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Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

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Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#181

Post by MBCook »

anthonypasq wrote: post #87
JohnMakin wrote: post #12

Microsoft's fumble here is pretty spectacular. Back in early 2023, the state of google search was abysmal (despite that their leaders insisted it wasn't, it had become nearly unusable for me and I don't think was that unfounded of an opinion). Microsoft rolled out a new version of bing, which became bing chat - search worked for me again for a very brief window of time. They could have pounced on this opportunity to…

>it had become nearly unusable for me and I don't think was that unfounded of an opinion this is an extremely unfounded opinion, and pointing me to other people on hackernews that agree with you is not evidence. Google search quite literally was and continues to be the most successful and profitable product in the history of humanity. None of your comment interfaces with reality at all.

The fact that Google grabbed a monopoly and now is making bank does not mean the product is good.

It was amazing.

Today it’s pretty terrible for me. I’ve switched to Kagi.

But Google has a MASSIVE advantage. They have the most used browser (they push the hell out of it). They get the most search traffic, so they can use that to tune results better than anyone (if they want). Thats part of how they took off so fast. Got so good. The rich get richer.

And everyone knows Google is #1 by 1000 miles. So that’s the engine they want to be in. That’s whose advice they follow.

Google gets the searches so it can get better faster. It gets the eyeballs to make the money to invest in other Google stuff. All of it pushes Chrome, which pushes Google Search.

Google is not the best. Google years ago was. They’re a shadow of their former self, destroyed by spam of their creation and AI slop they’ve helped make.

They’re still THE default. But as they say, “past performance is not an indicator of future success“.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#182

Post by ajkjk »

anthonypasq wrote: post #86
ChuckMcM wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect this is the crux of the problem. There aren't any "AI" products that have enough value. Compare to their Office suite, which had 100 - 150 engineers working on it, every business paid big $$ for every employee using it, and once they shipped install media their ongoing costs were the employees. With a 1,000,000:1 ratio of users to developers and an operating expense (OpEx) of engineers/offices/management. Th…

Your premise that the leaders of every single one of the top 10 biggest and most profitable companies in human history are all preposterously wrong about a new technology in their existing industry is hard to believe. AI is literally the fastest growing and most widely used/deployed technologies ever.

every time these companies make a mistake and waste billions of dollars it is well-publicized. so there is plenty of data that they are frequently and preposterously wrong.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#183

Post by yoyohello13 »

_fat_santa wrote: post #33

The biggest issue I see is Microsoft's entire mentality around AI adoption that focuses more on "getting the numbers up" then actually delivering a product people want to use. Most of the announcements I hear about Copilot, it's always how they've integrated it into some other piece of software or cut a deal with yet another vendor to add it to that vendors product offering. On the surface there's nothing wrong with…

I just attended a training about AI Foundry today and they advertised thousands of integrations and support for like 50 different models. There is no way in hell all that stuff is tested and working properly. Microsoft seems to just be trying to throw as much chum as possible in the ocean and seeing what bites.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#184

Post by Dylan16807 »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #125
direwolf20 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the branding. When the button that explored the internet said "internet explorer" it was so obvious. Then every OS component had to become its own brand. Why can't it just be called "internet"?

> Why can't it just be called "internet"? Because the world wide web is just one of the many applications that is possible to implement on the internet infrastructure.

They were asking about "internet" versus "internet explorer", so that's not relevant.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#185

Post by ajkjk »

anthonypasq wrote: post #87
JohnMakin wrote: post #12

Microsoft's fumble here is pretty spectacular. Back in early 2023, the state of google search was abysmal (despite that their leaders insisted it wasn't, it had become nearly unusable for me and I don't think was that unfounded of an opinion). Microsoft rolled out a new version of bing, which became bing chat - search worked for me again for a very brief window of time. They could have pounced on this opportunity to…

>it had become nearly unusable for me and I don't think was that unfounded of an opinion this is an extremely unfounded opinion, and pointing me to other people on hackernews that agree with you is not evidence. Google search quite literally was and continues to be the most successful and profitable product in the history of humanity. None of your comment interfaces with reality at all.

it's not "unfounded", mountains of people have observed it. That's the foundation.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#186

Post by Dylan16807 »

anthonypasq wrote: post #87
JohnMakin wrote: post #12

Microsoft's fumble here is pretty spectacular. Back in early 2023, the state of google search was abysmal (despite that their leaders insisted it wasn't, it had become nearly unusable for me and I don't think was that unfounded of an opinion). Microsoft rolled out a new version of bing, which became bing chat - search worked for me again for a very brief window of time. They could have pounced on this opportunity to…

>it had become nearly unusable for me and I don't think was that unfounded of an opinion this is an extremely unfounded opinion, and pointing me to other people on hackernews that agree with you is not evidence. Google search quite literally was and continues to be the most successful and profitable product in the history of humanity. None of your comment interfaces with reality at all.

I don't see how "most successful and profitable product" is supposed to disprove a big drop in quality.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#187

Post by jacquesm »

egl2020 wrote: post #154
simonw wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Google+ thing was a great example of bonus-driven product design. My understanding is that effectively everyone at Google was told that their annual bonus would be directly tied to how well their team's products supported the rollout of Google+.

I was at G when "mobile first" was the slogan, and it led to "odd" choices such as designing and leading with a travel app rather than the web site. Perhaps locally suboptimal, but in the long run brutal forcing functions were needed to move a company as big and successful as Google into something new. I hear that going all-in on AI was internally disruptive and probably had some bad side-effects that I'm ignoring, b…

> I hear that going all-in on AI was internally disruptive and probably had some bad side-effects that I'm ignoring, but in hindsight it was the right thing to do.

That's the opposite in my experience. It is driving long term google audience away from google's paying products.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#188

Post by 6510 »

anthonypasq wrote: post #86
ChuckMcM wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect this is the crux of the problem. There aren't any "AI" products that have enough value. Compare to their Office suite, which had 100 - 150 engineers working on it, every business paid big $$ for every employee using it, and once they shipped install media their ongoing costs were the employees. With a 1,000,000:1 ratio of users to developers and an operating expense (OpEx) of engineers/offices/management. Th…

Your premise that the leaders of every single one of the top 10 biggest and most profitable companies in human history are all preposterously wrong about a new technology in their existing industry is hard to believe. AI is literally the fastest growing and most widely used/deployed technologies ever.

The mistake is simple. It is like the difference between giving you many tools to use vs making you the tool.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRq_SAuQDec

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#189

Post by ryandrake »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #80
_fat_santa wrote: post #33

The biggest issue I see is Microsoft's entire mentality around AI adoption that focuses more on "getting the numbers up" then actually delivering a product people want to use. Most of the announcements I hear about Copilot, it's always how they've integrated it into some other piece of software or cut a deal with yet another vendor to add it to that vendors product offering. On the surface there's nothing wrong with…

I expect this is the crux of the problem. There aren't any "AI" products that have enough value. Compare to their Office suite, which had 100 - 150 engineers working on it, every business paid big $$ for every employee using it, and once they shipped install media their ongoing costs were the employees. With a 1,000,000:1 ratio of users to developers and an operating expense (OpEx) of engineers/offices/management. Th…

For most software products I use, if the company spent a year doing nothing but fixing P2 bugs and making small performance improvements, that would deliver far, FAR more value to me than spending a year hamfistedly cramming AI into every corner of the software. But fixing bugs doesn't 1. pad engineer's resumes with new technology, or 2. give company leadership exciting things to talk about to their golfing buddies. So we get AI cram instead.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#190

Post by jacquesm »

ChrisArchitect wrote: post #68
dang wrote: post #51

Is there a readable link to this article? The workarounds posted in this thread so far seem all to have stopped working.

For whatever reason that title has reverted to the original Microsoft's Pivotal AI Product Is Running into Big Problems ...maybe to not imply copilot is having any kind of technical problems

Oh, but it does.
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