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Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

wsj.com

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Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#331

Post by bunderbunder »

Lio wrote: post #242
bunderbunder wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For the usecase of "How do I do thing X in Excell" you could probably get pretty far with just adding a small, local LLM running on the user's machine. That would move the cost of running the model to the end user but it would also mean giving up all the data they can from running prompts remotely. It would probably also make Office users more productive rather than replacing them completely and that's not the vision…

Fair. But I sure wish we could instead solve this problem the way we did 20 years ago: by not having Web search results be so choked off by SEO enshittification and slop that it’s hard to find good information anymore. Because, I promise you, “How do I do thing X in Excel?” did not used to be nearly so difficult a question to answer.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#332

Post by anal_reactor »

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 ?

Someone somewhere understands that ChatGPT as a brand is too valuable to have it ruined by middle management. Hence Copilot.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#333

Post by Ylpertnodi »

smcleod wrote: post #291

Microsoft's everything is running into problems. Seriously though, it always seems like a dumpster fire over there but the last year is next level with all their Windows 11 problems, Windows update problems, Office365 outages, Copilot issues, Azure outages etc... not to mention the features no one seems to want.

Several people are not happy about the association with Bill Gates, too.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#334

Post by deckar01 »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #255
deckar01 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MS actually changed their office.com landing page to a funnel that tricks you to into installing a copilot app. It used to be the dashboard for MS web apps. There are no links to the web apps, but they are all still there, you just have to know the subdomains. The app doesn’t have any of the functionality that page used to offer…

I haven't used office.com but it does seem to have links to the four main webapps (did there used to be more?). They're the second row of big boxes titled "Word with Copilot", etc. Admittedly with very confusing names.

I checked way back machine and they have been making large changes to that page every day for the last month. It used to be a lie that office 365 was rename to office 365 copilot, yet it is an app with only chat bot functionality. They advertise the copilot integration for the main office apps now, but those are not part of the copilot app they are trying to trick you into installing.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#335

Post by bunderbunder »

analog31 wrote: post #328
bunderbunder wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The perception may be that anything AI related will be obsolete in months. So why pay to have it built into a laptop?

I doubt obsolescence anticipation has anything to do with it. That’s how tech enthusiasts think, but most people think more in terms of, “Is this useful to me?” And if it’s doing a useful thing now then it should still be doing that useful thing next year as long as nobody fucks with it.

I would guess it’s more just consumer fatigue. For two reasons. First, AI’s still at the “all bark and no bite” phase of the hype cycle, and most people don’t enjoy trying a bunch of things just to figure out if they work as advertised. Where early adopters think of that as play time, typical consumers see it as wasted time. Second, and perhaps even worse, they have learned that they can’t trust that à product will still be doing that useful thing in the future because the tech enthusiasts who make these products can’t resist the urge to keep fucking with it.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#336

Post by sownkun »

ryandrake wrote: post #189
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…

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.…

This is exactly what I was thinking about my current place of employment. Wouldn't all of our time be spent better working on our main product than adding all these questionably useful AI add ons? We already have a couple AI addons we built over the years that aren't being used much.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#337

Post by deckar01 »

karel-3d wrote: post #320
deckar01 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MS actually changed their office.com landing page to a funnel that tricks you to into installing a copilot app. It used to be the dashboard for MS web apps. There are no links to the web apps, but they are all still there, you just have to know the subdomains. The app doesn’t have any of the functionality that page used to offer…

Well there is no "Office" anymore, the suite is named "Microsoft 365 Copilot".

There are no office tools. It’s just a chatbot app. The page says they combined word and excel and PowerPoint, but it still doesn’t do anything but chat. I asked it to create a word document and it offered me a download link to a word template…

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#338

Post by inquirerGeneral »

anthonypasq wrote: post #87
JohnMakin wrote: post #12

Microsoft's fumble here is pretty spectacular. Back in early 2023, the state of google search was abysmal (despite that their leaders insisted it wasn't, it had become nearly unusable for me and I don't think was that unfounded of an opinion). Microsoft rolled out a new version of bing, which became bing chat - search worked for me again for a very brief window of time. They could have pounced on this opportunity to…

>it had become nearly unusable for me and I don't think was that unfounded of an opinion this is an extremely unfounded opinion, and pointing me to other people on hackernews that agree with you is not evidence. Google search quite literally was and continues to be the most successful and profitable product in the history of humanity. None of your comment interfaces with reality at all.

[dead]

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#339

Post by dmichulke »

indymike wrote: post #167
Sharlin wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure soon enough it'll be renamed "Copilot 365 Explorer" or something similar.

I'm holding out for Copilot 365 Explorer Enterprise Edition.

...the only edition where you can disable bing as default search engine
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