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Microsoft's Pricey AI Assistant Copilot Leaves Early Adopters Feeling Cheated
(www.ibtimes.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024
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It’s funny that Microsoft fucked up the branding so bad that half of these comments are about GitHub Copilot — a specialized, useful tool for experienced developers to speed up rote tasks — and the other half about their whole “Shoehorn AI into everything.” strategy. And Bing Chat is also now Copilot, apparently? Is Cortana now Windows Copilot? Is there an Xbox Copilot that plays Starfield for you?
Remember that internal Microsoft video that leaked where a marketing person was begging them to use Apple’s iPod box designs instead of their usual ones: https://youtu.be/EUXnJraKM3k?si=3aAZ9xulggtHDVp6
It was apparently 17 years ago but it’s still true that Microsoft can’t brand things for shit.
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There is a setting for Xbox Controllers to use two of them like it's the same one called Copilot.
Co Xbox Windows pilot
Co pilot pilot for Microsoft Flight Sim 2025
Well copilot is the category of those assistants. Most other companies call them copilots too, even in B2B space
Similarly, other users told the outlet that the AI hallucinated wrong answers or miscalculated spreadsheets. AI experts, including The Wharton School professor, Ethan Mollick accused Copilot of making bizarre suggestions for weekend meetings.
It seems these users never used GPT
It's because it's not as good
... In contrast, Microsoft's corporate VP, Jared Spataro, told us that users are finding immediate value in Copilot
haha no really?
Guy who's job it is to sell a product, lies to sell a product.
So people are surprised that GPT-4 is performing as well as GPT-4 always has?
Copilot isn't GPT4, as far as I know. GPT4 hallucinations are quite minimal.
In the ios app there is literally a switch that turns on gpt-4. I am not sure what it is using when the switch is off though.
Sweatshop children in a foreign land
Technically still a neural network.
What part of "early adopter" did you not understand before you wasted your money?
As far as I am concerned Copilot is a giant theft of open source code and breaches the license. I expect in the future a lot of repositories will be used to poison these AI agents just as is happening with images. The agents will get better but the quality of what they produce will also be poisoned and get worse precisely due to the theft.
Poisoning code should be ludicrously easy: They crawl pretty much everything and a random AST walk looks suspiciously like real code while it's the equivalent of showing an image generation model noise. Or maybe better: Mondrians that are indistinguishable from Vermeers. (I hope I didn't offend anyone by calling Mondrian abstract nonsense but it is abstract nonsense).
I don't think copilot will hold out for long anyway, the novelty is wearing off and even inexperienced programmers are beginning to see that it helps you write code faster that shouldn't have been written in the first place. Code is like 90% maintenance and excessive boilerplate doesn't make it easier.
OTOH please don't let that "Let's scam artists by selling them snake oil that if it wasn't trivial to circumvent would break naturally within a week" guy fool you. On the actually interesting side of poisoning attacks, people have made cars hallucinate radar blips I bet a couple of companies are getting quite tough questions from regulators right now.
Yeah it's a classic case of Microsoft marketing. So far I found the office integration to be the least useful and most over hyped in marketing. However what it is good at is actually helpful. Join a meeting late it already has an update for what's happened on the meeting so far and it's really good for summarizing a meeting especially a key topics and a summary of action items. Tedious tasks like taking data copied from a PDF file and reformatting it correctly in CSV. And my favorite is making custom graphics based on a specific colour pallet, though most images are really good for entertainment, demos and samples, but not production quality for final products. Weird results include creepy human images just don't look right in a disturbing zombie-like way.
I have not had a chance to test the office integrations (and the $30 price tag may keep it that way,) but I’ve been testing the web chat version, and once toggled to “precise” mode I find it close to chatgpt. Just a little more prone to lapse into acting like a bing chat app and very limited in conversation length…
I think the trick is to treat it like a junior assistant or maybe an intern who might make mistakes and not as a seasoned, experienced employee who always puts out perfect work.
$30? Idk how it is in the consumer space, but in the Enterprise world the initial opening for copilot required 300 seats of E3 or better, and then a purchase of 300 seats of copilot 365 at $30 each. They were supposed to drop the 300 copilot 365 seat req q1 but I'm not sure if they did.
3030012=108,000 per year for copilot. E3 is 36 a month, 30012=129,600.
Big money.
I'm told they dropped the seat requirements. Yeah $30 is the business rate. No discounts for education. I suspect the backend costs on this are still rather high but should improve once hardware catches up to demand.
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Trash company once again dumps trash on the market and attempts to sell it to morons.
Yes, but when will it make porn?
They already have porn chatbots.
The bosses are airborne while I can’t work online, so I generate my porn on the company’s time.
My favorite are the gigantic companies falling all over themselves to buy this for their workforces before it's even clear what value a bot that can't reliably do arithmetic is going to add to Excel
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This is certainly not about finding fools who not only are beta testers but also provide training data... And not only for free, but they pay also for this.. Win win win for M$
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