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What spreadsheets need? LLMs, says Microsoft
- wkat4242 2y agoI hope it helps because right now copilot is really not good at Excel.
- cyanydeez 2y agoRIP copy-paste. Theyll probably find a way to doom dna science again.
- ThrowawayTestr 2y agoIt's not Microsoft's fault geneticists were using Excel incorrectly.
- terribleperson 2y agoThey're going to give tax accountants across the country terrible headaches.
- jazzyjackson 2y agostill can't parse ISO8601
- blitzar 2y agoThe way it confidently parses the few days of each month as nonsensical American dates is the icing on the cake.
- galaxyLogic 2y agoIs this basically about giving us an alternate prompt-based user-interface to Excel and other applications?
- slowmovintarget 2y agoNo, this has more to do with uploading your sheets to the cloud. "It's so the Assistant can see it! No other reason! Honest!!! We wouldn't dare do anything else with your sheet." More seriously, making spreadsheet formatted data more easily consumable by curve fitting ML algorithms actually can be useful. I would just would want total control of where that data goes, and unless you roll your own, or have a contract to purchase your own, you don't get that.
- queuebert 2y agoThis will be a huge time saver for shady accountants everywhere.
- bearjaws 2y agoExcel already destroys RAM... sure let's add the most memory intensive process known to man into the mix.
- apwell23 2y agoMore garbage shoved at users to pump up the markets. Does anyone use LLM stuff that meta added to whatsapp and instagram. Everyone i know hates that shit. When are these ppl going get held accountable for this farce.
- peterbell_nyc 2y agoA big chunk of the knowledge contained in enterprises is in spreadsheets. It's a no brainer to make that more easily accessible to LLMs. Wrap a thoughfully designed agentic framework around this and you presumably get a cheap junior data analyst that you can ask arbitrary questions of to better optimize value delivered through the knowledge you have. Anything from "free" drill down reports by territory on sales or ops to potentially running monte carlo simulations based on identified correlations to get a sense of the best classes of improvements to invest in to reduce shipping costs, improve sales conversions in specific verticals, etc. I don't know if this is the framework, but this is one of the problems that needs to be effectively solved for large spreadsheets to unlock access to the data more efficiently.
- echelon 2y ago> agentic This is the hot new word in the LLM space. Was this picked because LLMs are losing luster for broad, cross-domain applicability? What systems actually demonstrate this behavior? I'm not short on LLMs, but I can see a future where Gen AI in the creative space (image, audio, video) outpaces LLMs in terms of impact.
- syrgian 2y agoI was trying to write a decent definition but Wiki does it better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_language_model#Agency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_language_model#Agency In this context it could be able to do multiple actions in order to address an ask from the user: read cells, documentation, edit cells, and perhaps even read the result from the edited cell before answering. i.e. "Can you create a new sheet that focuses on the Countries where the sales happened, including YoY differences, and tell me which countries are outliers and for which reason(s)?" (probably very far fetched given the level of progress Excel has achieved in 20 years).
- jmclnx 2y agoI do not know if this is a good idea, this AI thing is looking a lot line the dot-com era of the late 90s.
- juancb 2y agoHallucinated bookeeping and forecasts are going to make for some really interesting outcomes.