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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

#201

Post by saidinesh5 »

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…

> But with "AI", not only is it not a product in itself, it's a feature to a product, but it has OpEx and CapEx costs that dominate the balance sheet based on their public disclosures. Worse, as a feature, it demonstrably harms business with its hallucinations.

I think it depends on how the feature is used? I see it as mostly as yet another user interface in most applications. Every couple of years I keep forgetting the syntax and formulas available in Excel. I can either search for answers or describe what i want and let the LLM edit the spread sheet for me and i just verify.

Also, as time passes the OpEx and CapEx are projected to reduce right? It maybe a good thing that companies are burning through their stockpiles of $$$ in trying to find out the applicability and limits of this new technology. Maybe something good will come out of it.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#202

Post by albedoa »

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.

Looks like the context understander has logged on. Welcome!

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#204

Post by username223 »

raincole wrote: post #136
shevy-java wrote: post #84

It is rather interesting how dead-focused Microsoft is on AI. Even if you look at their recent statements "We now admit there are AI problems with Microsoft-related products." (e. g. Win11 in particular), it seems to me that they really have no way back now. It's turtles down all the way; once the train is moving, it is hard to stop. It's definitely not what many users wanted or expected from Win11; nonetheless, and…

> It is rather interesting how dead-focused Microsoft is on AI. Yeah. Right now the of office.com is: > Microsoft 365 Copilot | Create, Share and Collaborate with Office and AI Microsoft 365 Copilot... what a product name.

> Microsoft 365 Copilot | Create, Share and Collaborate with Office and AI

That's some insight into Microsoft's brain rot, isn't it? "Imagine spending every day for the next year dealing with robot office software."

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#205

Post by petersumskas »

AI is like electricity. It may be the “product” you think you are selling. But it isn’t the product people are buying.

People are buying what these things facilitate (lights, tvs, air conditioning, etc in the case of electricity)

I think the AI folk have generally done a terrible job of connecting the dots to show people what they are actually getting.

It’s worth noting that some things mentioned above already existed before electricity. So people needed to be shown that electric light is in almost all ways better, cheaper, more convenient than existing alternatives.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#206

Post by [deleted] »

apercu wrote: post #44
_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…

> "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." That succinctly describes 90% of the economy right now if you just change a word and remove a couple: The biggest issue I see is the entire mentality that focuses more on "getting the numbers up" than actually delivering a product people wa…

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#207

Post by user3939382 »

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…

My take away from mobile first G was “sites need to be fast right guys for mobile?” -> amp -> actually let’s hostile take over the web, oh actually well rework chrome auto sign in, oh actually … just a long string of user hostility

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#208

Post by bunderbunder »

saidinesh5 wrote: post #201
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…

> But with "AI", not only is it not a product in itself, it's a feature to a product, but it has OpEx and CapEx costs that dominate the balance sheet based on their public disclosures. Worse, as a feature, it demonstrably harms business with its hallucinations. I think it depends on how the feature is used? I see it as mostly as yet another user interface in most applications. Every couple of years I keep forgetting…

The thing about giving your application a button that costs you a cent or two every time a user clicks on it is, then your application has a button that costs you a cent or two every time a user clicks on it.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#209

Post by bunderbunder »

shigawire wrote: post #199
ryandrake wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I think it is more externally driven as well, a prisoners dilemma. I don't want to keep crapping out questionable features but if competitors keep doing it the customer wants it -- even if infrastructure and bug fixes would actually make their life better.

Last time I saw results of a survey on this, it found that for most consumers AI features are a deciding factor in their purchasing decisions. That is, if they are looking at two options and one sports AI features and the other doesn’t, they will pick the one that doesn’t.

It’s possible AI just seems more popular than it is because it’s easy to hear the people who are talking about it but harder to hear the people who aren’t.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#210

Post by verdverm »

bagacrap wrote: post #173
verdverm wrote: post #153

Microslop can never be a real Ai company if they can't build a frontier model and push the envelope themselves. Today they are completely dependent on 3rd party companies, not a good position to be in.

They own a quarter of openai

Right, they had to buy it, not build it
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