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Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work

blogs.microsoft.com

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Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work

#331

Post by JonChesterfield »

lazyasciiart wrote: post #327
JonChesterfield wrote: post #297

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.

That also seems wild to me. It doesn't even seem to be questioned whether giving Microsoft a copy of every email you send is a good idea. Even when the emails are about contract terms with Microsoft, the conflict of interest doesn't seem to worry anyone.

This whole announcement is "look how good we are at reading your internal documents" and I still don't think it's going to register on the threat model.

Fortunately we can definitely trust Microsoft not to do anything unethical in the name of profits.

P.s. I had a totally unsuccessful conversation with a security person who believed that the AI powered network scanning stack they used kept them safe. Secret software stack running CI on AWS, email through Microsoft. All the IP they cared about literally stored outside their fortified local network.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work

#332

Post by MikusR »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #85
mihaaly wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is also impressive how slow they deliver the option of ungrouping taskbar icons, which is requested by masses for years now, and actually worked before. I know, I know, that is a much harder poblem than AI. Maybe they need to improve AI much more first so it could have superhuman powers, solving the task bar ungrouping problem finally for the humanity.

Maybe it's not actually being requested by masses and instead just a vocal minority that you happen to be a part of? Or maybe Microsoft already calculated that fixing it won't bring much if any more money than not and therefore that it's not worth it. Just because something that you want fixed isn't done does not mean they're "slow". If it hasn't been included after years of being "requested by masses", then it's mor…

Insider versions have started to show that work on ungrouping is being done https://twitter.com/XenoPanther/status/1633649557652250631

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work

#333

Post by whoisthemachine »

jodrellblank wrote: post #323
whoisthemachine wrote: post #319

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,…

> I don't remember ActiveX playing much of a part in the internet.

The large company I work for still mandates IE11. Why do you think that is? If your corporate strategy gets you 20-30 years of vendor lock-in, then I would say it was a successful strategy.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work

#334

Post by maroonblazer »

JonChesterfield wrote: post #331
lazyasciiart wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That also seems wild to me. It doesn't even seem to be questioned whether giving Microsoft a copy of every email you send is a good idea. Even when the emails are about contract terms with Microsoft, the conflict of interest doesn't seem to worry anyone. This whole announcement is "look how good we are at reading your internal documents" and I still don't think it's going to register on the threat model. Fortunately…

IANAL but aren't MSFT acting in the role of "data processor" (per GDPR) and so are limited in terms of what they can do with customer data?

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work

#335

Post by jacooper »

valine wrote: post #324
jacooper wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maybe trim chat history to most important content?

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work

#336

Post by agloe_dreams »

srveale wrote: post #71
agloe_dreams wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better idea: Use GPT-4 to create an AI Dilbert generator that lacks a nutcase cartoonist.

From ChatGPT (free version, maybe the paid version is funnier?) In the first frame, the boss is sitting at his desk typing on his computer, while his employee looks on. The boss says, "I've discovered this amazing new tool! It's a generative language model that can write all my emails for me!" In the second frame, the boss shows his employee a sample email he wrote using the tool. The email reads, "Greetings, minion.…

This is remarkably close to the actual thing.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work

#337

Post by kickopotomus »

croes wrote: post #320
kickopotomus wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like everyone is just focusing on auto-generated/summarized emails which is rather myopic. The real value add here is the ability to make all of an organization's data more easily discoverable and searchable.

By uploading it into the GPT model? Sounds dangerous.

How is it any more dangerous than existing cloud storage use?

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work

#338

Post by daydream »

swyx wrote: post #326
daydream wrote: post #312

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.

After combing through the announcements again I mostly agree with you. Google and Microsoft are putting AI in very similar places.

I still believe MS is going further. Business Chat will be a very big deal if it works well. Google didn't announce anything similar.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work

#339

Post by RajT88 »

warning26 wrote: post #94
mihaaly wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is also impressive how slow they deliver the option of ungrouping taskbar icons, which is requested by masses for years now, and actually worked before. I know, I know, that is a much harder poblem than AI. Maybe they need to improve AI much more first so it could have superhuman powers, solving the task bar ungrouping problem finally for the humanity.

I don't like a lot of things about the direction that Microsoft has taken Windows's UX, but this is absolutely an edge case that only a tiny % of users care about, and certainly not "masses" of anyone.

There are on the order of Billions of Windows devices out there.

When you make a change like this where there is no configurable option to go back to the old style of working you cause issues for tens of millions of people who developed a workflow that depended on that.

There have been dozens of little things like this. Some got fixed in Win11 eventually (so they were obviously bugs). My example: in Windows Explorer you can start typing the name of a file and as long as you keep a quick pace, you will end up with that file highlighted. When Win11 shipped, it stopped matching at the first letter.

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