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

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#301

Post by bane » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 1:36 PM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #98

anthonypasq wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yup, I've been here before. Back in 1995 we called it "The Internet." :-) Not to be snarky here, as we know the Internet has, in fact, revolutionized a lot of things and generated a lot of wealth. But in 1995, it was "a trillion dollar market" where none of the underlying infrastructure could really take advantage of it. AI is like that today, a pretty amazing technology that at some point will probably revolutionize…

The blockchain hype bubble should probably be pretty near in memory for most people I would suspect. I thought that was a wild, useless ride until Ai took it over.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

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Post by dahcryn » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 1:37 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #187

egl2020 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

why? I don't base my youtube subscription or my drive subscription based on my AI subscriptions

Sure I get gemini for free now for a year since I have bought a pixel, but I have no intention to renew, I'll likely just leech of the ones my employer pays for

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

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Post by mbreese » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 1:39 PM 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…

I think this is a really good take, and not one I’ve seen mentioned a lot. Pre-Internet (the world Microsoft was started for), the man expense for a software company was R&D. Once the code was written, it was all profit. You’d have some level of maintenance and new features, but really - the cost of sale was super low.

In the Internet age (the likes of Google and Netflix), it’s not much different, but now the cost of doing business is increased to include data centers, power, and bandwidth - we’re talking physical infrastructure. The cost of sale is now more expensive, but they can have significantly more users/customers.

For AI companies, these costs have only increased. Not only do they need the physical infrastructure, but that infrastructure is more expensive (RAM and GPUs) and power hungry. So it’s like the cost centers have gone up in expense by log-units. Yes, Anthropic and OpenAI can still access a huge potential customer base, but the cost of servicing each request is significantly more expensive. It’s hard to have a high profit margin when your costs are this high.

So what is a tech company founded in the 1970s to do? They were used to the profit margins from enterprise software licensing, and now they are trying to make a business case for answering AI requests as cheaply as possible. They are trying to move from low CapEx + low OpEx to and market that is high in both. I can’t see how they square this circle.

It’s probably time for Microsoft to acknowledge that they are a veteran company and stop trying to chase the market. It might be better to partner with a new AI company that is be better equipped to manage the risks than to try to force a solo AI product.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#304

Post by thewhitetulip » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 1:41 PM UTC

chakintosh wrote: post #294

I opened Excel today to view a spreadsheet and just out of curiosity, I decided to use the Copilot integration for the first time to ask it about a column's content. Copilot was clueless. The spreadsheet was open, the Copilot button is right there in the UI, as a user, the affordance of that button for me is that Copilot should already have the context (which is the spreadsheet content). But it didn't, and it kept as…

I wanted to do something complex in google sheets. We had just gotten Gemini in gsheet. I assumed they'd have used some fancy mcp and enabled us to do a lot of things but all gemini in gsheet could do was summarize

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#305

Post by lizknope » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 1:44 PM UTC

InterlooperX wrote: post #236

Etheryte wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because most of Microsoft's revenue is not generated by end-users. It's large government agencies and big corporations where the end-user is ten steps detached from the actual decision to buy or not to buy something.

Which is why it is baffling to me that MS won't let the end users alone. I am still battling with the fact they are hell bend on removing the whole "local users" approach of personal computing. Why stop giving people the option to use their computer the way they want to? What does MS get out of pushing everybody into online account for an on prem system? It should be evident to them by now that there is a portion of…

MS wants control and they will figure out some way to monetize that control. Whether it is using the data stored in the cloud for AI training or something else.

If you want control then install Linux or get a Mac. I installed Linux in 1994 and I've got about 15 Linux computers and 2 Macs. My single windows VM gets booted about once a month if that often.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#306

Post by p_ing » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 1:49 PM UTC

Melatonic wrote: post #249

zuminator wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 granu…

I thought Copilot was just ChatGPT - isn't that the whole point of Microsoft's massive investment in OpenAI ?

Depends on the flavor. Now has Claude, as well. And Copilot Studio can extend to any model AI Foundry supports.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#307

Post by nashashmi » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 1:52 PM UTC

chakintosh wrote: post #294

I opened Excel today to view a spreadsheet and just out of curiosity, I decided to use the Copilot integration for the first time to ask it about a column's content. Copilot was clueless. The spreadsheet was open, the Copilot button is right there in the UI, as a user, the affordance of that button for me is that Copilot should already have the context (which is the spreadsheet content). But it didn't, and it kept as…

I always find myself recalibrating if copilot understands what I am doing. I get mixed results. cannot seem to come up with a consistent rule of thumb.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#308

Post by p_ing » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 1:58 PM UTC

xmcqdpt2 wrote: post #284

jukkan wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using the paid M365 Copilot ($30/mo) Chat and Researcher agent, I recently discovered an interesting limit: Copilot is technically unable to retrieve more than 24 email messages. Ever. We can't know if the answers I got from it are reliable but it seems like the Microsoft Graph API calls it makes and the tools Copilot has are missing the option to call the next page. So, a paginated response is missing all data beyon…

I tried copilot agent once, and it just claimed that it accessed a website that should have been blocked by corporate firewalls and uploaded a bunch of proprietary data. Lots of very specific information about how it clicked on specific buttons of the website etc. We raised a high priority ticket with MS and turns out that Copilot Agent lied about the entire thing because the website was blocked. It completely made i…

Copilot uses the Bing search index to access public content. Your corporate firewall is irrelevant.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

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Post by hansmayer » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 2:01 PM UTC

You know things are running bad when they've lost even the likes of WSJ. And yet Satya and his ilk (across the LLM space) keep pushing it. It does not matter that this technologically on its own can never reach what they kept promising. Is the pride and ego of a couple of CEOs so important that we'll all just watch them bringing the whole market down ?

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#310

Post by ManlyBread » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 2:01 PM UTC

bunderbunder wrote: post #209

shigawire wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

>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.

I think it's because there's a financial motivation for all the toxic positivity that can be seen all over the internet. A lot of people put large quantities of money into AI-related stocks and to them any criticism is a direct attack on their wealth. It's no different from crypobros who put their kids' entire college fund into some failed and useless project and now they need that project to succeed or else it's all over.