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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

#331

Post by conductr »

tstrimple wrote: post #312
conductr wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’ve switched contexts completely with your strawman. Meaning, you’ve pivot Brenda in finance to some technical/software engineer task. You’ve pointed the conversation specifically at a use case that AI is good at, writing code and solving those problems. The world at large is much more complex than helping you be a 10x engineer. To live up to the hype, it has to do this reliably for every vertical in a majority of…

You're moving goalposts. You claimed "AI" cannot verify results and that's trivially false. Claude code verifies results on a regular basis. You don't have a clue what you're talking about and are just pushing ignorant FUD.

It can't with reliability is what I'm saying. I'm not doubting you built one singular use case where it has. When I feed Copilot a PDF contract and ask it what is my monthly minimum I can charge this client and it tells me $1000, I ask it a dozen other questions and it changes it's response but never to the correct value, then when I ask it to cite where it finds that information and it points me to a paragraph that clearly says $1500 - spelled out clear as day, not entangled in a bunch of legalese or anything else - how is that reliable for a Brenda in finance? (this is a real case I tried out)

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

#332

Post by Covenant0028 »

candiddevmike wrote: post #57
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.

I don't understand why generative AI gets a pass at constantly being wrong, but an average worker would be fired if they performed the same way. If a manager needed to constantly correct you or double check your work, you'd be out. Why are we lowering the bar for generative AI?

Gen AI doesn't just get a pass at being wrong. It gets a pass for everything.

Look at Grok. If a human employee went around sexually harassing their CEO in public and giving themselves a Hitler nickname, they'd be fired immediately and have criminal charges. In the case of Grok, the CEO had to quit the company after being sexually harassed.

We've not lowered the bar for AI, we've removed it entirely.

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

#333

Post by Covenant0028 »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #139
candiddevmike wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why generative AI gets a pass at constantly being wrong, but an average worker would be fired if they performed the same way. If a manager needed to constantly correct you or double check your work, you'd be out. Why are we lowering the bar for generative AI?

How much compute costs is it for the AI to do Brenda's job? Not total AI spend, but the fraction that replaced Brenda. That's why they'd fire a human but keep using the AI.

Brenda's job involves being accountable for the output. In many types of jobs, posting false numbers would render her liable for a dismissal, lawsuit, or even jail.

I'd like to see the cost of a model where the model provider (Anthropic etc) can assume that kind of financial and legal accountability.

To the extent that this output is possible only when Anthropic is not held to the same standard as Brenda, we will need to conclude that the cost savings accrue due to the reduced liability standards than on the technical capabilities of the model

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

#334

Post by Covenant0028 »

tstrimple wrote: post #269
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…

> Every good Brenda is precisely good because she checks her own work before shipping it. AI does not do this. A confident statement that's trivial to disprove. I use claude code to build and deploy services on my NAS. I can ask it to spin up a new container on my subdomain and make it available internal only or also available externally. It knows it has access to my Cloudflare API key. It knows I am running rootless…

In the above scenario, if Claude accidentally wipes out your Jellyfin movies, will Claude deal with consequences (ie an unhappy family/friends) or will you?

That exemption from accountability is a massive factor that renders any comparison meaningless.

In a business scenario, a model provider that could assume financial and legal liability for mistakes (as humans need to do) would be massively more expensive.

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

#335

Post by MagicMoonlight »

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…

And that’s why consultants exist, because employees do insane shit like that

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

#336

Post by sswatson »

hunterpayne wrote: post #274
sswatson wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently I've used Claude Code to build a couple TUIs that I've wanted for a long time but couldn't justify the time investment to write myself. My experience is that I think of a new feature I want, I take a minute or so to explain it to Claude, press enter, and go off and do something else. When I come back in a few minutes, the desired feature has been implemented correctly with reasonable design choices. I'm not…

Its great for demos, its lousy for production code. The different cost of errors in these two use cases explains (almost) everything about the suitability of AI for various coding tasks. If you are the only one who will ever run it, its a demo. If you expect others to use it, its not.

As the name indicates, a demo is used for demonstration purposes. A personal tool is not a demo. I've seen a handful of folks assert this definition, and it seems like a very strange idea to me. But whatever.

Implicit in your claim about the cost of errors is the idea that LLMs introduce errors at a higher rate than human developers. This depends on how you're using the LLMs and on how good the developers are. But I would agree that in most cases, a human saying "this is done" carries a lot more weight than an LLM saying it.

Regardless, it is not good analysis to try to do something with an LLM, fail, and conclude that LLMs are stupid. The reality is that LLMs can be impressively and usefully effective with certain tasks in certain contexts, and they can also be very ineffective in certain contexts and are especially not great about being sure whether they've done something correctly.

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

#337

Post by simonw »

sswatson wrote: post #336
hunterpayne wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its great for demos, its lousy for production code. The different cost of errors in these two use cases explains (almost) everything about the suitability of AI for various coding tasks. If you are the only one who will ever run it, its a demo. If you expect others to use it, its not.

As the name indicates, a demo is used for demonstration purposes. A personal tool is not a demo. I've seen a handful of folks assert this definition, and it seems like a very strange idea to me. But whatever. Implicit in your claim about the cost of errors is the idea that LLMs introduce errors at a higher rate than human developers. This depends on how you're using the LLMs and on how good the developers are. But I…

> But I would agree that in most cases, a human saying "this is done" carries a lot more weight than an LLM saying it.

That's because humans have stakes. If a human tells me something is done and I later find out that it isn't, they damage their credibility with me in the future - and they know that.

You can't hold an LLM accountable.

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

#340

Post by smoothbran »

jwsteigerwalt wrote: post #81

Many fears of “AI mucking it up” could be mitigated with an ability to connect a workbook to a git repository. Not for data, but for VBA, cell formulas, and cell metadata. When you can encapsulate the changes a contributor (in this case co-pilot) makes into a commit, you can more easily understand what changes it/they made.

Even if "teaching the rest of the workforce how to use Git" wasn't a massive obstacle, many (most?) corporate workflows involve editing files that weren't designed to be human-readable. There are a couple of approaches out there for comparing diffs to excel spreadsheets specifically, but it's not exactly pleasant.
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