more likely, someone realizes your job should be automated and lays you off at some point down the road

If you do automate it

2a) your company thanks you then fires you

OR

2b) you are now assigned to automate more stuff as you’ve proven that you are more valuable to the company than just maintaining your widget

————

2b is really the safest long term position for any employee, I think. It’s not always foolproof, as 2a can happen.

But I’d rather be in box 2 than box 1 any day of the week if we’re talking long term employment potential.

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

#104

Post by ItsBob »

lemonwaterlime wrote: post #72
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…

The “Brenda” example is a lumped sum fallacy where there is an “average” person or phenomenon that we can benchmark against. Such a person doesn't exist, leading to these dissonant, contradictory dichotomies. The fact of the matter is that there are some people who can hold lots of information in their head at once. Others are good at finding information. Others still are proficient at getting people to help them. Et…

I see where you are coming from but in my head, Brenda isn't real.

She represents the typical domain-experts that use Excel imo. They have an understanding of some part of the business and express it while using Excel in a deterministic way: enter a value of X, multiply it by Y and it keeps producing Z forever!

You can train AI to be a better domain expert. That's not in question, however with AI, you introduce a dice roll: it may not miltiply X and Y to get Z... it might get something else. Sometimes. Maybe.

If your spreadsheet is a list of names going on the next annual accounts department outing then the risk is minimal.

If it's your annual accounts that the stock market needs to work out billion dollar investment portfolios, then you are asking for all the pain that it will likely bring.

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

#105

Post by dTal »

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…

"Thinking mode" only provides the illusion of debuggability. It improves performance by generating more tokens which hopefully steer the context towards one more likely to produce the desired response, but the tokens it generates do not reflect any sort of internal state or "reasoning chain" as we understand it in human cognition. They are still just stochastic spew. You have no more insight into why the model generates the particular "reasoning steps" it does than you do into any other output, and neither do you have insight into why the reasoning steps lead to whatever conclusion it comes to. The model is much less constrained by the "reasoning" than we would intuit for a human - it's entirely capable of generating an elaborate and plausible reasoning chain which it then completely ignores in favor of some invisible built-in bias.

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

#106

Post by Esophagus4 »

conductr wrote: post #99
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…

I work in corporate finance and these issues are certainly present. However, they are almost always known and determined low priority to have a better process built. Finance processes are nearly always a non priority as a pure cost center/overhead there’s not many companies that want to invest in improving the situation, they’ll limp along with minimal investment even once big and profitable. That said, every finance…

I’ve just set the finance people up with read only access to our data source, and they now can poke through it themselves.

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

#107

Post by codeulike »

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…

But then you need someone to maintain/look after that automation, and they'll be more expensive than two Brendas

And now if one of the Brendas wants to change their process slightly, add some more info, they can't just do it anymore. They have to have a three way discussion with the other Brenda, the automation guy and maybe a few managers. It will take months. So then its likely better for Brenda to just go back to using her spreadsheet again, and then you've got an automated process that no longer meets peoples needs and will be a faff to update.

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

#108

Post by harryf »

xyzzy123 wrote: post #78
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…

The promise of AI is that it lets you "skip the drudgery of thinking about the details" but sometimes that is exactly what you don't want. You want one or more humans with experience in the business domain to demonstrate they have thought about the details very carefully. The spreadsheet computes a result but its higher purpose is a kind of "proof" this thinking was done. If the actual thinking doesn't matter and you…

We need to stop using AI as an umbrella term. It’s worth remembering that LLMs can’t play chess and that the best chess models like Leela Chess Zero use deep neutral networks.

Generative AI - which the world now believes is AI, is not the same as predictive / analytical AI.

It’s fairly easy to demonstrate this by getting ChatGPT to generate a new relatively complex spreadsheet then asking it to analyze and make changes to the same spreadsheet.

The problem we have now is uninformed people believing AI is the answer to everything… if not today then in the near future. Which makes it more of a religion than a technology.

Which may be the whole goal …

> Successful people create companies. More successful people create countries. The most successful people create religions.

— Sam Altman - https://blog.samaltman.com/successful-people

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

#109

Post by intended »

motoboi wrote: post #26

Excel is the “beast that drives the ENTIRE economy” and he’s worried about Brenda from the finance department losing her job because then her boss will get bad financial reports I suppose the person that wrote that have not ideia Excel is just an app builder where you embed data together with code. You know that we have excel because computers didn’t understand column names in databases and so data extraction needed…

Found the person who hasn’t seen excel in the real world.

Excel - whatever its origin story - is the actual Swiss Army knife of the tech world.

There’s easily a few billion people who use excel. There is a reason it survives.

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

#110

Post by conductr »

dionian wrote: post #102
conductr wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not even greater trust. It’s just passive trust. The thing is, Brenda is her own QA department. Every good Brenda is precisely good because she checks her own work before shipping it. AI does not do this. It doesn’t even fully understand the problem/question sometimes yet provides a smart definitive sounding answer. It’s like the doctor on The Simpson’s, if you can’t tell he’s a quack, you probably would follow…

Brenda + AI > Brenda

That’s definitely the hype. But I don’t know if I agree. I’m essentially a Brenda in my corporate finance job and so far have struggled to find any useful scenarios to use AI for.

I thought once this can build me a Gantt chart because that’s an annoying task in excel. I had the data. When I asked it to help me, “I can’t do that but I can summarize your data”. Not helpful.

Any type of analysis is exactly what I don’t want to trust it with. But I could use help actually building things, which it wouldn’t do.

Also, Brenda’s are usually fast. Having them use a tool like AI that can’t be fully trusted just slows them down. So IMO, we haven’t proven the AI variable in your equation is actually a positive value.

Post reply on HN