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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

#381

Post by basch »

mzajc wrote: post #70
basch wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The products they are delivering remain somewhat poorly promoted. Designer is more than an LLM grafted to a text field. https://designer.microsoft.com/ If you go to microsoft.com, which link at the top would you click to get to Designer?

> Designer is more than an LLM grafted to a text field. https://designer.microsoft.com/ It's an AI image generator. There's thousands of tools that do this exact thing, and it seems their only "benefit" is infesting search engine image results with their horrible low-quality output. ... On a related note, here's another great LLM feature Microsoft seemingly failed to promote: instead of returning bits of page content…

It's more than an image generator, and if you pop open the UX, it's somewhat thoughtfully laid out.

Image generator meets editor meets page design.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#382

Post by rightbyte »

jamesnorden wrote: post #278
rightbyte wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The product is the stock price, not Office or Windows. From that perspective they are doing it right.

Is sacrificing everything for short term gains really the right move in any situation?

Dunno, hard question, but I think the payoff to executives is tied to stock performance in such a way that messes with the equation a lot.

What is on stake in the long term? Their legacy? Both in term of feel-good and getting the next job if they are not in the end of their career.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#384

Post by Andrex »

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…

There were six versions of Windows Mobile before the iPhone hit and they still couldn't do anything.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#385

Post by Andrex »

thewhitetulip wrote: post #304
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

It sounds like that's still a step up from Copilot.

I know Gemini has more advanced features in Docs and they rolled something out for Sheets. I would bet GWorkspace keeps gaining ground on the functionality battle.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#386

Post by username223 »

wongarsu wrote: post #239
username223 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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."

I spend most work days with robot dev software (claude code). If Copilot had a similar ability to do useful work with meaningful oversight I wouldn't mind spending time with it. Sadly it does not

That's different: you're using bots to create software that someone finds useful, so you're entirely on the producer end.

People using Copilot 365 are on both ends, both producing and being inundated with generated content. Sure, they can crank out 10x as many emails and slides, but they also have to deal with 10x as many incoming from their coworkers. They can of course use a bot for that, but then they're back where they started, but with errors.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#387

Post by xmcqdpt2 »

inglor_cz wrote: post #292
xmcqdpt2 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How did it know about the buttons? Or were they so generic that it could hallucinate them as well? I wonder if the site you mentioned was earlier harvested through some firewall hole during Copilot's training.

It must have either pulled the websites docs or knew about them.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#388

Post by xmcqdpt2 »

p_ing wrote: post #308
xmcqdpt2 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Turns out that's not true, at least where I work. IT / Microsoft confirmed that all Copilot traffic goes through our corporate firewall.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#389

Post by p_ing »

xmcqdpt2 wrote: post #388
p_ing wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Turns out that's not true, at least where I work. IT / Microsoft confirmed that all Copilot traffic goes through our corporate firewall.

Whomever you spoke to is misinformed.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/copilot/microsoft-365/mana...

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#390

Post by tester756 »

jamesnorden wrote: post #280
tester756 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Microsoft has also tried hard to push Edge, annoying nearly every Windows user on the planet, with no real success. False, Edge is actually decent product and viable replacement for Chromium based browsers. I use Firefox daily, but at work Edge is my way to go

Did you miss the 2019 news that Edge switched to just being another Chromium reskin?

for (other) chromium based browsers, I meant.
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