LOL… if AI were a tenth as effective as they claim, this would be like adding a second steering wheel to your car, you know? just in case the first one doesn’t cut it?
Microsoft ends OpenAI exclusivity in Office, adds rival Anthropic
Submitted 9 hours ago by ardi60@reddthat.com to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
Jhex@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
gedaliyah@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
What are people actually using AI for in office programs? I spend almost all day working on email, documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Every time in the past that I have tried to use AI tools, it has either failed to perform the task, done it poorly/incorrectly, or taken longer than using traditional tools (requiring multiple prompts, editing and correcting, etc.)
Am I just a dinosaur? Are there people who really use these tools productively?
jj4211@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Feel like I’m being gaslit, the more I try to use them the less confident I become in their utility.
I will confess it did help me cut through some particularly obtuse documentation to provide a rough example of what I wanted to do. It still totally screwed up the actual suggestion, but it at least helped me figure out some good keywords to dig into.
It occasionally saves me some tedium when I have to do something mindlessly tedious, but doing that usually also inflicts constant misguesses about what next.
But even when doing easy stuff they are falling over constantly, and that hasn’t been significantly improving.
CompostMaterial@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Document summary, quick email replies that sound coherent and professional when you have one foot out the door on a Friday, if the Org has fabric then the PowerPoint copilot can be a real time save of given me a presentation based off this outline and use some data as the source.
I find that those who are office professionals that don’t like AI most often either have expectations of perfection or don’t know how to prompt properly.
Ai excels at get you 60-70% of the way there the first time. Then you can either refine it with additional prompts or manually. Either way if it saves me time and effort on something I care nothing about then it is worth it to me.
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Depending on the ask, yes. Summarize this document - usually pretty correct, if verbose and disgustingly bland like eating paste. But then it’ll say “Do you want me to make this into a powerpoint?” and you go - sure, why not - and (true story) it goes “here it is” and there’s nothing there.
And you say “uh, there’s nothing there” and it goes “oh! Sorry. Here it is” and it links to a pdf. And you say “that’s not a powerpoint” and it goes “oh! sorry you’re right. Here.” and it links to a powerpoint that’s so sparse it seems like it assembled itself from the random background radiation of the universe - and it doesn’t even say what the summary said. It’s something sort of like it but worse somehow.
And that experience never changes. That’s essentially all any AI interaction will ever be.
GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml 6 hours ago
Their primary use case in the office that I’ve seen is asking someone a question and having them send a LLM response where they clearly didn’t read what you asked and the response they sent you does not answer the original question. It’s so cool!
gedaliyah@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
That has sorta been my experience so far. LLMs are great at producing output as long as the quality of the output doesn’t really matter. Maybe there are a lot more tasks than I realize where this is the case - in my work there are not many.
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
I use them for cursory web searches it would take me slightly longer to do directly.
spellings of words, name of the character from that movie, whatever ephemera I want at the moment that no one ever should really give two shits about.
Actual questions or actual functions? lol no. And the second they ask me to pay for it - it’s gone.
jaybone@lemmy.zip 5 hours ago
Yeah the only thing I find useful is the web search result when I want like a 5 line code example.
Problem is they could do the same thing by just scraping and parsing the first result and inlining it in the search result page so I don’t have to click on a link. Same thing just without wasting all that hardware and energy.
gedaliyah@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
I can see a use case when it comes to search - like you said. If the question is relatively trivial and slightly obscure then a LLM summary is probably adequate (maybe problematic for other reasons).
But this is being marketed in Productivity software! I really and genuinely want to understand why it seems so popular.
Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 6 hours ago
They push it so hard and yet I agree, its real world utility is incredibly low.
dwev@lemmy.ml 5 hours ago
Now two reasons to leave the MS ecosystem.
lemmy_nightmare@sh.itjust.works 3 hours ago
Savage
Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 hours ago
Microsoft has no allies, only investments and expendable subsidiaries.
Guess no one told Altman.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
I mean, they’re adding Shitpile B on top of Shitpile A. It’s still just more AI slop.
And this is less of an investment and more of a divestment. Sam’s been twisting Satya Nadella’s titties for years in order to milk the sweet multi-billion dollar free money cow. Bringing on Anthropic would suggest that Microsoft is turning off OpenAI’s infinite money machine.
Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 hours ago
Yeah, I’m thinking from Sam’s perspective of his gravy train. Betting on Microsoft’s benevolence is a mistake.
panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 8 hours ago
Amthropic’s servers already crash smear daily… I don’t think they can handle this…
Alaik@lemmy.zip 2 hours ago
Since when has foreseeable consequences or even feasibility stopped MBAs?
bhamlin@lemmy.world 1 minute ago
Yes, because which AI was there is the reason people didn’t like it. That’s the reason. 100%
/s