"The problem is that it doesn’t actually do anything."
I disagree, and I think you'll see what I mean when you shift the frame of reference from "person working at a large company with Office 365 installed" to a couple hundred million average Joe's having access to it at home.
Webs search is now a horrifying wasteland, and people know it. Remember the conversations we all had just a few years ago: LLM will replace web search. That's the key point here - not "replace web search" for the subset of people who have office jobs, but web search for the vastly greater number of people who just have it at home on their computer.
The tech - the products - are good enough for your average person at home who wants a starting point and a structure to work through for something they know nothing about. I think that's actually one of the strengths of the tech as it exists for the winder audience: you don't really need ultra accurate, super precise, info and checklists and guides when you just want to know what to look into to do some decorative tiling on the top of an old table you bought; a way to make sense of and work through a type of pop media you have become interested in; to give you a starting point to work through some new problem you have encountered in day to day life.
That "80 percent vaguely accurate-ish" threshold that LLMs can broadly deliver for a novice is actually good enough for that vast majority of things people deal with that aren't really super-critical. Are you idly curious about some ways to think about how to replant and re-do your back yard greenery? Curious about how to make sense of all the competing numbers and criteria and features when looking to buy your first air-conditioner? Want to take a vague, repetitive, not very well put together response to something your neighbor starting holding forth on on Nextdoor and make it tighter and better expressed?
That little Copilot icon that comes default in Windows legitimately can help you there.
I was listening to an NPR story yesterday about how fashion designers are now using “AI” to spot fashion trends. Aside from the fact that it is now unclear whether a journalist means “software” when they say “AI”, a recurring thought I had was that maybe lots of people are now using AI to make inconsequential decisions. One of the predictions they hyped in the story was that “yellow will be hot”. Ok, sure… but if it’s not, it doesn’t really matter. I can see that AI “helps” in this scenario to reduce decision fatigue, but you might have been just as well off flipping a coin. Even if you buy yourself an expensive coin, it’s a lot cheaper!
I’m just conveying my experience. Whatever copilot is at my company’s Microsoft portal seems to do absolutely nothing and connect to nothing.
Even if this is my company not paying for the license, it seems like a pretty miserable way for Microsoft to try to tempt companies into buying one by delivering a completely useless “light” experience.
Everything you’re describing that’s wonderful about the Windows copilot button is the stuff I’m already doing on ChatGPT.com because that brand name came first.
I agree about this. It's very difficult to figure out. In fact my working theory is IT has banned it as much as they can (we get strange and difficult to interpret pronouncements about permission to use LLM).
Windows 11 in general pushes so much unwanted crap at us in ways that we can't control that it's reasonable to assume IT can't make the icons go away if they wanted to. And investing time building a workflow that disappears when IT has finally figured out how to nuke it (if that's the intent) isn't worth the risk.
For reference I work at a hospital so generally IT is extremely sensitive about potential breaches and leaks. In general the policy is we are allowed to use LLM. The organization is on Azure but I can't even find anyone in IT to tell me if we are even allowed to use Power platform (which is also in this weird state of letting you build things but they don't actually work). CoPilot is there ... ish. It's just not very powerful at all.
I disagree, and I think you'll see what I mean when you shift the frame of reference from "person working at a large company with Office 365 installed" to a couple hundred million average Joe's having access to it at home.
Webs search is now a horrifying wasteland, and people know it. Remember the conversations we all had just a few years ago: LLM will replace web search. That's the key point here - not "replace web search" for the subset of people who have office jobs, but web search for the vastly greater number of people who just have it at home on their computer.
The tech - the products - are good enough for your average person at home who wants a starting point and a structure to work through for something they know nothing about. I think that's actually one of the strengths of the tech as it exists for the winder audience: you don't really need ultra accurate, super precise, info and checklists and guides when you just want to know what to look into to do some decorative tiling on the top of an old table you bought; a way to make sense of and work through a type of pop media you have become interested in; to give you a starting point to work through some new problem you have encountered in day to day life.
That "80 percent vaguely accurate-ish" threshold that LLMs can broadly deliver for a novice is actually good enough for that vast majority of things people deal with that aren't really super-critical. Are you idly curious about some ways to think about how to replant and re-do your back yard greenery? Curious about how to make sense of all the competing numbers and criteria and features when looking to buy your first air-conditioner? Want to take a vague, repetitive, not very well put together response to something your neighbor starting holding forth on on Nextdoor and make it tighter and better expressed?
That little Copilot icon that comes default in Windows legitimately can help you there.