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What are your thoughts on Microsoft Copilot? (lemmy.blahaj.zone)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Copilot sounds amazing on paper. The free (to 365 subs) version on the web is just Chat GPT4, so that's familiar enough. The integration with 365 applications is really what grabs me. Stuff like tossing it 10 spreadsheets and asking it to analyze and compare the data, having a virtual assistant to remind me of upcoming actionables, and summarizing a meeting when I zone out - it all sounds really handy.

I met with Microsoft last week and they're down for giving me a 90 day trial if I want to take it for a spin. Any thoughts or suggestions? I ideally want to determine if this will improve productivity for my end users enough to be worth the insane cost of $30/user/mo.

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[–] supercritical 15 points 7 months ago

I’ve had a lot of opportunity to use copilot at work, and it’s always been a joke. If you ask it to do any tasks that would actually give you a result, you’re better off just spending that time doing it right.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago

It's crap, search is far better for me

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago

I did that test drive and was highly disappointed - but that was several weeks (==versions) back.

It couldn't adjust power point slides, was lost in word documents and didn't grasp context of queries.

Same prompt in chatgpt 4 and copilot resulted in vastly different results as well.

That said: give it a go! Is love to get a more recent update. The reminders and meeting features I didn't test at all for example.

[–] Waldowal 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

From the other comments, it sounds meh right now, but I've always been impressed by the speed at which OpenAI improves their product so, with their tight partnership to MS, it might not be long before it's something special. Maybe wait 6 months to use your 90 day trial. I'm most interesting in what it can do for Power BIs Q&A functionality.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Copilot is way behind on chatgpt though - I guess they don't want to throw the compute power necessary to leverage the full models - that could change any day I guess.

[+] ZapBeebz_ 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Can I ask why you feel that way? I use Customer Key at my org so all of our data is encrypted with our own encryption keys, and no Copilot data goes outside of our ecosystem. This was a major selling point for my compliance dept.

[–] ZapBeebz_ 1 points 7 months ago

Because our society is not in any way, shape, or form ready for ai. One of the often touted end uses of AI is replacing busywork jobs. That's great, if our nation (America) didn't tie liveable income, healthcare, etc. to having a job. Without better social programs, and more importantly, a society that wants better social programs, ai will end up being a net negative for humanity.

Also, llms are wrong just as much as they're right (if not more often wrong), but are always confident. And in the world we live in where people generally pick the easy road, that means all the errors made never get caught or fact checked because people think AI is infallible. And if I have to go proofread everything copilot kicks out anyways, is it really saving me that much time? Especially because authorizing it increases the odds that people just trust the program, and don't check the outputs, so some wonky ass code or statements get published.

[–] pennomi 1 points 7 months ago

Copilot as an autocomplete for coding is quite useful. I save a fair amount of time simply not typing the short snippet I was about to type.

Anything more than that probably not worth it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

It's Microsoft. Kill it with fucking fire.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 7 months ago

Lol