6 ms·

Nobody seems to want to use Copilot, but Microsoft is in a great position when AGI "drop-in office workers" become a thing. They can just provision however many

• jen20 11mo ago
  A new Turing test: when all the AGI worker bots would rather gargle razor blades than use Microsoft Teams, we might be close.
  • aeve890 11mo ago
    >use Microsoft Teams Shit like this make rogue AI scenarios totally plausible. I won't wish that on my worst enemy
• otabdeveloper4 11mo ago
  > when AGI "drop-in office workers" become a thing How many more weeks? Also, is this before or after flying cars?
  • qgin 11mo ago
    Looking like 2028-2030 but it's a moving target. Since we're basically getting flying cars next year at the World Cup, I guess it's going to be after flying cars.
    • chongli 11mo ago
      I prefer fusion power as the go-to vapourware technology. It’s been “10-20 years out” for 70 years and counting. I don’t see any reason to believe that “AGI office workers” will be ready to go by 2030. All signs right now are pointing to a looming plateau in their capabilities.
      • marcosdumay 11mo ago
        Fusion has halved the "interval until we get it" on those 50 years. AGI has doubled the "interval until we get it" twice already since 2022. Those things are not the same kind of vaporware.
        • gjm11 11mo ago
          Could you name a specific person whose estimate of when we might get AGI has doubled twice since 2022? Or do you mean you found one person with a really short estimate in 2022, another person with a longer one in 2024, and another with a longer one now? Also, if you compare with 50 years ago, AGI has also (better than) halved the interval experts are commonly predicting since then. (Of course the experts could turn out to be hilariously wrong, for fusion or AI or both. I just don't think your comparison is anything like apples-to-apples.)
      • thfuran 11mo ago
        Fusion is always years away because funding has been at or below the minimal "fusion never" levels since the '70s: https://fire.pppl.gov/us_fusion_plan_1976.pdf https://fire.pppl.gov/us_fusion_plan_1976.pdf
      • otabdeveloper4 11mo ago
        > pointing to a looming plateau Latest LLM's have already been declining in performance. It's not a plateau and it's not looming. We don't know what the hell we are doing. Adding more training data and parameters only degrades LLMs after a certain threshold.
    • sofixa 11mo ago
      > Since we're basically getting flying cars next year at the World Cup That's so funny. Regular people can't hahndle regular cars. Self-driving cars barely handle 2 dimensional space within very specific confines and rules, in good weather. Existing airspace is congested to the point of being problematic in most metro areas around the world. "Flying cars" might be replacing some private heliopters, maybe. But they aren't going mainstream any time soon.
      • BobaFloutist 11mo ago
        I also don't really understand what's supposed to be the line between flying car and helicopter. Does the flying car need to also be street legal on the ground? Does it just not have to look too much like a helicopter?
        • qgin 11mo ago
          I think it’s anything in the category of “way more common than a helicopter to the point where normal people use them”.
        • bluGill 11mo ago
          It needs to get through dense downtowns where there isn't much space between buildings, and wires and skyways to dodge as well. A skilled pilot could do it - but they wouldn't try because while space physically exists there isn't enough margin for error.
    • solumunus 11mo ago
      Ok Elon.
      • qgin 11mo ago
        Idk they seem pretty serious https://gizmodo.com/official-air-taxi-provider-of-the-2028-olympic-games-buys-california-airport-2000685420 https://gizmodo.com/official-air-taxi-provider-of-the-2028-o...
• pulse7 11mo ago
  I'm very happy that "AGI office workers" will use Microsoft products - so I don't have to do it anymore... But: they will not pay a dime for the licenses...
  • zombot 11mo ago
    Don't panic, you will still do the paying for the licenses.
• robotswantdata 11mo ago
  For the average office task they don’t seem far off being competent, at least to the average workers quality. Ai builder with gpt5 + workflow triggers is very capable already. 1-2 more model generation hops needed plus a bit more “agent” plumbing before its game over for the excel and word jobs.
  • sevensor 11mo ago
    Which average office tasks would those be? Writing project proposals? Putting budget numbers into a shared spreadsheet? Composing a progress report? Preparing presentation slides for an executive status update meeting? Writing performance reviews? Taking mandatory compliance training? Going to planning meetings? One or two of these, I could see. Automated progress reports would be nice. But a lot of them aren’t about document generation, but about human accountability, about being a person who commits to something in writing. Automating away paper pushers means all the accountability lands on their bosses, leaving them nowhere to hide. It will be quite something if we manage to rewrite the corporate social context like this.
• fooqux 11mo ago
  > Microsoft is in a great position when AGI "drop-in office workers" become a thing While I don't disagree with you here, that's a helluva big bet. It'll have to happen soon enough that other companies aren't able to pivot in time, and despite what Altman says, I just don't see it happening at that timescale.
  • mschuster91 11mo ago
    > While I don't disagree with you here, that's a helluva big bet. And yet, one that Microsoft has the best chances. Apple has all but zero presence in BigCorp outside of social media and creative teams. Google has its Workspaces thing plus its web wannabe-equivalents to Office, but that's it. And AWS is an infrastructure provider. Microsoft in contrast? They're everywhere and most importantly, whatever is in Office 365 automatically has the "compliant" checkboxes ticked for auditors. And MS can easily ride the time until AGI or something coming reasonably close to it is marketable on that moat.
    • bikotreats 11mo ago
      "Apple has all but zero presence in BigCorp outside of social media and creative teams" Bad take. Apple has a strong presence within the tech and digital agency world. At every company i've worked for (3 tech companies, 1 digital agency), the Macbook is the default issued workstation unless you formally request a Windows laptop. Some roles, like finance, tax, 3D design, favor Windows but that is generally because certain software they depend on only exists in the Windows world. Microsoft totally dominates non-tech companies though.
      • chirau 11mo ago
        Apple's footprint in BigCorp is a drop in the ocean compared to MS. You said it yourself, "certain software they depend on only exists in the Windows world". That is intentional and the reason is because of MS dominance in BigCorp. Most makers don't find it worthwhile to spend so much time and resources building software for Apple when it has so few users at that level.
      • 11mo ago
• candiddevmike 11mo ago
  Why don't we see companies adopting this setup with offshore workers if it's that "seamless" and easy to get started?
• d3Xt3r 11mo ago
  Relevant: https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/microsofts-head-of-ai-doesnt-understand-why-people-dont-like-ai-and-i-dont-understand-why-he-doesnt-understand-because-its-pretty-obvious/ https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/microsofts-head-of-ai-do...
• nitwit005 11mo ago
  People will just have the thing open in another window, and move the result over, rather than pay for a bunch of Teams licenses. In general, we should expect more AI use to decrease the value of human oriented products. A word document is just some XML collection to a computer program. An AI won't need Word to create or edit the files.