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Predicting spreadsheet formulas from semi-structured contexts
- paxys 5y agoI LOVE this feature of Google Sheets. So ingenious.
- truculent 5y agoWhat do you love about it?
- vlovich123 5y agoSo CoPilot for Google sheets? Presumably less of an issue because it’s suggesting formulas rather than values, but I bet you its going to leak something unintended.
- jeffbee 5y agoHave you heard of Google Smart Reply or Smart Compose (for Gmail, and Inbox before that) leaking the contents of other people's emails in the 7 years it's been in production?
- vlovich123 5y agoAs I understand it, one key difference is that those messages are providing suggestions based on the emails for YOUR account only. I think this work is slightly different where, like CoPilot, it looks at a larger corpus of all Google Docs across accounts. I could be wrong though. It wasn't as clear.
- jeffbee 5y agoNo, both Smart Reply and Smart Compose use one global model trained on a large corpus. Training individual models for every user would cost a fortune. See section 7 of: https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-data/pdf/45189.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...
- ourmandave 5y agoPeople who used the SUM function also liked: AVERAGE, MEDIAN, and NORMDIST.
- bombcar 5y agoClippy is back with AI and he means business this time, punk. ;)
- toomanybeersies 5y agoI think the bigger risk is people using the wrong formula because "Google suggested it", and ending up miscalculating something important.
- stathibus 5y agoIt drives me absolutely mental that we have all this fancy AI nonsense but we still can't have built in support for some basic stuff that finance/accounting people do every day in excel.
- sorbits 5y agoWhat features are you referring to?
- 2Gkashmiri 5y agoi have a feature request for "tax depreciation" formula and no one seems to care. i tried libreoffice and they were like "if excel doesnt have it, why should we".
- ximeng 5y agoThe current suggestions in Google sheets disappear very quickly if you press a key and then don’t reappear, so in practise are useless to me as I tend to be typing quickly.
- stevesimmons 5y agoHey Google, great you can predict this in Google Sheets... Now how about going to Maps and fixing the Miles/Kilometres setting? After a decade of using Google Maps, I still have to manually switch from Automatic (Miles, as I'm in the UK) to Kilometres each time.
- BiteCode_dev 5y agoOr displaying the street names I'm interested in. Because for some reasons, some are not displayed, and I'm walking on it.
- truculent 5y agoThe problem with features like this and copilot is that the hard parts of software (including spreadsheets) is not writing code, but maintaining it and evolving it. Perhaps these technologies could be turned to those ends, or we could develop better tooling to coerce code-generation to meet our expectations (writing tests or types for copilot to obey, for instance). Without these reassurances, which seem hard to do within spreadsheets, I struggle to see these tools as a net positive. The best “writing code with a computer as a partner” experience I have had so far is with Idris, which uses no ML. Despite this, this is very cool work, and I may feel differently after using it for some time.