Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work

#41

Post by aldarisbm » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 3:45 PM UTC

droopyEyelids wrote: post #36

QuadrupleA wrote: post #20

My first thought is, "gross"... now we'll have to wonder whether Manager X is even paying attention to the emails they're reading and responding to, or doing any actual work or thinking. Could lead to a world that's even more tilted towards politics and socially engineering your way up the ladder, versus competence and skill.

ChatGPT opened my eyes to the fact that we already should have been wondering about it. I tried using ChatGPT to generate answers to some requests to my team, and it created the most plausible wild goose chase answers I could ever imagine. They would be a terrible waste of time for anyone who received them. Then I started to notice how many of the emails and requests I get are just as bad ! Plausible sounding answers…

This is why the grounding that office365 seems to be doing will be so important, it will not be 100% but having the response be grounded on actual artifacts (actual documentation, emails, data) will be huge, the fact that it gives you citations for the things it suggests, is huge.

Props to the MS team.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work

#42

Post by mynameisvlad » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 3:45 PM UTC

itsaquicknote wrote: post #28

jatins wrote: post #12

Shipping at big companies can often be surprisingly hard so it's impressive to see how fast Microsoft is moving with AI integration into all their products.

"In the months ahead..." They've not shipped this. They're planning to. You're reading a marketing piece about work in the pipe. Like so, so many other company product "launches" in this space that are "already testing with a small group of whatevers".

I would argue that shipping to a limited test group qualifies in terms of measuring velocity, which is what the OP said they were impressed with.

Launching to 10000 people vs 10000000 is a matter of scale (which is still important, but not the same thing as), not velocity.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work

#43

Post by roseway4 » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 3:45 PM UTC

QuadrupleA wrote: post #20

My first thought is, "gross"... now we'll have to wonder whether Manager X is even paying attention to the emails they're reading and responding to, or doing any actual work or thinking. Could lead to a world that's even more tilted towards politics and socially engineering your way up the ladder, versus competence and skill.

Is it any better or worse than delegating work to a junior team member and not bothering to review the work product?

I love the idea that I can rapidly produce a rough draft of a document from notes, something I’m already doing with ChatGPT, albeit not as elegantly as if the functionality were integrated into Docs/Word.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work

#44

Post by agloe_dreams » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 3:45 PM UTC

itsaquicknote wrote: post #28

jatins wrote: post #12

Shipping at big companies can often be surprisingly hard so it's impressive to see how fast Microsoft is moving with AI integration into all their products.

"In the months ahead..." They've not shipped this. They're planning to. You're reading a marketing piece about work in the pipe. Like so, so many other company product "launches" in this space that are "already testing with a small group of whatevers".

FWIIW, This seems rather similar to Github Copilot in VS Code. Been using it for a year, training data issues aside the product is absurdly good at times.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work

#45

Post by PaulWaldman » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 3:45 PM UTC

miguelazo wrote: post #23

jatins wrote: post #12

Shipping at big companies can often be surprisingly hard so it's impressive to see how fast Microsoft is moving with AI integration into all their products.

Given how bad the Bing integration has gone, perhaps we should wait and see what the actual results are before we get too impressed.

How has the Bing integration been deficient?

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work

#46

Post by rqtwteye » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 3:45 PM UTC

dopeboy wrote: post #16

jatins wrote: post #12

Shipping at big companies can often be surprisingly hard so it's impressive to see how fast Microsoft is moving with AI integration into all their products.

My biggest takeaway from all of this. I’m very impressed with their velocity.

Let's see if it's the same type of velocity they have with Teams. Constant change that breaks things.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work

#47

Post by hestefisk » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 3:45 PM UTC

b33j0r wrote: post #10

Clippy: it appears that you’re writing a very sad word document in partially broken Danish, and keep trying to signal SOS with your typing pattern. Would you feel better in bold Comic Sans? You: aw, clippy, I believed in you all along

Enter: Microsoft Bob

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work

#48

Post by sandworm101 » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 3:46 PM UTC

QuadrupleA wrote: post #20

My first thought is, "gross"... now we'll have to wonder whether Manager X is even paying attention to the emails they're reading and responding to, or doing any actual work or thinking. Could lead to a world that's even more tilted towards politics and socially engineering your way up the ladder, versus competence and skill.

Can one bring a sexual harassments complaint against a machine? I see this thing being trained up on material within an HR department only to parrot back some horrible phrase it learned after reading hundreds of harassment complaint discussions.

I used to work surrounded by lawyers. Just like doctors drift into discussions of horrible diseases, lawyer drift into discussions of horrible legal situations. Letting Clippy "learn" from that material seems really dangerous. How do you kill/reset this thing once it has become poisoned?

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work

#49

Post by maxdoop » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 3:46 PM UTC

mdm12 wrote: post #37

maxdoop wrote: post #22

I wonder how this will play out. Yes, it’s pretty awesome and yes, helpful. But if we extend the timeline, doesn’t this likely lead to AI-generated responses talking to AI-generated questions about AI-generated presentations?

We already have students using AI to generate answers for homework and teachers using automation to grade it. I would say we are already there.

So really, human input to get the ball rolling. AI takes it all the from there.

Wild.

Re: Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work

#50

Post by eganist » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 3:46 PM UTC

> Sometimes Copilot will be right, other times usefully wrong — but it will always put you further ahead.

If there's one tangentially related development I'm actually interested to see how it fleshes out in broader work discussions, it's the marketing of failure modes as a feature.