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Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work

blogs.microsoft.com

321–330 of 344 posts

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work

#321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How has the Bing integration been deficient?

On this topic, now that GPT-4 without Bing is available on ChatGPT Plus, it’s noticeable that Bing slows down the generation and can make the output much worse by including Bing crap in the context. But it’s also sometimes better at things the normal GPT doesn’t know about. I think it’s going to be the best search engine once they improve the speed.

Bing has to be slower since it mixes in context from the web. So technically it does a Web search, feeds the results into ChatGPT, while ChatGPT itself doesn't have this step.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work

#322
post #287

Hurrah! Now we can enter 3 bullet points, have an AI automatically turn them into 3 pages of waffle, and then copilot can automatically summarise those back into bullet points again.

Imagine the disconnect as nobody in the company will know what is going on when everything is auto-generated and people are only reading summaries.

Bullshit jobs indeed

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work

#323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One difference is that you can continue using your old Atom install, and if it had been "extinguished", you couldn't[1]. The other difference is that EEE was largely about interoperable protocols, not what one person could do with one program - it was about TCP/IP and SMTP and HTML and trying to take those over to Microsoft's benefit[2]. > " And blaming it on the end-user because they fail to pick up a massive produc…

Netscape Navigator was also open sourced, so I am confused what a project being open source has to do with Microsoft's business strategy. We factually know that Netscape's downfall was a result of the EEE strategy [0]. Just because Netscape rushed to open source Netscape Navigator when they saw their market sharing falling doesn't mean that Microsoft didn't employ EEE. If Microsoft had bought Netscape once Netscape w…

> "Microsoft's strategy to "kill HTML by extending it""

I'm still using HTML today. It hasn't been extinguished because it still exists. It's like complaining that someone murdered your dog, and I point out that your dog is still alive and you say "I'm confused what that has to do with anything".

Extinguish: "To put an end to or make extinct; destroy: synonym: annihilate."

You can still use Atom, it isn't extinct, destroyed or annihilated, and that's related to it being Open Source because there is no way for anyone to annihilate it when you can have your own copy of the source.

Compare that to the proposed "kill HTML by extending it" where, if webservers only served compiled ActiveX and you could only view that on Windows with IE and IE wouldn't render HTML, no amount of 'having the source' would let you use HTML to make web pages your customers could view. You'd put HTML on your webserver and your customers couldn't view it. You'd look at the IE source code and you couldn't distribute it. HTML would be killed as an interoperable standard, It's a difference in kind.

> "It is just a business strategy, that's all."

> "We factually know that Netscape's downfall was a result of the EEE strategy [0]"

We know that Microsoft made a product good enough that nobody bothered to install Netscape. If that's all EEE means it wouldn't have been an attempt to kill HTML. From your link "Extinguish: When extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant market share, they marginalize competitors that do not or cannot support the new extensions." - is anyone seriously saying it was ActiveX which people loved and that's why they dropped Netscape? I don't remember ActiveX playing much of a part in the internet.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work

#324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm waiting for a general correction mechanism, I don't even know what to call it. "NO, chatgpt, people usually have 5 fingers", and the gpt just learns, rather like a child. I keep thinking that's the next real step.

I think what's mainly stopping that from happening is that GPT-4 doesn't remember older chats. If we make it remember everything ,it should get more personal and remember everything right?

The token limit is the problem, in general token limits can’t be changed after the model has been trained. Gpt4 has an exceptionally large 32k token limit, but even with 32k tokens you’d only get a few weeks of chat before the context window was full.

Not to mention the added cost of using the full 32k tokens. OpenAI is charging $0.12 a token which would quickly add up. It’s prohibitively expensive unless you have a very very compelling business use case.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work

#325
post #137
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it did threaten violence towards a user.

You think they didn’t do that on purpose for all the free news cycles they got? If I was launching AI, having it be just a bit unhinged is obviously the best way to get it to go viral.

The common mistake of attributing to malice what could perfectly be attributed to stupidity.

Sure, not your run of the mill stupidity, but even ML scientists do not understand why would a model make a particular choice.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work

#326

Comparing Google's announcement a couple days ago with this. Microsoft's announcements are massively more ambitious. Google announced a handful of LLM-based features. This is Microsoft adding LLM-based features to all of their core office software. For big companies being able to ask questions and get answers informed by all your documents, emails, chats, etc is huge. For small companies the features in Excel, Teams,…

> Google announced a handful of LLM-based features. This is Microsoft adding LLM-based features to all of their core office software.

i think this is incorrect. take another look at this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DaJVZBXETE its clear they are infusing ai in all their workspace stuff.

now whether or not they do it fast or do it well, that is a different story.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work

#327

Amazing! I keep banging on about how Microsoft is building the business lock-in of the next decade, and this is a sign of it. Put down your snubs about Clippy and frothing about "EEE" and look at that announcement: > " Business Chat works across the LLM, the Microsoft 365 apps, and your data — your calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings and contacts — to do things you’ve never been able to do before. You can gi…

> Tell my team how we updated the product strategy,” and it will generate a status update based on the morning’s meetings, emails and chat threads." This sounds to me like a significant competitive disadvantage. I'm torn between joy that this makes it easier for small companies to compete by doing novel things like, uh, talking to each other and horror that my own employer might embrace this with enthusiasm. It's an…

Many of those IP-Paranoid companies are already using Sharepoint and Office 365 (or Google Docs) to store all that documentation.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work

#328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netscape Navigator was also open sourced, so I am confused what a project being open source has to do with Microsoft's business strategy. We factually know that Netscape's downfall was a result of the EEE strategy [0]. Just because Netscape rushed to open source Netscape Navigator when they saw their market sharing falling doesn't mean that Microsoft didn't employ EEE. If Microsoft had bought Netscape once Netscape w…

> " Microsoft's strategy to "kill HTML by extending it" " I'm still using HTML today. It hasn't been extinguished because it still exists. It's like complaining that someone murdered your dog, and I point out that your dog is still alive and you say "I'm confused what that has to do with anything". Extinguish: "To put an end to or make extinct; destroy: synonym: annihilate." You can still use Atom, it isn't extinct,…

It played a pretty large part in corporate intranets, which certainly controlled a lot of users. Most people weren't using more than one browser.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work

#329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tell my team how we updated the product strategy,” and it will generate a status update based on the morning’s meetings, emails and chat threads." This sounds to me like a significant competitive disadvantage. I'm torn between joy that this makes it easier for small companies to compete by doing novel things like, uh, talking to each other and horror that my own employer might embrace this with enthusiasm. It's an…

Many of those IP-Paranoid companies are already using Sharepoint and Office 365 (or Google Docs) to store all that documentation.

Because the convenience of SharePoint and O365 is a huge productivity boost compared to having everything self hosted on-prem. Or better yet, the other way around, having everything on-prem, outside the cloud, kneecaps your productivity.

Case in point, I currently work in a relatively niche cybersecurity company, so naturally, most customer stuff is done and stored on-prem for security reasons since we handle a lot of customer sensitive data and storing it in anyone's cloud is a big no-go for any customer.

By far the biggest issues are managing the on-prem environment and moving the data back and fourth between the O365 environment and the on-prem environment, as the O365 environment is actively used by the customers, C-suite, business, sales and upper management, while the on-prem environment is used by the engineers, lower and middle managers, which is the biggest PITA that I have ever dealt with.

Nextcloud, Thunderbird, Libre Office, Element chat etc. are great but what Microsoft offers with the O365/sharepoint ecosystem is something else and copilot will move the goalposts even further.

Also, I'm not aware of Microsoft having had any data leaks or breaches, so maybe they have gained enough trust in the corporate space that makes companies at ease storing all their stuff in Microsoft's cloud for the sake of convenience.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work

#330

Hurrah! Now we can enter 3 bullet points, have an AI automatically turn them into 3 pages of waffle, and then copilot can automatically summarise those back into bullet points again.

In other words, looks like we've just invented a new negative compression scheme. Both sides of the conversation see a short message, while a longer one is sent over the wire.
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