Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#211

Post by tartoran » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 5:24 AM UTC

heisenzombie wrote: post #79

_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 have Copilot buttons sprinkled everywhere on my work computer, and every time I have tried to use them I get something saying "Oh, I can't do that". It's truly baffling. Copilot button on my email inbox? I try "Find me emails about suchandsuch", and get the response "I don’t have direct access to your email account. If you’re using Outlook (desktop, web, or mobile), here are quick ways to find all emails related to…

I'm baffled by this as well, Microsoft seems to have lost the plot almost completely.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#212

Post by saghm » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 5:27 AM UTC

autoexec wrote: post #193

rightbyte wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The product is the stock price, not Office or Windows. From that perspective they are doing it right.

In particular it's the short term stock price. They'll happily grift their way to overinflated stock prices today even though at some point their incestuous money shuffle game will end and the stocks will crash and a bunch of people who aren't insider trading are going to be left with massive losses.

Stock price increases that don't lead to higher dividends eventually are indistinguishable from Ponzi schemes after the fact.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#213

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 5:28 AM UTC

primax wrote: post #180

mattmaroon wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't know what it does other than respond to emails in Outlook.

It's good for creating meeting notes and action lists in Teams, but that's about it. MS use of AI in apps really feels like their Google+ moment.

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#214

Post by jsemrau » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 5:38 AM UTC

I am building Agents for a long while now. The problem with Copilot is that it gets in the way too many times without being useful. Examples: When I open an email with 3 short lines of text, why do I need a "summary by copilot" button?

When I open a meeting invote from someone else the first 1/3rd of the screen is occupied with "Prepare for your meeting" nonsense. The "insights" button just provides general knowledge akin to "read the documentation".

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#215

Post by christkv » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 6:02 AM UTC

The lobotomized version of Open AI models. It feels worse than small local models I run. Does anyone know what size of models they are running?

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#216

Post by zuminator » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 6:16 AM UTC

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…

100% agree. Office and Windows were hugely successful because they did things that users (and corporations) wanted them to do. The functionality led to brand recognition and that led to increased sales. Now Microsoft is putting the horse before the cart and attempting to force brand recognition before the product has earned it. And that just leads to resentment.

They should make Copilot/AI features globally and granularly toggleable. Only refer to the chatbots as "Copilot," other use cases should be primarily identified on a user-facing basis by their functionality. Search Assistant. Sketching Aid. Writing Aid. If they're any good at what they do, people will gravitate to them without being coerced.

And as far as Copilot goes, if they are serious as me it as a product, there should be a concerted effort to leapfrog it to the top of the AI rankings. Every few weeks we're reading that Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, or DeepSeek has broken some coding or problem-solving score. That drives interest. You almost never hear anything similar about Copilot. It comes off as a cut-rate store brand knockoff of ChatGPT at best. Pass.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#217

Post by throwaheyy » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 6:22 AM UTC

iamleppert wrote: post #110

The Copilot they have integrated into Azure is absolutely useless. Every now and then I'll get frustrated at which one of the thousands of menus some switch is under and I'll ask their chatbot and it will spend a lot of time "Identifying the problem..." and "Gathering information..." only to give me links to generic help articles, have some sort of error, or give me flat out wrong information. These days I try to int…

Yup, I asked it how long an azure subscription had existed and it could not even tell me that. Literally now() minus the object’s creation date and it had no idea what to do.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#218

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 6:22 AM UTC

bitwize wrote: post #162

pjmlp wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a fresh air after Balmer and he helped opening the company to open source, naturally not without their own intentions, however Satya has been a disaster for the consumer branding, anything related to Windows.

Just because Satya is bald and Indian, doesn't make him Gandhi. Ballmer was Bill's bulldog, but he couldn't direct the company's strategy nearly as effectively as his predecessor; Nadella is craftier. Microsoft has been Microsofting harder than ever lately, and their open source strategy is very subtly embrace-extend-extinguish. I honestly think that by 2030 they will have begun executing a plan to disallow Linux (or…

Luckily you can use "Linux" on Google's products, or Amazon for that matter. /s

In what concerns EEE in open source, there are plenty of candidates, expecially everyone that has contributed for the detriment of GPL based licenses in favour of business friendly licenses.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#219

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 6:24 AM UTC

h3lp wrote: post #66

pjmlp wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It appears the problem is more deep than that. From what I could infer from some community talks, podcasts and so, I would assert that nowadays they have the problem new hires have been educated in UNIX like OSes and Web. Thus Windows team gets lots of folks that never coded anything for Windows, and management instead of having proper trainings in place, just goes with Webview2 and Electron all over the place. I mig…

> nowadays they have the problem new hires have been educated in UNIX like OSes and Web. So, in other words, the kids grow up learning and using Linux, right?

More like macOS and Chromebooks, developing mobile apps and Web.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#220

Post by onion2k » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 6:26 AM UTC

Daz912 wrote: post #163

_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…

Excel integration is amazing, saves me hours a week and helps me write complicated formulas in seconds.

That only good if you're doing measurably more with the time you save. I feel like I'm significantly faster in parts of my job using Copilot, but when I try to get data on what I'm doing now that I wasn't doing before I had it I don't come up with anything. I know I'm working faster, but the time seems to have just gone.