Imagine the enormous complexity of office file formats if your business is literally building coding models/agents and still you choose to bundle LibreOffice.
The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice
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Re: The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice
#92Are they at least respecting the licenses (.i.e.: providing a verbatim copy of each license?)
Re: The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice
#93I still don’t understand why with all their cash these companies dont redo their apps in Rust or native. They are all so heavy and dog slow. There are already some very fast cross platform (wasm too!) libraries that can do what poppler does as well as parse and produce various office file formats. Because 2gb is crazy town, these things could be around 100mb, just throw some tokens at the problem.
What % of time, for a an average session, do you think is app overhead vs waiting for tokens? And there's your answer for why it's not a priority.
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Re: The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice
#94Also in the newest app I think the transcription feature is unusable. Ok, I can have a shortcut to start and stop recording. Wow, cool! Ok, but where did the transcription go? In my clipboard? To my cursor? Hey? :(
Re: The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice
#95There is a serious threat to Microsoft here, if everyone starts using AI for generating and updating Office docs. At some point Office will become just a viewer.
im stoked for that outcome, standard document tooling should not live behind subscription models anymore. i dont care that microsoft spent zillions bankrolling education systems and companies to fall into this cultural lock in over the decades whether they like it or not spreadsheets word docs etc are just ubiquitous parts of existing in society at this point you're gonna need to reach for these tools eventually just…
You assume tokens will be free after these get their monopoly positions? Actual libre office is actual open source running on weak hardware. Truly free.
And I suspect we will look back at MS with nostalgia once Altman and Musk get their ai imperiums.
Re: The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice
#96spinning up an entire copy of libreoffice sounds super heavy?, if someone here is actually using chatgpt to edit docx documents then they can feel free to use us. vespper.com
You want something heavier? They were trashing people's SSDs a few months ago. IDK if it's been resolved, yet.
Re: The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice
#97The new app is an unbelievable mess. Settings are senselessly organized, too. The whole thing has this aesthetic slickness and then underneath it's like the people who make it have never even used it. It's not surprising that it's pulled in absolutely massive dependencies, although I'm not sure it's the wrong call on some operating systems. LibreOffice is pretty tried and true.
Almost like it's... vibe coded.
Re: The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't worry, they are ahead of this. Satya said some time ago that they expect soon to have more agents using Microsoft software than humans, and are working on transitioning their focus from serving humans to serving agents. https://www.news18.com/business/satya-nadella-announces-micr...
So they will switch to per-agent pricing instead of per-user. Fine, but that doesn't change the fact that Microsoft Office will become a just bunch of viewers as far as human usage is concerned. As far as generating Office documents, you can do that without using any Microsoft code.
This is one that's already true and "everyone" hasn't figured it out yet. But you don't really even need Office as a viewer, PDF is fine (for printable/portable fixed-layout) or just HTML. "Office" is a product that doesn't need to exist anymore, at least for the core apps. For day-to-day office work, you probably shouldn't be using those legacy apps, you should be reviewing portable document formats and asking an agent to make the revisions that you want.
Re: The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice
#99(I made a similar comment in a different post by Simon Willison yesterday about GPT Work)
I am unsure the direction that AI assisted document creation work will go in. I am opinionated and building something in the space. In this reply I discuss my view + what I have been building.
My opinion is: We now have AI, this new amazing flexible tool. We can throw it at any problem. But in terms of document creation we have a choice between old fashioned siloed document formats (.pptx, .pdf, .xlsx, .docx, etc.) and a freshly rendered - slightly randomly styled - html site with some basic javascript within it. I think these combinations are odd and do not maximise the powers of AI.
I've been building something called SmallDocs [0][1] which is a new take on work documents. It's all Markdown, but it always renders (100% privately) on the SmallDocs site. This means the SmallDocs renderer can convert recognised Markdown combinations into powerful traditional document formats [2]. For example, we convert a ```cells block into an in-line spreadsheet you can export to Excel.
This gives an agent the ability to express itself with a great deal of depth and flexibility. For example, your agent can produce a single data analysis "SmallDoc" with text, charts, spreadsheets, etc. [3] I find that combining formats quickens the speed I can understand a topic.
SmallDocs also have standardised and pretty boring styling. This means you spend less time understanding the layout of a flashy HTML page and more time on the content.
I also believe a pre-determined rendering engine has a lot of advantages over a freslhy built HTML artifact. It allows you to build in lot's of useful defaults that the agent doesn't have to code from scratch. These can be small things, for example, every time your agent renders a Markdown table in SmallDocs you can instantly copy it as a CSV or a PNG. And these can be bigger things, such as a rich slides DSL with solid styling defaults, which saves your agents a lot of tokens and results in consistently attractive HTML slides [4]. (Slides can also be automatically exported to .pdf and .pptx.)
I've been at it for a few months, and am still working on the project. I am looking for feedback and open source collaborators. Thanks for reading!
[1] https://github.com/espressoplease/smalldocs
[2] https://smalldocs.org/blogs/what-is-a-smalldoc
[3] https://smalldocs.org/s/46fWiAyF77T9c7tqYwAQqp#k=j78ZEOOrgo8...
[4] https://smalldocs.org/s/QrmeWMsULGS871nXQYOacB#k=ubOHH9QtTWp...
(And something totally different, your agent can also use SmallDocs to walk you through code files: https://smalldocs.org/s/JsI_-tWSH0UpSd_YXxVLPm#k=G5jLCYA4JUX...)
Re: The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't worry, they are ahead of this. Satya said some time ago that they expect soon to have more agents using Microsoft software than humans, and are working on transitioning their focus from serving humans to serving agents. https://www.news18.com/business/satya-nadella-announces-micr...
So they will switch to per-agent pricing instead of per-user. Fine, but that doesn't change the fact that Microsoft Office will become a just bunch of viewers as far as human usage is concerned. As far as generating Office documents, you can do that without using any Microsoft code.
> For Microsoft, this shift means products like M365 will act as the foundational layer where AI agents operate. Users will still need places to store documents, manage projects, search files, and track workflows
They bet on the online office suite (M365).