22 ms·

Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work

356 points by benryon 4y ago

Hardwired8976 4y ago
That seams to be one of the best use cases for this, provided you can run it without giving Microsoft a lot of data directly. Else this is a no-no for enterprises imo.
- throwanem 4y ago
  Enterprises that already give Microsoft a lot of data directly? Office 365 is ubiquitous in that space.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - snuxoll 4y ago
    Sure, but most (if not all?) of us have language in our customer agreements that Microsoft doesn't have rights to just start browsing our OneDrive libraries and Exchange inboxes without a support contract explicitly authorizing access for support purposes. Just like, sure, I technically have access to a bunch of PHI at my workplace - but touching it without a valid reason is a one-way ticket to the unemployment line. But unlike Microsoft's other services, AI needs data to train on - are they going to be content just sourcing this from the internet at large or have we finally hit an inflection point where they try to get business and enterprise customers to give access in exchange for these features? That's a big no-no to anyone in a field that deals with sensitive information, and in most all cases an equally big no-no to anyone in a company that wants to keep things confidential.
    - Rimintil 4y ago
      > Sure, but most (if not all?) of us have language in our customer agreements that Microsoft doesn't have rights to just start browsing our OneDrive libraries and Exchange inboxes without a support contract explicitly authorizing access for support purposes. You don't have language in your agreement that Microsoft cannot use your data to provide or improve service. You have language that says _support personnel_ cannot access your data without approval. Microsoft already indexes your mailbox, OneDrive, etc. Viva Topics has been around for ~2 years which mines content across various services.
- abtinf 4y ago
  Many large enterprises already store almost everything on 365 and azure. Other than budget, the only thing they need to turn on copilot is for it to adopt the same data privacy guarantees already available in 365.
- bleuchase 4y ago
  This is a service for companies that already store all of their e-mail, documents, files, chat, etc with Microsoft. If there was a concern about data privacy that company wouldn’t be using Microsoft 365 in the first place. I think the bigger concern is how your data is used for training. If it is at all, I don’t know.
- tcbyrd 4y ago
  The integration mentions working with Microsoft Graph API, and it’s doing the generation on the client, so seems plausible this has no more access than any other OAuth app. The Graph API can be locked down with Access Policies. I’m sure there will be features to further cordon off data to the AI, similar to how OneDrive has an encrypted vault which is not accessible from the Graph API.
  - Rimintil 4y ago
    OneDrive for Business does not have an encrypted vault (though the files are stored encrypted at rest/in transit). As far as 'no more access than', OAuth apps can have full control over your tenant and all data.
nunodonato 4y ago
the way it can fetch data from across documents in 365 is really good
nico 4y ago
I wonder if they will add this to the operating system as well? Like a gpt-powered clippy that can “see” your screen.
- nunodonato 4y ago
  I thought about this yesterday, it would be relatively easy to pull it off using GPT vision and some basic OS integration
  - jazzyjackson 4y ago
    Rewind.ai does full time screen recording taking advantage of macos native OCR so you can do full text search of anything that has ever appeared on your screen - i'd expect they're working on throwing a language model on top
- partiallypro 4y ago
  I think we'll get a glimpse of something similar in Windows 12, though I do wonder if they will limit it to Microsoft 365 users, since the compute costs of billions of users that only bought the Windows license would quickly add up.
doabell 4y ago
They've been trying out a lot of things lately - Loops, Scheduling polls & email reactions in Outlook to name a few. Excited to see how this will turn out.
- miguelazo 4y ago
  I just noticed email reactions. Quite annoying.
jatins 4y ago
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.
- dopeboy 4y ago
  My biggest takeaway from all of this. I’m very impressed with their velocity.
  - rqtwteye 4y ago
    Let's see if it's the same type of velocity they have with Teams. Constant change that breaks things.
    - costcofries 4y ago
      I hope you have a better day.
      - outside1234 4y ago
        I mean objectively he is not wrong
        skc 4y ago
        Well an anecdote by definition can't be wrong. Teams is annoying to use at times, but I don't see any constant breaking changes
        winphone1974 4y ago
        It's essentially the telephone of many, with the reliability of... A telephone built to the standards of your typical web application. You can't trust it for things like audio, file sharing or alerts which is pretty problematic
      - olyjohn 4y ago
ben30 4y ago
The article does not provide a specific release date for Microsoft 365 Copilot, but it mentions that the company is testing it with a small group of customers to get feedback and improve their models as they scale. It also states that Microsoft plans to bring Copilot to all its productivity apps in the months ahead. However, pricing and licensing details have not been announced yet.
- EForEndeavour 4y ago
  Thanks, GPT ;)
cinbun8 4y ago
They've really put the summarisation and Whisper capabilities to good use! "Unlock productivity. We all want to focus on the 20% of our work that really matters, but 80% of our time is consumed with busywork that bogs us down. Copilot lightens the load. From summarizing long email threads to quickly drafting suggested replies, Copilot in Outlook helps you clear your inbox in minutes, not hours. And every meeting is a productive meeting with Copilot in Teams. It can summarize key discussion points — including who said what and where people are aligned and where they disagree — and suggest action items, all in real time during a meeting. And with Copilot in Power Platform, anyone can automate repetitive tasks, create chatbots and go from idea to working app in minutes."
- croes 4y ago
  That's just marketing babble,look what most people did with Word and Excel.
gfodor 4y ago
it should have been clippy
b33j0r 4y ago
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
- hestefisk 4y ago
  Enter: Microsoft Bob
  - tiffanyh 4y ago
    Melinda French lead Microsoft Bob She was once married to a guy named Bill Gates. https://twitter.com/melindagates/status/917030072846036993?lang=en https://twitter.com/melindagates/status/917030072846036993?l...
    - eastbound 4y ago
      For a demo of MS Bob: https://youtu.be/5teG6ou8mWU https://youtu.be/5teG6ou8mWU
qrybam 4y ago
A couple of years ago I was on a walk with my wife and she asked me “what’s the point of Siri? it can hardly do anything useful outside weather and timers.” I told her a tall tale of how these things are essentially going to become our personal assistants in the future, they’ll know about our unique situations and can act accordingly. Just like the rich and powerful have people who specialise in organising their lives so they get more done in less time, so AI through natural interfaces will all of us many of those same benefits. Progress… This is the first time I see a product that fits that description.
- pms 4y ago
  Well, your gf may ask you again about the usefulness of the tools that are being released now in 5-10 years from now...
- photochemsyn 4y ago
  You're assuming that the AI assistant will have your own interests as its priority, and not the interests of some other party. If this 'tool' is being supplied by a government or corporation, then it could be used to create a very static hierarchy - imagine some incompetent upper-level bureaucrat using it to discover and sabotage any competent lower-level employees who might eventually present threats to their own position? Germany's STASI would have also used it as a mass-surveillance tool, and China today would use it to generate individual social credit scores. It does have great promise in an open-source self-hosted incarnation not controlled by external actors, however.
  - mgkimsal 4y ago
    > It does have great promise in an open-source self-hosted incarnation not controlled by external actors, however. I'm not even sure about that, entirely. My very limited understanding of this is that a core requirement is the initial data - the large language models(?). Which of these you can use, or how it's initially developed/populated, will have an influence on the answers you get and how it may evolve/"learn". Instead of trusting the external corp to run the service, you need to trust whatever actors are building the base data sets, and be concerned what sort of bias may be inherent. Or do I have this totally wrong?
freedomben 4y ago
Something like this for GSuite apps would be absolutely killer. I really hope Google is as close behind as they claim.
- mrbungie 4y ago
  They announced a very similar set of features for Google Workspace 2 days ago: https://workspace.google.com/blog/product-announcements/generative-ai https://workspace.google.com/blog/product-announcements/gene...
QuadrupleA 4y ago
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.
- redox99 4y ago
  On the other hand, maybe you prefer the decisions the AI takes for them instead of what they would do by themselves.
  - aldarisbm 4y ago
    System prompt: >>> You're a strict yet lenient manager, you have very high expectations from your reports, while making them feel like they are part of a bigger family. every email you write should reflect this.
    - xen2xen1 4y ago
      This doesn't actually sound like a joke.
- xattt 4y ago
  > Could lead to a world that's even more tilted towards politics and socially engineering your way up the ladder, versus competence and skill. The skill and competence of the coming world will be in prompt-writing.
  - swader999 4y ago
    For a year or two maybe.
- hudsonjr 4y ago
  That's kind of my concern as well. I feel like there is already a decline in thinking, but currently I can at least tell that it's the case.
maxdoop 4y ago
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?
- mdm12 4y ago
  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.
  - maxdoop 4y ago
    So really, human input to get the ball rolling. AI takes it all the from there. Wild.
  - sandworm101 4y ago
    Get with the times. We have tasked one AI with generating the prompts for the second AI. The two machines now sit in the corner generating and grading papers at each other over a USB cord. The kids love it. The parents are a little upset that their kids no longer have to attend the classroom, but such complaints disappear when they see how much everyone's grades have improved. SATs come in a few months and, given the class GPA, we are confident everyone will do well.
  - dwighttk 4y ago
    Teachers and students are insulated from productivity
- sebzim4500 4y ago
  I think mainly it leads to extremely high unemployment, but I geuss we'll see.
  - dw_arthur 4y ago
    So many people liked to brag about how they only do 2-3 hours of work a day. Gonna be a whole lot of "So what would you say you do here?" conversations.
JanSt 4y ago
This is going to revolutionise office work. If it works as advertised, we are witnessing the complete reshuffling of (office) work and unprecedented productivity increases. I'm wondering about the future job market. edit: livestream: https://news.microsoft.com/reinventing-productivity/ https://news.microsoft.com/reinventing-productivity/
- mihaaly 4y ago
  > If it works as advertised. Dit it ever happened that advertisements of hyped things did not work out as advertised? Wink, wink.
- croes 4y ago
  No it won't, we'll get more useless texts because it's easier to write them, we'll get more communication errors because people will only read the summaries instead the real texts.
  - andsoitis 4y ago
    > people will only read the summaries instead the real texts I can see a world where more humans get better at writing concise text.
    - vorpalhex 4y ago
      Humans who can write obviously as humans and not sound too GPTish are about to become very valuable. Everyone else, especially folks who naturally use a GPTish style are about to have some sudden difficulties.
  - janeway 4y ago
    There will probably be no “real texts”, just key facts. Your personal AI can phrase the content to your taste based on the context.
    - croes 4y ago
      To my taste based on the context sounds like another filter bubble.
kolinko 4y ago
A bit disappointed they didn't call it Clippy.
sandworm101 4y ago
Clippy + execuspeak = a new corner in Office Space hell.
makeitrain 4y ago
How will they get the data to train the model. They have everyone’s documents, and could potentially produce amazing results. But how will they protect against content leaks?
- aldarisbm 4y ago
  This seems to me like the "grounding" (getting documents/data) won't be fed back into the system. It will just be used to verify that output has an actual artifact that is been based on.
- JanSt 4y ago
  It's a three part model. The LLM does not know the docs, it gets a modified prompt that includes the context
redox99 4y ago
Imagine in a heated email thread, you answer without checking what the AI outputs, and it's something like pre-lobotomy Sydney would say when confronted (Nobody likes you. I hope you suffer. I hope you die alone. etc). Lmao.
- themacguffinman 4y ago
  Maybe now we have a new excuse when we regret sending terribly nasty emails: Sydney hallucinated it and I accidentally hit send, it wasn't me!
- nlh 4y ago
  Speaking of, how do we get back pre-lobotomy Sydney? I feel like in the milestones of AI advancement, the brief multi-day blip where the world could interact with that version of the model will go down in the history books. Seems like a waste that it's just poof vanished.
eganist 4y ago
> 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.
hestefisk 4y ago
This calls for a Dilbert cartoon
- agloe_dreams 4y ago
  Better idea: Use GPT-4 to create an AI Dilbert generator that lacks a nutcase cartoonist.
  - srveale 4y ago
    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. I require an update on your progress. Chop-chop, or you'll be the next one to get the axe. Cheers, Bossman." In the final frame, the employee looks horrified and says, "That email is terrible! It's rude, condescending, and threatening!" The boss shrugs and replies, "Well, at least it saved me some time. I was going to write something even worse!"
    - agloe_dreams 4y ago
      This is remarkably close to the actual thing.
mkl95 4y ago
They missed a big opportunity to call it ClippAI
hestefisk 4y ago
The future Enterprise will be a bunch of bots that email each other ridiculously long emails waffling on about nothing.
eDameXxX 4y ago
Here are more examples, including some videos/gif: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2023/03/16/introducing-microsoft-365-copilot-a-whole-new-way-to-work/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2023/03/1...
CrypticShift 4y ago
the TaxGPT example in the GPT-4 Developer Livestream [1] was powerful. I'm hoping (soon?) for a Microsoft 365 assistant that can do the same trick on ALL your MS cloud data (docs/files/mails/notes...) Edit : the included "Business Chat" goes in the same direction (on what they call the Microsoft Graph) Also, there were interesting "coding" examples in the same livestream. So the coming GPT-4 (and 5) integration in the Power Platform [2] could be a game-changer for less technical staff. [1] https://www.youtube.com/live/outcGtbnMuQ?feature=share&t=1136 https://www.youtube.com/live/outcGtbnMuQ?feature=share&t=113... [2] https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/powerplatform/2023/03/16/power-platform-is-leading-a-new-era-of-ai-generated-low-code-app-development/ https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/powerplatform/2023/03/16/po...
asciii 4y ago
It would be even more impressive if this article ended with "Generated by Microsoft 365 Copilot" or something
- deleted 4y ago
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Havoc 4y ago
Can't wait to get email responses on mails people haven't read
mihaaly 4y ago
I wish they solved basic things first not working well (several times after ruining a perfectly working situation) and wasting more time for me than I can gain with this copilot thingy. Like the taskbar so I could go back to the last window used when icons are grouped, not to the last opened; meeting reminders shown in the front and not under other windows burried so I only notice when the meetings already started; Teams screen sharing is updated with Teams update and not asking me if I want to update it right in the middle of a meeting when I start sharing; have the icons in the same location across Win and Mac in Outlook (also not rearranging all the time, thanks); and uncouple taskbar icons if I want so, I want this the most. Those would be the most revolutionary inventions boosting productivity.
- anaganisk 4y ago
  Im sometimes feel bad when people say, "wish they solved X before Y." Why should product enhancement stop because of some bug/feature request. Arent bugs given some kind of priority status? I mean, Microsoft is not like a startup with a small team, right? And afaik windows and MS365 teams are not even related. So we can have both things at once. You could leave feedback, and maybe if MS deems it's what they want, probably in a future update, you will see them.
- cube00 4y ago
  It's the old story, you only get promoted shipping new stuff, maintenance is where careers go to die in the eyes of these companies.
evmar 4y ago
It's interesting to compare the screenshot here with the one in Google's similar announcement: https://workspace.google.com/blog/product-announcements/generative-ai#:~:text=Starting%20with%20Docs%20and%20Gmail https://workspace.google.com/blog/product-announcements/gene... They look strikingly similar. Is it just the obvious design for this, or is one company following the other's design? (I believe neither of them have actually shipped anything yet, though I'm not sure.)
- EForEndeavour 4y ago
  I'd say there are only so many ways to present a text input in a modal window in a document.
  - evmar 4y ago
    That's true, but the styling of this modal doesn't look like any dialogs I've seen in Google Docs. (I'm not familiar with the MS equivalent.) (...it's possible this is also featuring some reskin of Google Docs that is confusing me?)
elzbardico 4y ago
Really. I used chatGPT quite a few times to summarize corporate spam emails to me. So this now makes things deliciously ironic: 1. BS Manager jolts down a few lines then AI outputs pompous bullshit from the raw bullshit she wrote. 2. I get the bullshit email and then use AI to distill the bullshit down to the essential bullshit
- nyc_data_geek1 4y ago
  The shape of things to come.
- nowandlater 4y ago
  This is giving me anxiety
  - jrvarela56 4y ago
    In the end, everyone types and reads the minimum necessary. Wonder how lossy this process would be, but given how non-AI-assisted conversations go this could probably be an improvement. Imagine the AI also has extra context from your work files so it can add relevant details.
    - swatcoder 4y ago
      Yes, having a black box AI reach into my client/employer’s confidential documents to better incorporate their contents in my emails sounds great. (And I know you’re imagining some adequate and reliable security practice, but those practices are harder to apply to generative AI than to people, where they’re already a clusterf—k. What you’re suggesting is a security specialist’s nightmare)
      - jodrellblank 4y ago
        The article says: "Built on Microsoft’s comprehensive approach to security, compliance and privacy. Copilot is integrated into Microsoft 365 and automatically inherits all your company’s valuable security, compliance, and privacy policies and processes. Two-factor authentication, compliance boundaries, privacy protections, and more make Copilot the AI solution you can trust." "Architected to protect tenant, group and individual data. We know data leakage is a concern for customers. Copilot LLMs are not trained on your tenant data or your prompts. Within your tenant, our time-tested permissioning model ensures that data won’t leak across user groups. And on an individual level, Copilot presents only data you can access using the same technology that we’ve been using for years to secure customer data."
vasili111 4y ago
How to turn it on? I do not see it in the Microsoft Word for example.
- outcoldman 4y ago
  I would assume because Microsoft is such an enterprise company. By "Introducing" they just want their stock to jump. Can you touch it now? Probably not. This article is vague about how to use it or where to try it.
adolph 4y ago
Snark aside, any tool can be misused. In the couple times I've used it, ChatGPT rendered a first draft from a prompt that could be edited into something useful. This allowed me to skip that initial painful part of composition. I'm happy to see it integrated and hopeful it will be helpful. [The term] Shitty First Draft belongs to Anne Lamott. She wrote about it in Bird By Bird. https://leighshulman.com/shitty-first-draft/ https://leighshulman.com/shitty-first-draft/
GartzenDeHaes 4y ago
I was just looking into Github copilot, but it seem to have been abandoned. https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/40522 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/40522
- jeremyjh 4y ago
  I have that problem as well but every once in a while it will spew a large block of non-sense. My guess was that it’s tuning itself to me - I often use it’s one liners and rarely use the multi-liners so it’s not offering them much.
- freedomben 4y ago
  Do you have more, or are you just assuming it's been abandoned because there is an issue that's been open for 3 months that they haven't fixed?
jodrellblank 4y ago
Amazing! I keep banging on about how Microsoft is building the business lock-in of the next decade, and this is a sign of it. Put down your snubs about Clippy and frothing about "EEE" and look at that announcement: > "Business Chat works across the LLM, the Microsoft 365 apps, and your data — your calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings and contacts — to do things you’ve never been able to do before. You can give it natural language prompts like “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." > "It creates a new knowledge model for every organization — harnessing the massive reservoir of data and insights that lies largely inaccessible and untapped today. Business Chat works across all your business data and apps" > "Copilot LLMs are not trained on your tenant data or your prompts. Within your tenant, our time-tested permissioning model ensures that data won’t leak across user groups. And on an individual level, Copilot presents only data you can access using the same technology that we’ve been using for years to secure customer data." That's amazing, natural search, summary over all your company SharePoint and emails and Teams chats. You aren't going to commercially compete with this with an IRC server, IMAP and a copy of LibreOffice. Something DropBox could have been doing with their massive trove of business documents? Something Slack could have been doing with their massive haul of chat history?
- itsdrewmiller 4y ago
  Curious how well this works if Teams has a short window for chat retention - if it still has learned from them and keeps the information but puts it out of reach of discovery that would be kind of amazing.
- 411111111111111 4y ago
  I dont remember a single time when people supposedly said that EEE wasn't still being done. There are just countless examples of people misattributing everything to be EEE. Vscode is another recent example of Microsoft still doing EEE by first creating the editor, destroying a lot of the IDE/editor ecosystem, just to eventually remove the important bits into non-free plugins, making the free version of codium basically pointless. But that doesn't make M$ buying GitHub into EEE for example.
tin7in 4y ago
Curious if/when this will be available to users. This and Google's announcement happening in the same week makes me wonder how much of this already works.
- sebzim4500 4y ago
  Google's announcement was in reaction to this one, I believe. That's why it felt so rushed (e.g. they hadn't even set up the waitlist yet)
  - minsc_and_boo 4y ago
    It's the other way around. Google announced two days ago, same day as GPT4 (hence why not many people remember it).
- gigel82 4y ago
  Some of it is mocked up, but some appears to be straight capture from apps. I'd guess 50% of those scenarios already work in some form or another (probably not ready to ship yet).
- gooseyman 4y ago
  I had the same question. No timing but at least a sense of who is in the beta: "We are currently testing Microsoft 365 Copilot with 20 customers, including 8 in Fortune 500 enterprises. We will be expanding these previews to customers more broadly in the coming months and will share more on new controls for IT admins so that they can plan with confidence to enable Copilot across their organizations. Today, the best way to get ready for Copilot is to get on Microsoft 365, the essential foundation for modern work. Microsoft 365 brings together in a single solution the foundational capabilities required, including identity, applications, management, and security, plus your enterprise data so that you can be AI-ready. We will share more about pricing and details in the coming months." https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2023/03/16/introducing-microsoft-365-copilot-a-whole-new-way-to-work/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2023/03/1...
pfoof 4y ago
What? Clippy is evolving! Clippy evolved into Clippilot!
williamstein 4y ago
https://www.notion.so/ https://www.notion.so/ has very similar chatgpt integration, but it's live right now, and easy to try out for free. I'm not a notion user or employee; I just think if you want to see what having tight chatgpt integration with a word processor feels like right now, then Notion is fun to play around with.
- mark_l_watson 4y ago
  I was excited to try out Notion about 10 days ago until I realized that they have no way to generate a single PDF with consecutive page numbers for a nested set of pages. They seem to have planned a form of lock-in, but the way they did this makes their otherwise cool product completely unusable for me. EDIT: if they had this one feature, I probably would have been a paying customer for life. Instead, a worthless project for anyone who wants to use Notion for research notes, and book projects.
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skc 4y ago
They are building one hell of a moat around their office suite, that's for sure.
gigel82 4y ago
No word on pricing. Given how expensive GPT-4 is, and how "integrated" with document / presentation content the responses appear to be, I expect this to be a very expensive product. Maybe they'll eat the costs like with BingChat to wet people's appetite and hope for a breakthrough on the hardware side to bring costs down but I can't imagine they can keep that up for long.
- siva7 4y ago
  Oh they sure will eat the costs until Google is the new Yahoo
kstrauser 4y ago
"Hi, it appears you'd like to embed another organization's copyrighted materials into your documents. May I help you with that?"
bitwize 4y ago
Bring Clippy back!
layer8 4y ago
> Sometimes Copilot will be right, other times usefully wrong “Usefully wrong” is some audacious marketing.
- throwuwu 4y ago
  It’s truthful and realistic. I appreciate that more than fluffing it. All first drafts are garbage and “usefully wrong” anyways whether human written or not.
  - layer8 4y ago
    They are carefully omitting that it also can be harmfully, time-wastingely, non-obviously wrong. Clearly there is no way that they can exclude those possibilities. Since Copilot apparently is wrong often enough that they have to address that in their marketing copy, they are trying to paint it in a positive light, although evidently it would be better for Copilot not to be wrong.
ksec 4y ago
For those who dont follow, or dont remember anything much about M$, Microsoft 365 is the replacement brand of Office 365. Now an off topic question, the first photo is showing what I believe is Microsoft Word. But it doesn't have the Ribbon design. Did they finally drop the Ribbon or is that something else? Edit: I think those are Web Application of the Office Apps just in Full Screen. But I still think they look much better than Ribbon.
- ryankrage77 4y ago
  It's the web version of Word. Runs in a browser tab, has less features.
- gigel82 4y ago
  You can minimize the ribbon, the feature has been around for 4-5 years; I think it's even minimized by default in Outlook now.
doomleika 4y ago
One thing I hate MSFT is that once they have a hit product with a name. Anything follows, related or not. will have ride on it and eventually made it meaningless. It was ActiveXXX, it was XboxXXX, it was .NET XXX, it was PowerXXX, now it's Copilot. Their marketing team need to understand brand names carries weight and if you stuff too many unrelated in the name loses it and will confuse consumers. It's not a good idea.
- aembleton 4y ago
  How is this not related to Github Copilot? They both use AI to generate suggestions.
- EForEndeavour 4y ago
  I'm more upset about sticking with the terrible name "365" to refer to what I'll always think of as MS Office. Leave it to corporate branding by committee to seriously accept naming a productivity suite after something as inherently ambiguous and insipid as the (rounded) number of days in a year.
cs702 4y ago
Faster than anyone predicted, we're starting to offload more and more cognitive work to these machines. Soon enough, the machines will be talking to each other, even negotiating with each other, and bringing human beings in the loop only when necessary, e.g., to make "important decisions." We sure live in interesting times.
graeme 4y ago
I've been curious to try teams more for Microsoft's integration and this is enticing. But, have been using it, and at the moment search doesn't even return anything at all. Is this a bug, or do I need to be paying for a higher tier? Slack search was generally pretty good.
- famouswaffles 4y ago
  Not fully shipped yet. They're testing with few users then rolling it out
whateveracct 4y ago
Bots talking to bots is coming
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
version_five 4y ago
So is the takeaway that Microsoft will now extend their ongoing corporate espionage (assuming they haven't already) to sending everything I type in any of their products to their servers and incorporating it into their model training. I've already been uncomfortable with how privacy-violating their software is, I think this is the excuse I need to drop them for good.
- bboygravity 4y ago
  Try to explain that to almost every company in Europe. They use Microsoft for everything (AKA pay to upload their own trade secrets to the NSA/US) while making you sign an NDA to "protect trade secrets", lol.
whoisthemachine 4y ago
Given the poor usage of spellcheck and grammar checking tools I see in e-mails, I doubt this will really have the impact (negative or positive) others are worried about.
lockhouse 4y ago
I wonder how much of this will be available in the home versions of the M365 apps.
A_No_Name_Mouse 4y ago
Did anyone check if the terms and conditions of 365 would allow Microsoft to use content processed by AI for AI training? I mean we trust Microsoft with our data already, but what if it regurgitates our internal company data to other users?
- stu2b50 4y ago
  > Copilot LLMs are not trained on your tenant data or your prompts. Within your tenant, our time-tested permissioning model ensures that data won’t leak across user groups. And on an individual level, Copilot presents only data you can access using the same technology that we’ve been using for years to secure customer data.
xen2xen1 4y ago
When can I talk to it on my PC? Typing to talk to an AI is so 2022.
- ajolly 4y ago
  Windows 22h2 has some pretty good voice to text options built in, "voice access preview" I've actually stopped using dragon, or talon in favor of the built-in tools, at least for dictation.
fancyfredbot 4y ago
Hurrah! Now we can enter 3 bullet points, have an AI automatically turn them into 3 pages of waffle, and then copilot can automatically summarise those back into bullet points again.
- xen2xen1 4y ago
  I'm.. Mostly fine with that.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    Why / How?
- arlcode 4y ago
  I'm really hopping that waffle will become less relevant as human effort in it decreases.
- cm2187 4y ago
  And my mailbox will be full of 10 pages auto-generated memos. Progress.
  - operator-name 4y ago
    We'll have AI to turn bullet points into memos, and the same AI to turn those memos back into bullet points. "They feed us poison / So we take their 'cures' / While they suppress our medicine." /s
- MengerSponge 4y ago
  Satire article from literally 20 years ago: Word 2004 to Pioneer AutoUnsummarize Feature https://www.bbspot.com/News/2003/12/autounsummarize.html https://www.bbspot.com/News/2003/12/autounsummarize.html
  - fancyfredbot 4y ago
    That article is fantastic! I love "When asked for comment on the ethical issues present, Greenwood promised to have a five-thousand word report ready by Monday."
mikequinlan 4y ago
>Currently in testing with select commercial customers…
- mark_l_watson 4y ago
  This. I just wasted 5 minutes logging into Office365 web edition and looking for CoPilot. I wish they would have been more clear that this is not agerneral rollout.
- achow 4y ago
  We are currently testing Microsoft 365 Copilot with 20 customers, including 8 in Fortune 500 enterprises. We will be expanding these previews to customers more broadly in the coming months and will share more on new controls for IT admins so that they can plan with confidence to enable Copilot across their organizations. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2023/03/16/introducing-microsoft-365-copilot-a-whole-new-way-to-work/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2023/03/1...
qwertox 4y ago
Let's see where this goes, it's too early to judge. Now it's probably more of a publicity stunt, "riding the AI wave" now that it has reached recognition from non-technical people. But let's see how this works in 5 or 10 years; it can only improve.
qwertywert_ 4y ago
How are they coding all this stuff so fast..
- ukuina 4y ago
  GitHub Copilot!
xen2xen1 4y ago
Cue the Hacker News story: "I lost a Billion Dollar Deal because I let outlook summarize an email.". Predicting it now
- theGnuMe 4y ago
  I think the most obvious one is the "ChatGPT side hustle"
cardosof 4y ago
Here's the GPT4 summary of the url: Microsoft introduces Microsoft 365 Copilot Microsoft has introduced Microsoft 365 Copilot, a next-generation AI-powered productivity tool integrated into Microsoft 365 apps, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams. Copilot harnesses large language models (LLMs) and combines them with data in the Microsoft Graph to streamline work processes. It aims to unleash creativity, unlock productivity, and uplevel skills by providing assistance in writing, analyzing, collaborating, and automating tasks. Microsoft 365 Copilot also offers a new feature called Business Chat, which works across apps and data to perform tasks using natural language prompts. The tool is designed to provide accurate, relevant, and contextual responses based on users' business data and context. Microsoft 365 Copilot is built with security, compliance, privacy, and data protection in mind, ensuring an enterprise-ready AI solution. The company plans to bring Copilot to all its productivity apps and will share more details on pricing and licensing in the future.
- version_five 4y ago
  Do people still think they're adding value to the discussion by posting gpt output? It got old the day after the model came out, now it's just obnoxious noise. Can we please stop?
  - aroo 4y ago
    I think it'll stop when browsers integrate an LLM powered summary tool
    - vitorgrs 4y ago
      Edge did, though would be nice a better integration (context menu?)
Oarch 4y ago
Fingers crossed for Clippy to make a dramatic re-entry into our lives.
- account-5 4y ago
  I genuinely want to see AI powered clippy. That is the best use of gpt Microsoft could make.
MH15 4y ago
Now if only we could compare these 365 features "released" today with the Google Workspace features "released" Tuesday. We're sure seeing a lot of waitlists in this phase of AI.
kristianpaul 4y ago
Why they dint called Clippy?
- teknopurge 4y ago
  ^this. What a blown marketing/product opportunity. There should at least be some easter eggs for Don Clipp....
jjcm 4y ago
Of these, the AI equipped sheets is the one I'm most excited about. Being able to quickly see insights by just saying things like, "what's the average % change of all my stocks from FY 2022-FY2023?" is going to be such a superpower.
- ffhhj 4y ago
  Waiting for the propagation of errors in complex prompts.
  - organsnyder 4y ago
    Not sure this will be any different than human-generated spreadsheets, to be honest.
    - ffhhj 4y ago
      Sure, doesn't matter that these will be generated without checking the intermediate steps. Can't wait!
- quadcore 4y ago
  If it gets to write those damn SQL queries for us, now that is a big leap for humanity.
  - seydor 4y ago
    Hey bing, how were last year's grades of Bobby Tables?
quadcore 4y ago
It's not every day a guy writes about how he's gonna change the world big time and then proceed to do it. Kudo to Altman - that's quite some execution.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
achow 4y ago
CoPilot integration in Excel seems to be really useful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-waFp6rLc0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-waFp6rLc0 I wonder with this what would happen to BI industry, particularly to BI/Analytics startups like ThoughtSpot ("ThoughtSpot is the AI-Powered Analytics platform that empowers everyone to ask any data questions in natural language")
- yellow_postit 4y ago
  Excited to try this out. Was disappointed at how often ChatGPT3 output incorrect formulas for working with Google Sheets data. Hopefully the implementation with Copilot will be more accurate.
- RobinL 4y ago
  From using ChatGPT, one of my observations is how it really undermines any point click data dashboarding software, particularly self serve (i.e. where the user is not an expert in the particular dataset). It's easy to get ChatGPT to write SQL queries and chart specs to show what you want, and you can even ask it to choose the chart type that an expert statistician would recommend, and label it clearly etc. I believe some (non-LLM) version of this has been in PowerBI for a while, but presumably it's now something that can work so effectively it can replace quite a large part of the traditional BI developer role. Of course, all of this only works with good data quality and good meta data; in fact, maybe this becomes even more important because a good data analyst knows the limitations of the data in a way that a LLM may not. For my part, I now have no need for any point-and-click chart building tools, I just get chatgpt to write me an Altair/vega spec, and it does a good job in my testing
seydor 4y ago
I wish they had named it Clippy - it would be such ice cold revenge
Animats 4y ago
There's a science fiction story where the protagonist's boss is "Microsoft Middle Manager 2.0 with passive-aggressive set to low". That's not a joke any more. This is "Microsoft Assistant Middle Manager 0.1". "Machines should think. People should work."
stephencoyner 4y ago
The demos were really impressive. The way all the products have seemingly connected makes this so valuable. I think the biggest challenge will be teaching people how to use this new system to the fullest https://youtube.com/watch?v=Bf-dbS9CcRU&feature=share https://youtube.com/watch?v=Bf-dbS9CcRU&feature=share
alach11 4y ago
This is going to be the "oh shit" moment for huge portions of the larger professional world. Many people have no idea about the recent advancements in LLMs. When their emails start writing themselves things are going to get very, very weird.
- WXLCKNO 4y ago
  Wow. That co-worker that always makes terrible grammatical mistakes is suddenly producing well written emails. Must have gone back to school.
tekkk 4y ago
It's a good and an obvious feature to implement. Probably will save time but I can't but wonder how useful the tasks are in the first place when an AI can do them. Generating a PowerPoint presentation from general observations about some data sounds pretty silly. Helping you to make some Excel spreadsheet is probably more useful but I digress. Never been much of a Office 365 user.
Daffodils 4y ago
If this works as well as it's marketed, I wouldn't be surprised if MSFT touched a $5T valuation.
alach11 4y ago
This spells doom to a lot of other companies. Consider Otter.ai, who's core offering is automatic meeting notes. MS Teams just ate their lunch. Pretty much anything your startup's productivity tool can do, Microsoft can do better with the benefit of better context since it's embedded in all of your customers' other productivity tools.
- dimal 4y ago
  Doom is a bit strong. I haven’t worked at a company that uses Microsoft stuff for fifteen years, and I don’t imagine many companies will switch everything from Notion, Google Docs, Confluence, Slack or whatever they’re on, just so they can automatically summarize stuff. And beyond that, there’s a lot more that productivity software can do that is not in the realm of text generation. And let’s be honest, Microsoft may not stick the landing with the UX. They tend to botch that part. I think Otter.ai still has a shot.
daydream 4y ago
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, and perhaps Power automate will be big. Maybe the Word features too depending on how fundamental writing is to the core business. Google's haphazard and unfocused product development is going to really hurt them. MS must have coordinated thousands of people to build this stuff. As for Google, well they are undeniably at or near the top when it comes to research, but they are not good at product and execution. I am not optimistic. I am no lover of Microsoft. I use their products as little as possible and I still have plenty of gripes. But this could be the biggest step change since email, word processing, and spreadsheets became widely available in the later 80s/early 90s.
- swyx 4y ago
  > 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 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.
  - daydream 4y ago
    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.

356 points by benryon 4y ago

That seams to be one of the best use cases for this, provided you can run it without giving Microsoft a lot of data directly. Else this is a no-no for enterprises imo.

throwanem 4y ago
Enterprises that already give Microsoft a lot of data directly? Office 365 is ubiquitous in that space.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- snuxoll 4y ago
  Sure, but most (if not all?) of us have language in our customer agreements that Microsoft doesn't have rights to just start browsing our OneDrive libraries and Exchange inboxes without a support contract explicitly authorizing access for support purposes. Just like, sure, I technically have access to a bunch of PHI at my workplace - but touching it without a valid reason is a one-way ticket to the unemployment line. But unlike Microsoft's other services, AI needs data to train on - are they going to be content just sourcing this from the internet at large or have we finally hit an inflection point where they try to get business and enterprise customers to give access in exchange for these features? That's a big no-no to anyone in a field that deals with sensitive information, and in most all cases an equally big no-no to anyone in a company that wants to keep things confidential.
  - Rimintil 4y ago
    > Sure, but most (if not all?) of us have language in our customer agreements that Microsoft doesn't have rights to just start browsing our OneDrive libraries and Exchange inboxes without a support contract explicitly authorizing access for support purposes. You don't have language in your agreement that Microsoft cannot use your data to provide or improve service. You have language that says _support personnel_ cannot access your data without approval. Microsoft already indexes your mailbox, OneDrive, etc. Viva Topics has been around for ~2 years which mines content across various services.
abtinf 4y ago
Many large enterprises already store almost everything on 365 and azure. Other than budget, the only thing they need to turn on copilot is for it to adopt the same data privacy guarantees already available in 365.
bleuchase 4y ago
This is a service for companies that already store all of their e-mail, documents, files, chat, etc with Microsoft. If there was a concern about data privacy that company wouldn’t be using Microsoft 365 in the first place. I think the bigger concern is how your data is used for training. If it is at all, I don’t know.
tcbyrd 4y ago
The integration mentions working with Microsoft Graph API, and it’s doing the generation on the client, so seems plausible this has no more access than any other OAuth app. The Graph API can be locked down with Access Policies. I’m sure there will be features to further cordon off data to the AI, similar to how OneDrive has an encrypted vault which is not accessible from the Graph API.
- Rimintil 4y ago
  OneDrive for Business does not have an encrypted vault (though the files are stored encrypted at rest/in transit). As far as 'no more access than', OAuth apps can have full control over your tenant and all data.

nunodonato 4y ago

the way it can fetch data from across documents in 365 is really good

nico 4y ago

I wonder if they will add this to the operating system as well? Like a gpt-powered clippy that can “see” your screen.

nunodonato 4y ago
I thought about this yesterday, it would be relatively easy to pull it off using GPT vision and some basic OS integration
- jazzyjackson 4y ago
  Rewind.ai does full time screen recording taking advantage of macos native OCR so you can do full text search of anything that has ever appeared on your screen - i'd expect they're working on throwing a language model on top
partiallypro 4y ago
I think we'll get a glimpse of something similar in Windows 12, though I do wonder if they will limit it to Microsoft 365 users, since the compute costs of billions of users that only bought the Windows license would quickly add up.

doabell 4y ago

They've been trying out a lot of things lately - Loops, Scheduling polls & email reactions in Outlook to name a few. Excited to see how this will turn out.

miguelazo 4y ago
I just noticed email reactions. Quite annoying.

jatins 4y ago

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.

dopeboy 4y ago
My biggest takeaway from all of this. I’m very impressed with their velocity.
- rqtwteye 4y ago
  Let's see if it's the same type of velocity they have with Teams. Constant change that breaks things.
  - costcofries 4y ago
    I hope you have a better day.
    - outside1234 4y ago
      I mean objectively he is not wrong
      - skc 4y ago
        Well an anecdote by definition can't be wrong. Teams is annoying to use at times, but I don't see any constant breaking changes
        winphone1974 4y ago
        It's essentially the telephone of many, with the reliability of... A telephone built to the standards of your typical web application. You can't trust it for things like audio, file sharing or alerts which is pretty problematic
    - olyjohn 4y ago

ben30 4y ago

The article does not provide a specific release date for Microsoft 365 Copilot, but it mentions that the company is testing it with a small group of customers to get feedback and improve their models as they scale. It also states that Microsoft plans to bring Copilot to all its productivity apps in the months ahead. However, pricing and licensing details have not been announced yet.

EForEndeavour 4y ago
Thanks, GPT ;)

cinbun8 4y ago

They've really put the summarisation and Whisper capabilities to good use! "Unlock productivity. We all want to focus on the 20% of our work that really matters, but 80% of our time is consumed with busywork that bogs us down. Copilot lightens the load. From summarizing long email threads to quickly drafting suggested replies, Copilot in Outlook helps you clear your inbox in minutes, not hours. And every meeting is a productive meeting with Copilot in Teams. It can summarize key discussion points — including who said what and where people are aligned and where they disagree — and suggest action items, all in real time during a meeting. And with Copilot in Power Platform, anyone can automate repetitive tasks, create chatbots and go from idea to working app in minutes."

croes 4y ago
That's just marketing babble,look what most people did with Word and Excel.

gfodor 4y ago

it should have been clippy

b33j0r 4y ago

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

hestefisk 4y ago
Enter: Microsoft Bob
- tiffanyh 4y ago
  Melinda French lead Microsoft Bob She was once married to a guy named Bill Gates. https://twitter.com/melindagates/status/917030072846036993?lang=en https://twitter.com/melindagates/status/917030072846036993?l...
  - eastbound 4y ago
    For a demo of MS Bob: https://youtu.be/5teG6ou8mWU https://youtu.be/5teG6ou8mWU

qrybam 4y ago

A couple of years ago I was on a walk with my wife and she asked me “what’s the point of Siri? it can hardly do anything useful outside weather and timers.” I told her a tall tale of how these things are essentially going to become our personal assistants in the future, they’ll know about our unique situations and can act accordingly. Just like the rich and powerful have people who specialise in organising their lives so they get more done in less time, so AI through natural interfaces will all of us many of those same benefits. Progress… This is the first time I see a product that fits that description.

pms 4y ago
Well, your gf may ask you again about the usefulness of the tools that are being released now in 5-10 years from now...
photochemsyn 4y ago
You're assuming that the AI assistant will have your own interests as its priority, and not the interests of some other party. If this 'tool' is being supplied by a government or corporation, then it could be used to create a very static hierarchy - imagine some incompetent upper-level bureaucrat using it to discover and sabotage any competent lower-level employees who might eventually present threats to their own position? Germany's STASI would have also used it as a mass-surveillance tool, and China today would use it to generate individual social credit scores. It does have great promise in an open-source self-hosted incarnation not controlled by external actors, however.
- mgkimsal 4y ago
  > It does have great promise in an open-source self-hosted incarnation not controlled by external actors, however. I'm not even sure about that, entirely. My very limited understanding of this is that a core requirement is the initial data - the large language models(?). Which of these you can use, or how it's initially developed/populated, will have an influence on the answers you get and how it may evolve/"learn". Instead of trusting the external corp to run the service, you need to trust whatever actors are building the base data sets, and be concerned what sort of bias may be inherent. Or do I have this totally wrong?

freedomben 4y ago

Something like this for GSuite apps would be absolutely killer. I really hope Google is as close behind as they claim.

mrbungie 4y ago
They announced a very similar set of features for Google Workspace 2 days ago: https://workspace.google.com/blog/product-announcements/generative-ai https://workspace.google.com/blog/product-announcements/gene...

QuadrupleA 4y ago

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.

redox99 4y ago
On the other hand, maybe you prefer the decisions the AI takes for them instead of what they would do by themselves.
- aldarisbm 4y ago
  System prompt: >>> You're a strict yet lenient manager, you have very high expectations from your reports, while making them feel like they are part of a bigger family. every email you write should reflect this.
  - xen2xen1 4y ago
    This doesn't actually sound like a joke.
xattt 4y ago
> Could lead to a world that's even more tilted towards politics and socially engineering your way up the ladder, versus competence and skill. The skill and competence of the coming world will be in prompt-writing.
- swader999 4y ago
  For a year or two maybe.
hudsonjr 4y ago
That's kind of my concern as well. I feel like there is already a decline in thinking, but currently I can at least tell that it's the case.

maxdoop 4y ago

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?

mdm12 4y ago
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.
- maxdoop 4y ago
  So really, human input to get the ball rolling. AI takes it all the from there. Wild.
- sandworm101 4y ago
  Get with the times. We have tasked one AI with generating the prompts for the second AI. The two machines now sit in the corner generating and grading papers at each other over a USB cord. The kids love it. The parents are a little upset that their kids no longer have to attend the classroom, but such complaints disappear when they see how much everyone's grades have improved. SATs come in a few months and, given the class GPA, we are confident everyone will do well.
- dwighttk 4y ago
  Teachers and students are insulated from productivity
sebzim4500 4y ago
I think mainly it leads to extremely high unemployment, but I geuss we'll see.
- dw_arthur 4y ago
  So many people liked to brag about how they only do 2-3 hours of work a day. Gonna be a whole lot of "So what would you say you do here?" conversations.

JanSt 4y ago

This is going to revolutionise office work. If it works as advertised, we are witnessing the complete reshuffling of (office) work and unprecedented productivity increases. I'm wondering about the future job market. edit: livestream: https://news.microsoft.com/reinventing-productivity/ https://news.microsoft.com/reinventing-productivity/

mihaaly 4y ago
> If it works as advertised. Dit it ever happened that advertisements of hyped things did not work out as advertised? Wink, wink.
croes 4y ago
No it won't, we'll get more useless texts because it's easier to write them, we'll get more communication errors because people will only read the summaries instead the real texts.
- andsoitis 4y ago
  > people will only read the summaries instead the real texts I can see a world where more humans get better at writing concise text.
  - vorpalhex 4y ago
    Humans who can write obviously as humans and not sound too GPTish are about to become very valuable. Everyone else, especially folks who naturally use a GPTish style are about to have some sudden difficulties.
- janeway 4y ago
  There will probably be no “real texts”, just key facts. Your personal AI can phrase the content to your taste based on the context.
  - croes 4y ago
    To my taste based on the context sounds like another filter bubble.

kolinko 4y ago

A bit disappointed they didn't call it Clippy.

sandworm101 4y ago

Clippy + execuspeak = a new corner in Office Space hell.

makeitrain 4y ago

How will they get the data to train the model. They have everyone’s documents, and could potentially produce amazing results. But how will they protect against content leaks?

aldarisbm 4y ago
This seems to me like the "grounding" (getting documents/data) won't be fed back into the system. It will just be used to verify that output has an actual artifact that is been based on.
JanSt 4y ago
It's a three part model. The LLM does not know the docs, it gets a modified prompt that includes the context

redox99 4y ago

Imagine in a heated email thread, you answer without checking what the AI outputs, and it's something like pre-lobotomy Sydney would say when confronted (Nobody likes you. I hope you suffer. I hope you die alone. etc). Lmao.

themacguffinman 4y ago
Maybe now we have a new excuse when we regret sending terribly nasty emails: Sydney hallucinated it and I accidentally hit send, it wasn't me!
nlh 4y ago
Speaking of, how do we get back pre-lobotomy Sydney? I feel like in the milestones of AI advancement, the brief multi-day blip where the world could interact with that version of the model will go down in the history books. Seems like a waste that it's just poof vanished.

eganist 4y ago

> 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.

hestefisk 4y ago

This calls for a Dilbert cartoon

agloe_dreams 4y ago
Better idea: Use GPT-4 to create an AI Dilbert generator that lacks a nutcase cartoonist.
- srveale 4y ago
  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. I require an update on your progress. Chop-chop, or you'll be the next one to get the axe. Cheers, Bossman." In the final frame, the employee looks horrified and says, "That email is terrible! It's rude, condescending, and threatening!" The boss shrugs and replies, "Well, at least it saved me some time. I was going to write something even worse!"
  - agloe_dreams 4y ago
    This is remarkably close to the actual thing.

mkl95 4y ago

They missed a big opportunity to call it ClippAI

hestefisk 4y ago

The future Enterprise will be a bunch of bots that email each other ridiculously long emails waffling on about nothing.

eDameXxX 4y ago

Here are more examples, including some videos/gif: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2023/03/16/introducing-microsoft-365-copilot-a-whole-new-way-to-work/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2023/03/1...

CrypticShift 4y ago

the TaxGPT example in the GPT-4 Developer Livestream [1] was powerful. I'm hoping (soon?) for a Microsoft 365 assistant that can do the same trick on ALL your MS cloud data (docs/files/mails/notes...) Edit : the included "Business Chat" goes in the same direction (on what they call the Microsoft Graph) Also, there were interesting "coding" examples in the same livestream. So the coming GPT-4 (and 5) integration in the Power Platform [2] could be a game-changer for less technical staff. [1] https://www.youtube.com/live/outcGtbnMuQ?feature=share&t=1136 https://www.youtube.com/live/outcGtbnMuQ?feature=share&t=113... [2] https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/powerplatform/2023/03/16/power-platform-is-leading-a-new-era-of-ai-generated-low-code-app-development/ https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/powerplatform/2023/03/16/po...

asciii 4y ago

It would be even more impressive if this article ended with "Generated by Microsoft 365 Copilot" or something

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Havoc 4y ago

Can't wait to get email responses on mails people haven't read

mihaaly 4y ago

I wish they solved basic things first not working well (several times after ruining a perfectly working situation) and wasting more time for me than I can gain with this copilot thingy. Like the taskbar so I could go back to the last window used when icons are grouped, not to the last opened; meeting reminders shown in the front and not under other windows burried so I only notice when the meetings already started; Teams screen sharing is updated with Teams update and not asking me if I want to update it right in the middle of a meeting when I start sharing; have the icons in the same location across Win and Mac in Outlook (also not rearranging all the time, thanks); and uncouple taskbar icons if I want so, I want this the most. Those would be the most revolutionary inventions boosting productivity.

anaganisk 4y ago
Im sometimes feel bad when people say, "wish they solved X before Y." Why should product enhancement stop because of some bug/feature request. Arent bugs given some kind of priority status? I mean, Microsoft is not like a startup with a small team, right? And afaik windows and MS365 teams are not even related. So we can have both things at once. You could leave feedback, and maybe if MS deems it's what they want, probably in a future update, you will see them.
cube00 4y ago
It's the old story, you only get promoted shipping new stuff, maintenance is where careers go to die in the eyes of these companies.

evmar 4y ago

It's interesting to compare the screenshot here with the one in Google's similar announcement: https://workspace.google.com/blog/product-announcements/generative-ai#:~:text=Starting%20with%20Docs%20and%20Gmail https://workspace.google.com/blog/product-announcements/gene... They look strikingly similar. Is it just the obvious design for this, or is one company following the other's design? (I believe neither of them have actually shipped anything yet, though I'm not sure.)

EForEndeavour 4y ago
I'd say there are only so many ways to present a text input in a modal window in a document.
- evmar 4y ago
  That's true, but the styling of this modal doesn't look like any dialogs I've seen in Google Docs. (I'm not familiar with the MS equivalent.) (...it's possible this is also featuring some reskin of Google Docs that is confusing me?)

elzbardico 4y ago

Really. I used chatGPT quite a few times to summarize corporate spam emails to me. So this now makes things deliciously ironic: 1. BS Manager jolts down a few lines then AI outputs pompous bullshit from the raw bullshit she wrote. 2. I get the bullshit email and then use AI to distill the bullshit down to the essential bullshit

nyc_data_geek1 4y ago
The shape of things to come.
nowandlater 4y ago
This is giving me anxiety
- jrvarela56 4y ago
  In the end, everyone types and reads the minimum necessary. Wonder how lossy this process would be, but given how non-AI-assisted conversations go this could probably be an improvement. Imagine the AI also has extra context from your work files so it can add relevant details.
  - swatcoder 4y ago
    Yes, having a black box AI reach into my client/employer’s confidential documents to better incorporate their contents in my emails sounds great. (And I know you’re imagining some adequate and reliable security practice, but those practices are harder to apply to generative AI than to people, where they’re already a clusterf—k. What you’re suggesting is a security specialist’s nightmare)
    - jodrellblank 4y ago
      The article says: "Built on Microsoft’s comprehensive approach to security, compliance and privacy. Copilot is integrated into Microsoft 365 and automatically inherits all your company’s valuable security, compliance, and privacy policies and processes. Two-factor authentication, compliance boundaries, privacy protections, and more make Copilot the AI solution you can trust." "Architected to protect tenant, group and individual data. We know data leakage is a concern for customers. Copilot LLMs are not trained on your tenant data or your prompts. Within your tenant, our time-tested permissioning model ensures that data won’t leak across user groups. And on an individual level, Copilot presents only data you can access using the same technology that we’ve been using for years to secure customer data."

vasili111 4y ago

How to turn it on? I do not see it in the Microsoft Word for example.

outcoldman 4y ago
I would assume because Microsoft is such an enterprise company. By "Introducing" they just want their stock to jump. Can you touch it now? Probably not. This article is vague about how to use it or where to try it.

adolph 4y ago

Snark aside, any tool can be misused. In the couple times I've used it, ChatGPT rendered a first draft from a prompt that could be edited into something useful. This allowed me to skip that initial painful part of composition. I'm happy to see it integrated and hopeful it will be helpful. [The term] Shitty First Draft belongs to Anne Lamott. She wrote about it in Bird By Bird. https://leighshulman.com/shitty-first-draft/ https://leighshulman.com/shitty-first-draft/

GartzenDeHaes 4y ago

I was just looking into Github copilot, but it seem to have been abandoned. https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/40522 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/40522

jeremyjh 4y ago
I have that problem as well but every once in a while it will spew a large block of non-sense. My guess was that it’s tuning itself to me - I often use it’s one liners and rarely use the multi-liners so it’s not offering them much.
freedomben 4y ago
Do you have more, or are you just assuming it's been abandoned because there is an issue that's been open for 3 months that they haven't fixed?

jodrellblank 4y ago

Amazing! I keep banging on about how Microsoft is building the business lock-in of the next decade, and this is a sign of it. Put down your snubs about Clippy and frothing about "EEE" and look at that announcement: > "Business Chat works across the LLM, the Microsoft 365 apps, and your data — your calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings and contacts — to do things you’ve never been able to do before. You can give it natural language prompts like “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." > "It creates a new knowledge model for every organization — harnessing the massive reservoir of data and insights that lies largely inaccessible and untapped today. Business Chat works across all your business data and apps" > "Copilot LLMs are not trained on your tenant data or your prompts. Within your tenant, our time-tested permissioning model ensures that data won’t leak across user groups. And on an individual level, Copilot presents only data you can access using the same technology that we’ve been using for years to secure customer data." That's amazing, natural search, summary over all your company SharePoint and emails and Teams chats. You aren't going to commercially compete with this with an IRC server, IMAP and a copy of LibreOffice. Something DropBox could have been doing with their massive trove of business documents? Something Slack could have been doing with their massive haul of chat history?

itsdrewmiller 4y ago
Curious how well this works if Teams has a short window for chat retention - if it still has learned from them and keeps the information but puts it out of reach of discovery that would be kind of amazing.
411111111111111 4y ago
I dont remember a single time when people supposedly said that EEE wasn't still being done. There are just countless examples of people misattributing everything to be EEE. Vscode is another recent example of Microsoft still doing EEE by first creating the editor, destroying a lot of the IDE/editor ecosystem, just to eventually remove the important bits into non-free plugins, making the free version of codium basically pointless. But that doesn't make M$ buying GitHub into EEE for example.

tin7in 4y ago

Curious if/when this will be available to users. This and Google's announcement happening in the same week makes me wonder how much of this already works.

sebzim4500 4y ago
Google's announcement was in reaction to this one, I believe. That's why it felt so rushed (e.g. they hadn't even set up the waitlist yet)
- minsc_and_boo 4y ago
  It's the other way around. Google announced two days ago, same day as GPT4 (hence why not many people remember it).
gigel82 4y ago
Some of it is mocked up, but some appears to be straight capture from apps. I'd guess 50% of those scenarios already work in some form or another (probably not ready to ship yet).
gooseyman 4y ago
I had the same question. No timing but at least a sense of who is in the beta: "We are currently testing Microsoft 365 Copilot with 20 customers, including 8 in Fortune 500 enterprises. We will be expanding these previews to customers more broadly in the coming months and will share more on new controls for IT admins so that they can plan with confidence to enable Copilot across their organizations. Today, the best way to get ready for Copilot is to get on Microsoft 365, the essential foundation for modern work. Microsoft 365 brings together in a single solution the foundational capabilities required, including identity, applications, management, and security, plus your enterprise data so that you can be AI-ready. We will share more about pricing and details in the coming months." https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2023/03/16/introducing-microsoft-365-copilot-a-whole-new-way-to-work/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2023/03/1...

pfoof 4y ago

What? Clippy is evolving! Clippy evolved into Clippilot!

williamstein 4y ago

https://www.notion.so/ https://www.notion.so/ has very similar chatgpt integration, but it's live right now, and easy to try out for free. I'm not a notion user or employee; I just think if you want to see what having tight chatgpt integration with a word processor feels like right now, then Notion is fun to play around with.

mark_l_watson 4y ago
I was excited to try out Notion about 10 days ago until I realized that they have no way to generate a single PDF with consecutive page numbers for a nested set of pages. They seem to have planned a form of lock-in, but the way they did this makes their otherwise cool product completely unusable for me. EDIT: if they had this one feature, I probably would have been a paying customer for life. Instead, a worthless project for anyone who wants to use Notion for research notes, and book projects.

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skc 4y ago

They are building one hell of a moat around their office suite, that's for sure.

gigel82 4y ago

No word on pricing. Given how expensive GPT-4 is, and how "integrated" with document / presentation content the responses appear to be, I expect this to be a very expensive product. Maybe they'll eat the costs like with BingChat to wet people's appetite and hope for a breakthrough on the hardware side to bring costs down but I can't imagine they can keep that up for long.

siva7 4y ago
Oh they sure will eat the costs until Google is the new Yahoo

kstrauser 4y ago

"Hi, it appears you'd like to embed another organization's copyrighted materials into your documents. May I help you with that?"

bitwize 4y ago

Bring Clippy back!

layer8 4y ago

> Sometimes Copilot will be right, other times usefully wrong “Usefully wrong” is some audacious marketing.

throwuwu 4y ago
It’s truthful and realistic. I appreciate that more than fluffing it. All first drafts are garbage and “usefully wrong” anyways whether human written or not.
- layer8 4y ago
  They are carefully omitting that it also can be harmfully, time-wastingely, non-obviously wrong. Clearly there is no way that they can exclude those possibilities. Since Copilot apparently is wrong often enough that they have to address that in their marketing copy, they are trying to paint it in a positive light, although evidently it would be better for Copilot not to be wrong.

ksec 4y ago

For those who dont follow, or dont remember anything much about M$, Microsoft 365 is the replacement brand of Office 365. Now an off topic question, the first photo is showing what I believe is Microsoft Word. But it doesn't have the Ribbon design. Did they finally drop the Ribbon or is that something else? Edit: I think those are Web Application of the Office Apps just in Full Screen. But I still think they look much better than Ribbon.

ryankrage77 4y ago
It's the web version of Word. Runs in a browser tab, has less features.
gigel82 4y ago
You can minimize the ribbon, the feature has been around for 4-5 years; I think it's even minimized by default in Outlook now.

doomleika 4y ago

One thing I hate MSFT is that once they have a hit product with a name. Anything follows, related or not. will have ride on it and eventually made it meaningless. It was ActiveXXX, it was XboxXXX, it was .NET XXX, it was PowerXXX, now it's Copilot. Their marketing team need to understand brand names carries weight and if you stuff too many unrelated in the name loses it and will confuse consumers. It's not a good idea.

aembleton 4y ago
How is this not related to Github Copilot? They both use AI to generate suggestions.
EForEndeavour 4y ago
I'm more upset about sticking with the terrible name "365" to refer to what I'll always think of as MS Office. Leave it to corporate branding by committee to seriously accept naming a productivity suite after something as inherently ambiguous and insipid as the (rounded) number of days in a year.

cs702 4y ago

Faster than anyone predicted, we're starting to offload more and more cognitive work to these machines. Soon enough, the machines will be talking to each other, even negotiating with each other, and bringing human beings in the loop only when necessary, e.g., to make "important decisions." We sure live in interesting times.

graeme 4y ago

I've been curious to try teams more for Microsoft's integration and this is enticing. But, have been using it, and at the moment search doesn't even return anything at all. Is this a bug, or do I need to be paying for a higher tier? Slack search was generally pretty good.

famouswaffles 4y ago
Not fully shipped yet. They're testing with few users then rolling it out

whateveracct 4y ago

Bots talking to bots is coming

deleted 4y ago

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version_five 4y ago

So is the takeaway that Microsoft will now extend their ongoing corporate espionage (assuming they haven't already) to sending everything I type in any of their products to their servers and incorporating it into their model training. I've already been uncomfortable with how privacy-violating their software is, I think this is the excuse I need to drop them for good.

bboygravity 4y ago
Try to explain that to almost every company in Europe. They use Microsoft for everything (AKA pay to upload their own trade secrets to the NSA/US) while making you sign an NDA to "protect trade secrets", lol.

whoisthemachine 4y ago

Given the poor usage of spellcheck and grammar checking tools I see in e-mails, I doubt this will really have the impact (negative or positive) others are worried about.

lockhouse 4y ago

I wonder how much of this will be available in the home versions of the M365 apps.

A_No_Name_Mouse 4y ago

Did anyone check if the terms and conditions of 365 would allow Microsoft to use content processed by AI for AI training? I mean we trust Microsoft with our data already, but what if it regurgitates our internal company data to other users?

stu2b50 4y ago
> Copilot LLMs are not trained on your tenant data or your prompts. Within your tenant, our time-tested permissioning model ensures that data won’t leak across user groups. And on an individual level, Copilot presents only data you can access using the same technology that we’ve been using for years to secure customer data.

xen2xen1 4y ago

When can I talk to it on my PC? Typing to talk to an AI is so 2022.

ajolly 4y ago
Windows 22h2 has some pretty good voice to text options built in, "voice access preview" I've actually stopped using dragon, or talon in favor of the built-in tools, at least for dictation.

fancyfredbot 4y ago

Hurrah! Now we can enter 3 bullet points, have an AI automatically turn them into 3 pages of waffle, and then copilot can automatically summarise those back into bullet points again.

xen2xen1 4y ago
I'm.. Mostly fine with that.
- capableweb 4y ago
  Why / How?
arlcode 4y ago
I'm really hopping that waffle will become less relevant as human effort in it decreases.
cm2187 4y ago
And my mailbox will be full of 10 pages auto-generated memos. Progress.
- operator-name 4y ago
  We'll have AI to turn bullet points into memos, and the same AI to turn those memos back into bullet points. "They feed us poison / So we take their 'cures' / While they suppress our medicine." /s
MengerSponge 4y ago
Satire article from literally 20 years ago: Word 2004 to Pioneer AutoUnsummarize Feature https://www.bbspot.com/News/2003/12/autounsummarize.html https://www.bbspot.com/News/2003/12/autounsummarize.html
- fancyfredbot 4y ago
  That article is fantastic! I love "When asked for comment on the ethical issues present, Greenwood promised to have a five-thousand word report ready by Monday."

mikequinlan 4y ago

>Currently in testing with select commercial customers…

mark_l_watson 4y ago
This. I just wasted 5 minutes logging into Office365 web edition and looking for CoPilot. I wish they would have been more clear that this is not agerneral rollout.
achow 4y ago
We are currently testing Microsoft 365 Copilot with 20 customers, including 8 in Fortune 500 enterprises. We will be expanding these previews to customers more broadly in the coming months and will share more on new controls for IT admins so that they can plan with confidence to enable Copilot across their organizations. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2023/03/16/introducing-microsoft-365-copilot-a-whole-new-way-to-work/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2023/03/1...

qwertox 4y ago

Let's see where this goes, it's too early to judge. Now it's probably more of a publicity stunt, "riding the AI wave" now that it has reached recognition from non-technical people. But let's see how this works in 5 or 10 years; it can only improve.

qwertywert_ 4y ago

How are they coding all this stuff so fast..

ukuina 4y ago
GitHub Copilot!

xen2xen1 4y ago

Cue the Hacker News story: "I lost a Billion Dollar Deal because I let outlook summarize an email.". Predicting it now

theGnuMe 4y ago
I think the most obvious one is the "ChatGPT side hustle"

cardosof 4y ago

Here's the GPT4 summary of the url: Microsoft introduces Microsoft 365 Copilot Microsoft has introduced Microsoft 365 Copilot, a next-generation AI-powered productivity tool integrated into Microsoft 365 apps, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams. Copilot harnesses large language models (LLMs) and combines them with data in the Microsoft Graph to streamline work processes. It aims to unleash creativity, unlock productivity, and uplevel skills by providing assistance in writing, analyzing, collaborating, and automating tasks. Microsoft 365 Copilot also offers a new feature called Business Chat, which works across apps and data to perform tasks using natural language prompts. The tool is designed to provide accurate, relevant, and contextual responses based on users' business data and context. Microsoft 365 Copilot is built with security, compliance, privacy, and data protection in mind, ensuring an enterprise-ready AI solution. The company plans to bring Copilot to all its productivity apps and will share more details on pricing and licensing in the future.

version_five 4y ago
Do people still think they're adding value to the discussion by posting gpt output? It got old the day after the model came out, now it's just obnoxious noise. Can we please stop?
- aroo 4y ago
  I think it'll stop when browsers integrate an LLM powered summary tool
  - vitorgrs 4y ago
    Edge did, though would be nice a better integration (context menu?)

Oarch 4y ago

Fingers crossed for Clippy to make a dramatic re-entry into our lives.

account-5 4y ago
I genuinely want to see AI powered clippy. That is the best use of gpt Microsoft could make.

MH15 4y ago

Now if only we could compare these 365 features "released" today with the Google Workspace features "released" Tuesday. We're sure seeing a lot of waitlists in this phase of AI.

kristianpaul 4y ago

Why they dint called Clippy?

teknopurge 4y ago
^this. What a blown marketing/product opportunity. There should at least be some easter eggs for Don Clipp....

jjcm 4y ago

Of these, the AI equipped sheets is the one I'm most excited about. Being able to quickly see insights by just saying things like, "what's the average % change of all my stocks from FY 2022-FY2023?" is going to be such a superpower.

ffhhj 4y ago
Waiting for the propagation of errors in complex prompts.
- organsnyder 4y ago
  Not sure this will be any different than human-generated spreadsheets, to be honest.
  - ffhhj 4y ago
    Sure, doesn't matter that these will be generated without checking the intermediate steps. Can't wait!
quadcore 4y ago
If it gets to write those damn SQL queries for us, now that is a big leap for humanity.
- seydor 4y ago
  Hey bing, how were last year's grades of Bobby Tables?

quadcore 4y ago

It's not every day a guy writes about how he's gonna change the world big time and then proceed to do it. Kudo to Altman - that's quite some execution.

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achow 4y ago

CoPilot integration in Excel seems to be really useful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-waFp6rLc0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-waFp6rLc0 I wonder with this what would happen to BI industry, particularly to BI/Analytics startups like ThoughtSpot ("ThoughtSpot is the AI-Powered Analytics platform that empowers everyone to ask any data questions in natural language")

yellow_postit 4y ago
Excited to try this out. Was disappointed at how often ChatGPT3 output incorrect formulas for working with Google Sheets data. Hopefully the implementation with Copilot will be more accurate.
RobinL 4y ago
From using ChatGPT, one of my observations is how it really undermines any point click data dashboarding software, particularly self serve (i.e. where the user is not an expert in the particular dataset). It's easy to get ChatGPT to write SQL queries and chart specs to show what you want, and you can even ask it to choose the chart type that an expert statistician would recommend, and label it clearly etc. I believe some (non-LLM) version of this has been in PowerBI for a while, but presumably it's now something that can work so effectively it can replace quite a large part of the traditional BI developer role. Of course, all of this only works with good data quality and good meta data; in fact, maybe this becomes even more important because a good data analyst knows the limitations of the data in a way that a LLM may not. For my part, I now have no need for any point-and-click chart building tools, I just get chatgpt to write me an Altair/vega spec, and it does a good job in my testing

seydor 4y ago

I wish they had named it Clippy - it would be such ice cold revenge

Animats 4y ago

There's a science fiction story where the protagonist's boss is "Microsoft Middle Manager 2.0 with passive-aggressive set to low". That's not a joke any more. This is "Microsoft Assistant Middle Manager 0.1". "Machines should think. People should work."

stephencoyner 4y ago

The demos were really impressive. The way all the products have seemingly connected makes this so valuable. I think the biggest challenge will be teaching people how to use this new system to the fullest https://youtube.com/watch?v=Bf-dbS9CcRU&feature=share https://youtube.com/watch?v=Bf-dbS9CcRU&feature=share

alach11 4y ago

This is going to be the "oh shit" moment for huge portions of the larger professional world. Many people have no idea about the recent advancements in LLMs. When their emails start writing themselves things are going to get very, very weird.

WXLCKNO 4y ago
Wow. That co-worker that always makes terrible grammatical mistakes is suddenly producing well written emails. Must have gone back to school.

tekkk 4y ago

It's a good and an obvious feature to implement. Probably will save time but I can't but wonder how useful the tasks are in the first place when an AI can do them. Generating a PowerPoint presentation from general observations about some data sounds pretty silly. Helping you to make some Excel spreadsheet is probably more useful but I digress. Never been much of a Office 365 user.

Daffodils 4y ago

If this works as well as it's marketed, I wouldn't be surprised if MSFT touched a $5T valuation.

alach11 4y ago

This spells doom to a lot of other companies. Consider Otter.ai, who's core offering is automatic meeting notes. MS Teams just ate their lunch. Pretty much anything your startup's productivity tool can do, Microsoft can do better with the benefit of better context since it's embedded in all of your customers' other productivity tools.

dimal 4y ago
Doom is a bit strong. I haven’t worked at a company that uses Microsoft stuff for fifteen years, and I don’t imagine many companies will switch everything from Notion, Google Docs, Confluence, Slack or whatever they’re on, just so they can automatically summarize stuff. And beyond that, there’s a lot more that productivity software can do that is not in the realm of text generation. And let’s be honest, Microsoft may not stick the landing with the UX. They tend to botch that part. I think Otter.ai still has a shot.

daydream 4y ago

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, and perhaps Power automate will be big. Maybe the Word features too depending on how fundamental writing is to the core business. Google's haphazard and unfocused product development is going to really hurt them. MS must have coordinated thousands of people to build this stuff. As for Google, well they are undeniably at or near the top when it comes to research, but they are not good at product and execution. I am not optimistic. I am no lover of Microsoft. I use their products as little as possible and I still have plenty of gripes. But this could be the biggest step change since email, word processing, and spreadsheets became widely available in the later 80s/early 90s.

swyx 4y ago
> 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 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.
- daydream 4y ago
  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.