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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

#111

Post by 9dev »

RajT88 wrote: post #71
9dev wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both are valid concerns, no need to decide. Take the USA: They are currently lead by a patently dumb president who fucks up the global economy, and at the same time they are powerful enough to do so! For a more serious example, consider the Paperclip Problem[0] for a very smart system that destroys the world due to very dumb behaviour. [0]: https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/ai-and-paperclip-problem

The paperclip problem is a bit hand-wavey about intelligence. It is taken as a given than unlimited intelligence would automatically win presumably because it could figure out how to do literally anything. But let's consider real life intelligence: - Our super geniuses do not take over the world. It is the generationally wealthy who do. - Super geniuses also have a tendency to be terribly neurotic, if not downright m…

To be clear, I don't think the paperclip scenario is a realistic one. The point was that it's fairly easy to conceive an AI system that's simultaneously extremely savant and therefore dangerous in a single domain, yet entirely incapable of grasping the consequences or wider implications of its actions.

None of us knows what an actual, artificial intelligence really looks like. I find it hard to draw conclusions from observing human super geniuses, when their minds may have next to nothing in common with the AI. Entirely different constraints might apply to them—or none at all.

Having said all that, I'm pretty sceptical of an AI takeover doomsday scenario, especially if we're talking about LLMs. They may turn out to be good text generators, but not the road to AGI. But it's very hard to make accurate predictions in either direction.

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

#112

Post by onionisafruit »

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…

People’s reaction to this varies based on the Brendas they’ve worked with. Some are given a specific task to do with their spreadsheets every week and have to just do as they are told even if they can see it’s not a good process. Others are secretly the brains of the company – the only one who really sees the whole picture. And a good number of Brendas are the company owner doing her best with the only tool she’s had the time to learn.

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

#113

Post by conductr »

Esophagus4 wrote: post #106
conductr wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also an acceptable solution. This is usually where the next step is have a BI type person just create a report for finance. Many reasons but what will end up is different people are filtering/retrieving the data differently causing inconsistencies.

But Usually finance is always preferring on demand access so the communication feedback loop of asking for stuff is not well liked so I’m sure they appreciate this middle step too.

There are many cases where there’s no easy way to give access to the data and a human in the loop is required. In that case, do the shared workbook thing I mentioned as a starting point at least. It may evolve from there.

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

#114

Post by xnorswap »

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…

And they've all been burned by enterprise finance products which were sold to solve exactly that problem.

Only different companies were all sold different enterprise finance products, but they need to communicate with each other (or themselves after mergers), so it all gets manually copied into Excel and emailed around each month.

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

#115

Post by phyzome »

Zigurd wrote: post #95

It's verifier law. Coding agents are useful and good and real products because when they screw up, things stop working almost always before they can do damage. Coding agents are flawed in ways that existing tools are good at catching, never mind the more obvious build and runtime errors. Letting AI write your emails and create your P&L and cash flow projections doesn't have to run the gauntlet of tools that were crea…

Nah, I've seen them screw in all sorts of ways that would fail in some conditions and not others. You're way too optimistic about this.

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

#116

Post by halfcat »

gosub100 wrote: post #27
cjs_ac wrote: post #2

At some point, a publicly-listed company will go bankrupt due to some catastrophic AI-induced fuck-up. This is a massive reputational risk for AI platforms, because ego-defensive behaviour guarantees that the people involved will make as much noise as they can about how it's all the AI's fault.

I see the inverse of that happening: every critical decision will incorporate AI somehow. If the decision was good, the leadership takes credit. If something terrible happens, blame it on the AI. I think it's the part no one is saying out loud. That AI may not do a damn useful thing, but it can be a free insurance policy or surrogate to throw under the bus when SHTF.

This works at most one time. If you show up to every board meeting and blame AI, you’re going to get fired.

This is true if you blame a bad vendor, or something you don’t even control like the weather. Your job is to deliver. If bad weather is the new norm, you better figure out how to build circus tents so you can do construction in the rain. If your AI call center is failing, you better hire 20 people to answer phones.

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

#118

Post by martin-t »

Esophagus4 wrote: post #103
martin-t wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, but notice what you are describing are all negative incentives.

When automation produces value for the company, the people automating it should capture a chunk of that value _as a matter of course_.

Even if you argue that you can then negotiate better compensation:

1) That is uncertain and delayed reward - and only if other people feel like it, it's not automatic.

2) The reward stops if you get fired or leave, despite the automation still producing value - you are also basically incentivized to build stuff that requires constant maintenance. Imagine you spend a man-month building the automation and then leave, it then requires a man-month of maintenance over the next 5 years. At the end of the 5 years, you should still be getting 50% of the reward.

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

#119

Post by xyzzy123 »

harryf wrote: post #108
xyzzy123 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 chang…

Ok yep, fair. My comment was about using copilot-ish tech to generate plausible looking spreadsheets.

The kind of things that a domain expert Brenda knows that ChatGPT doesn't know (yet) are like:

There are 3 vendors a, b, c who all look similar on paper but vendor c always tacks on weird extra charges that take a lot of angry phone calls to sort out.

By volume or weight it looks like you could get 100 boxes per truck but for industry specific reasons only 80 can legally be loaded.

Hyper specific details about real estate compliance in neighbouring areas that mean buildings that look similar on paper are in fact very different.

A good Brenda can understand the world around her as it actually is, she is a player in it and knows the "real" rules rather than operating from general understanding and what people have bothered to write down.

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

#120

Post by giarc »

b3lvedere wrote: post #94

"You know who's not hallucinating? Brenda" I don't know about that. There could be lots of interesting ways Brenda can (be convinced to) hallucinate.

I agree - having watched many people use Excel over the years, I'd say people often overestimate their skills. I see three categories of Excel users. First there are the people that are intimidated by it and stay away from any task involving Excel. Second are the people that know a little bit (a few basic formulas) and overestimate their skills because they only compare themselves to the first group. And the third group are the actual power users but know to keep that quiet because otherwise they become the "excel person" and have to fix every sheet that has issues.

I don't know if AI is going to make any of the above better or worse. I expect the only group to really use it will be that second group.

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