3 ms·

If you include microsoft copilot trials in fortune 500s, absolutely. A lot of major listed companies are still oblivious to the functionality of AI, their senio

If you include microsoft copilot trials in fortune 500s, absolutely. A lot of major listed companies are still oblivious to the functionality of AI, their senior management don't even use it out of laziness

jeron 8mo ago
it turns out it's really hard to get a man to fish with a pole when you don't teach them how to use the reel
- throwawaysleep 8mo ago
  Or give them a stick with twine and a plastic fork as a hook, as is the case with Copilot.
- Banditoz 8mo ago
  If AGI is coming, won't there just be autofishers and no one will ever have to fish again, completely devaluing one's fishing knowledge and the effort put in to learn it?
  - moregrist 8mo ago
    It’s not a great analogy but... “Autofishers” are large boats with nets that bring in fish in vast quantities that you then buy at a wholesale market, a supermarket a bit later, or they flash freeze and sell it to you over the next 6-9 months. Yet there’s still a thriving industry selling fishing gear. Because people like to fish. And because you can rarely buy fish as fresh as what you catch yourself. Again, it’s not a great analogy, but I dunno. I doubt AGI, if it does come, will end up working the way people think it will.
  - tsukurimashou 8mo ago
    > If AGI is coming spoiler, it's not
    - citrin_ru 8mo ago
      Evey now model is better than a previous one. When and why it is going to stop? Current models are limited by DC capacity which is rapidly expanded. Genuinely curious, I don't know the answer.
- conductr 8mo ago
  In regards to copilot, they’ve also been led on a fishing expedition to the middle of a desert
- onorton 8mo ago
  I'm not sure if this was the intention of the analogy, but fishing poles don't have reels.
chaos_emergent 8mo ago
100% All of the people who are floored by AI capabilities right now are software engineers, and everyone who's extremely skeptical basically has any other office job. On investigating their primary AI interaction surface, it's Microsoft Co-Pilot, which has to be the absolute shittiest implementation of any AI system so far. As a progress-driven person, it's just super disappointing to see how few people are benefiting from the productive gains of these systems.
- dboreham 8mo ago
  This isn't my experience. I see many non-software people using AI regularly. What you may be seeing is more: organizations with no incentive to do things better never did anything to do things better. AI is no different. They were never doing things better with pencil and paper.
- DaedalusII 8mo ago
  I think anthropic will succeed immensely here because when integrated with Microsoft365 and especially Excel it basically does what co-pilot said it would do. The moment of realisation happen for a lot of normoid business people when they see claude make a DCF spreadsheet or search emails claude is also smart because it visually shows the user as it resizes the columns, changes colours, etc. Seeing the computer do things makes the normoid SEE the AI despite it being much slower
  - sheeshkebab 8mo ago
    No one wants a chatbot “integrated” with excel and office365 crap, it’s clippy 2.0 bullshit. Replace excel and office stuff with ai model entirely then people will pay attention.
    - DaedalusII 8mo ago
      that only works if you can oneshot. but nobody can oneshot. iterating over work in excel and seeing it update correctly is exactly what people want. If they get it working in MSWord it will pick up even faster. If the average office worker can get the benefit of AI by installing an add-on into the same office software they have been using since 2000 (the entire professional career of anyone under the age of 45), then they will do so. its also really easy to sell to companies because they dont have to redesign their teams or software stack, or even train people that much. the board can easily agree to budget $20 a head for claude pro the other thing normies like is they can put in huge legacy spreadsheets and find all the errors Microsoft365 has 400 million paid seats
bccdee 8mo ago
There's a lot of rote work in software development that's well-suited to LLM automation, but I think a lot of us overestimate the actual usefulness of a chatbot to the average white-collar worker. What's the point of making Copilot compose an email when your prompt would be longer than the email itself? You can tell ChatGPT to make you a slide deck, but slide decks are already super simple to make. You can use an LLM as a search engine, but we already have search engines. People sometimes talk about using a chatbot to brainstorm, but that seems redundant when you could simply think, free from the burden of explaining yourself to a chatbot. LLMs are impressive and flexible tools, but people expect them to be transformative, and they're only transformative in narrow ways. The places they shine are quite low-level: transcription, translation, image recognition, search, solving clearly specified problems using well-known APIs, etc. There's value in these, but I'm not seeing the sort of universal accelerant that some people are anticipating.
bandrami 8mo ago
That's probably true for some, but I think a lot of big orgs are simply risk-averse and see AI in general as a giant risk that isn't even fully baked enough to quantify yet. The security and confidentiality issues alone will make Operations hesitant, and Legal probably has some questions about IP (both the risk of a model outputting patented or otherwise protected code, and the huge legal gray area that is the copyrightability of the output of an LLM). Give it a year or two and let things settle down and (assuming the music is still playing at that time) you might see more dinosaurs start to wander this way.

jeron 8mo ago

it turns out it's really hard to get a man to fish with a pole when you don't teach them how to use the reel

throwawaysleep 8mo ago
Or give them a stick with twine and a plastic fork as a hook, as is the case with Copilot.
Banditoz 8mo ago
If AGI is coming, won't there just be autofishers and no one will ever have to fish again, completely devaluing one's fishing knowledge and the effort put in to learn it?
- moregrist 8mo ago
  It’s not a great analogy but... “Autofishers” are large boats with nets that bring in fish in vast quantities that you then buy at a wholesale market, a supermarket a bit later, or they flash freeze and sell it to you over the next 6-9 months. Yet there’s still a thriving industry selling fishing gear. Because people like to fish. And because you can rarely buy fish as fresh as what you catch yourself. Again, it’s not a great analogy, but I dunno. I doubt AGI, if it does come, will end up working the way people think it will.
- tsukurimashou 8mo ago
  > If AGI is coming spoiler, it's not
  - citrin_ru 8mo ago
    Evey now model is better than a previous one. When and why it is going to stop? Current models are limited by DC capacity which is rapidly expanded. Genuinely curious, I don't know the answer.
conductr 8mo ago
In regards to copilot, they’ve also been led on a fishing expedition to the middle of a desert
onorton 8mo ago
I'm not sure if this was the intention of the analogy, but fishing poles don't have reels.

chaos_emergent 8mo ago

100% All of the people who are floored by AI capabilities right now are software engineers, and everyone who's extremely skeptical basically has any other office job. On investigating their primary AI interaction surface, it's Microsoft Co-Pilot, which has to be the absolute shittiest implementation of any AI system so far. As a progress-driven person, it's just super disappointing to see how few people are benefiting from the productive gains of these systems.

dboreham 8mo ago
This isn't my experience. I see many non-software people using AI regularly. What you may be seeing is more: organizations with no incentive to do things better never did anything to do things better. AI is no different. They were never doing things better with pencil and paper.
DaedalusII 8mo ago
I think anthropic will succeed immensely here because when integrated with Microsoft365 and especially Excel it basically does what co-pilot said it would do. The moment of realisation happen for a lot of normoid business people when they see claude make a DCF spreadsheet or search emails claude is also smart because it visually shows the user as it resizes the columns, changes colours, etc. Seeing the computer do things makes the normoid SEE the AI despite it being much slower
- sheeshkebab 8mo ago
  No one wants a chatbot “integrated” with excel and office365 crap, it’s clippy 2.0 bullshit. Replace excel and office stuff with ai model entirely then people will pay attention.
  - DaedalusII 8mo ago
    that only works if you can oneshot. but nobody can oneshot. iterating over work in excel and seeing it update correctly is exactly what people want. If they get it working in MSWord it will pick up even faster. If the average office worker can get the benefit of AI by installing an add-on into the same office software they have been using since 2000 (the entire professional career of anyone under the age of 45), then they will do so. its also really easy to sell to companies because they dont have to redesign their teams or software stack, or even train people that much. the board can easily agree to budget $20 a head for claude pro the other thing normies like is they can put in huge legacy spreadsheets and find all the errors Microsoft365 has 400 million paid seats

bccdee 8mo ago

There's a lot of rote work in software development that's well-suited to LLM automation, but I think a lot of us overestimate the actual usefulness of a chatbot to the average white-collar worker. What's the point of making Copilot compose an email when your prompt would be longer than the email itself? You can tell ChatGPT to make you a slide deck, but slide decks are already super simple to make. You can use an LLM as a search engine, but we already have search engines. People sometimes talk about using a chatbot to brainstorm, but that seems redundant when you could simply think, free from the burden of explaining yourself to a chatbot. LLMs are impressive and flexible tools, but people expect them to be transformative, and they're only transformative in narrow ways. The places they shine are quite low-level: transcription, translation, image recognition, search, solving clearly specified problems using well-known APIs, etc. There's value in these, but I'm not seeing the sort of universal accelerant that some people are anticipating.

bandrami 8mo ago

That's probably true for some, but I think a lot of big orgs are simply risk-averse and see AI in general as a giant risk that isn't even fully baked enough to quantify yet. The security and confidentiality issues alone will make Operations hesitant, and Legal probably has some questions about IP (both the risk of a model outputting patented or otherwise protected code, and the huge legal gray area that is the copyrightability of the output of an LLM). Give it a year or two and let things settle down and (assuming the music is still playing at that time) you might see more dinosaurs start to wander this way.