Microsoft Scales Back AI Goals Because Almost Nobody Is Using Copilot
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Re: Microsoft Scales Back AI Goals Because Almost Nobody Is Using Copilot
#2Copilot is basically just whitelabelled ChatGPT. It's a big ask for people to use it over the source system.
ChatGPT gets the headlines, is seen as an innovator, and costs less.
Copilot offers what? A physical button on a Windows keyboard, OS integration when we're in our browsers 24/7 and Atlas exists?
My main gripe is that if Copilot has any value MS do a piss-poor job of promoting it. I can see AI functions in MS365 being useful, I can see MS-related headaches being solvable quicker with an AI buddy nudging me along to a resolution. But their press releases and and demos, if they exist, do not compete with OpenAI's, Google's, hell Deepseek gets more coverage.
MS might as well give up and pursue integration and compatibility with the rest of the ecosystem. I know they won't though, they'll cut costs and still shove Copilot down our throats with feature creep and useless opt-out bulk.
Re: Microsoft Scales Back AI Goals Because Almost Nobody Is Using Copilot
#3[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46148748
Re: Microsoft Scales Back AI Goals Because Almost Nobody Is Using Copilot
#4The title here should be Almost Nobody, Including Microsoft QA, is using Copilot. I tried to use Copilot to create a PowerPoint presentation from a Word document. The output was complete trash. Bullet points were out of alignment, and several things just went off-screen. Re-prompting to try and correct the slides did nothing but create more trash.
Re: Microsoft Scales Back AI Goals Because Almost Nobody Is Using Copilot
#5Copilot is basically just whitelabelled ChatGPT. It's a big ask for people to use it over the source system. ChatGPT gets the headlines, is seen as an innovator, and costs less. Copilot offers what? A physical button on a Windows keyboard, OS integration when we're in our browsers 24/7 and Atlas exists? My main gripe is that if Copilot has any value MS do a piss-poor job of promoting it. I can see AI functions in MS3…
For something that is supposedly a "strategic priority" the implementation is half-assed as well. When I edit my prompt post-fact, it is instead sent as a new message.
Re: Microsoft Scales Back AI Goals Because Almost Nobody Is Using Copilot
#6If copilot could could take instructions in excel and create pivots and formulae then it would be useful. I can't think of other Windows operations I'd use it for.
For coding it's incredible - both in ide and on GitHub.
Re: Microsoft Scales Back AI Goals Because Almost Nobody Is Using Copilot
#7Copilot is basically just whitelabelled ChatGPT. It's a big ask for people to use it over the source system. ChatGPT gets the headlines, is seen as an innovator, and costs less. Copilot offers what? A physical button on a Windows keyboard, OS integration when we're in our browsers 24/7 and Atlas exists? My main gripe is that if Copilot has any value MS do a piss-poor job of promoting it. I can see AI functions in MS3…
IMO the wrapper products all suffer from the same problem. The LLM is trained to do a specific set of tasks such as Chat, Coding, Image understanding, and image/video generation, and tool use in support of the above. If you suddenly ask the LLM to do something it was not trained for such as producing power points - you get a few surprisingly successful results, followed by a large set of crap. There is no reason for customers or your own team to expect the underlying model to improve unless token usage is so massive it motivates training investment in this area.
LLMs are a facsimile of general intelligence on tasks similar to their training set and which can be solved in finite context length. If you are outside of the training set - you will have poor results. Likewise if you are in the training set, then the foundation model vendor will already have a great product to sell you (claude code/chatgpt etc.)
Re: Microsoft Scales Back AI Goals Because Almost Nobody Is Using Copilot
#8No bonuses will be paid until every text box has an “improve this text in some way” option.
Re: Microsoft Scales Back AI Goals Because Almost Nobody Is Using Copilot
#9Sounds like they're hoping for adoption down the further line... the "maybe later" approach.
Microsoft should take the "Don't Ask Me Again" approach instead, which everyone would see as a net win.
Re: Microsoft Scales Back AI Goals Because Almost Nobody Is Using Copilot
#10... and now we have this damn copilot key on our keyboards!