Microsoft boffins contemplate equipping Excel with AI Sooner or later, everything ends up in Microsoft Excel. The 37-year-old spreadsheet has been used to run Doom and Pac-Man, stop-motion animation, a turn-based role playing game, chess, and a neural network, among other things. Excel's latest trick comes courtesy of Microsoft's own software developers: "FLAME: A small language …
I don't know about everyone else but I have customers who handle sensitive info in excel, on certain devices with certain requirements and security.
Any automatic crap that is not explicitly transparent is not now; nor will ever be allowed.
Bringing in all kinds of AI shenanigans is nice and sexy yet to me displays a lack of customer understanding. Though I work in both segments (financials, telcos, infraprovicers, healthcare) and with solutions (identity management, financial and health info management) for other customers where security is paramount. So my experience might not be valid.
Still I believe if there is automatic / forced pushout of stuff like this we shall se a return to lotus 1-2-3.
This is a very good point. At the moment I'm working on a project where there are loads of data derived from patient samples. Most of the data are small and come from the instruments / analysis software in Excel format. If the patient and/or sample IDs got zapped up into Microsoft ML software then this could cause all sorts of legal problems...
I have customers who handle sensitive info in excel
I'd venture that is an approach fundamentally flawed from the get go with any Microsoft product, especially in the light of their latest fantastic idea to make you choose between security or mandatory execute their Office 365 audit..
The good news: This is a small model and therefore could (and definitely should) be able to run locally
The bad news: Microsoft have already slurped your data via the "connected features" of the current version of Excel. How else would they have come up with the training data
Why does AI have to automatically be a privacy invading technology? I think people get the wrong end of the stick when it comes to AI being incorporated into something like Excel. I think at most it will be used to help users create formulas / macros.
Are you under the impression that it will be used to send an entire spread sheet off somewhere for it to return a response that helps you understand the data? Because that is not how AI works / is used most of the time.
What you'll likely end up seeing is a prompt that allows you to issue a request such as "in column D on row 1, calculate X using columns A, B and C" or "what percentage of B is column A put the result in column C repeat for all rows up to row 20".
It will almost certainly never be "Please read the entire spreadsheet and tell me what the fuck it means!".
Please for the love of all things, go and give AI a try somewhere and see how it is used.
AI is a tool, not a team of builders. Sure, better tools could result in needing less builders, but they don't remove the need for builders entirely. It just leads to fewer builders. In the same way as if we had a wheelbarrow that could push itself, you'd need less menial labourers.
Yes, AI can be dangerous...but so can a hammer in the wrong hands...but you can still go out and buy a hammer.
Honestly, I think the problem is 2 fold.
Firstly, the name. Everything is being called AI. None of it is AI really. Not in the sense people think. AI makes most people think of, well, iRobot or Terminator. But what our current "AI" is, is effectively an automated mesh of "if/then" or "switch" operators, built automatically (clearly more complicated than this but this is my way of thinking about it). Its the same issue as Tesla's "full self drive" system. Which isn't.
The other part is the persistent behaviour of the big name companies in slurping all our data and then selling it back to us as a service, or to others. Once burnt, twice shy.
Realistically, at this point, if you want total control of your data? Move away from MS and Google. Move to something on your own systems. OpenOffice or similar. Only way to be sure really.
It doesn't, from a purely technical point of view. The problem is a lot of AI models don't run locally (not all of them, some do run locally). The problem with this is the company hosting the remote server has to make its money somewhere. If you aren't paying for access (and in some cases, if you are), they will often happily sell off your data.
It should be noted that a lot of software, particularly on mobile devices, offloads some of it's processing onto a cloud service now. You may not even be aware of it. This is not limited to AI models.
If instead of all this feelgood posturing, they actually fixed a few of the basics? Y'know, like cut and paste which behaves completely different on Excel from any other MS application? Or sorted out what modal windows (looking at you, 'find') do when you have multiple windows open on different spreadsheets?
1MB of RAM
brought back some memories that has :o)
In Laws PC - W95 - was running slow .................
took it home, and opened it to give it a quick once over
it had 4x 1MB sticks of RAM in there
now, back then, I was new into IT and so I was already collecting, just in case :o) any old bits from the PC's I was fixing for friends and neighbours
found 4x 4MB sticks, and slotted them in, good old clean and tidy up, of the case, and dust bunnies
use of CrapCleaner back when it WAS called Crap Cleaner :o)
took it back, and they said it FLEW :o)
life WAS so much simpler then - sort of
but back to topic :o)
I may be one of the few that likes Excel, was even tasked with training some users in BASIC usage of the beast, and at my level of ability and responsibility, it was fine
put all my music collection into there, because I can :o)
If you really want it to be useful, train the AI on the books of Enron, Theranos, WorldCom, Lehman Brothers and the like. It would save time and money preparing statements "optimized" for presentation to shareholders, the press and auditors.
Just make sure to include a popup alerting me when it is time to cash in my stock options and leave the company.
Damn! That was meant to be anonymous.
"You really don't need a bar graph for that, we feel this pie chart will work better. The general feeling is that AI has determined that every meeting with a presentation, especially management meetings, are always improved with pie charts. So we updated all your Excel files and replaced every chart with a pie chart."
"As you ticked the option 'Keep it tidy.' then we deleted some of your Excel files for you, the AI felt this stuff wasn't a productive use of your time and you haven't opened them for at least 20 mins anyway so we tidied up for you in a way we felt will help you. You're welcome, you have a nice day!"
"We don't feel you really meant to do that with the data you have, so we recalculated it in a way that would make more sense. Please don't try to correct what we say ever again!"
.. as this will then be the moment we can truly blame the computer for when it all goes wrong. And Microsoft, but their Terms keep them nicely isolated from consequences, otherwise it would have never gotten this bad.
"The computer did it" - coming to a Windows machine real soon. God help you trying to insure anything then (also because those spreadsheets too will be messed up with AI).
Aiaiaiai..
/s
"So, after years of crunching through all the data from Excel users, what has our fantastic AI model, worked out?"
"Err. You're not going to like this"
"What!?"
"Well. We have discovered, more user time has been spent correcting the autocorrect, than it has saved. More user time has been spent correcting the guessed at cell format, than it has saved. More time has been spent looking for ways to override Excel's auto-guessing features, than actually doing any profitable work. And our customer helpline has spent more time trying to justify why Excel doesn't have a kill switch for it's bonkers mad "let me guess what you want" feature."
"So, all's fine then. Just need to bolt on the AI, and give it more powers to guess at things, like, the email list you're going to send it all to?"
the Excel quirks that invalidates 20% of genetics papers are corrected by FLAME
Known since 2004
2016
According to a study in the journal Genome Biology, around 20 percent of genetics papers, have errors that have been introduced by Microsoft Excel or similar spreadsheet programs. The researchers analyzed more than 35,000 genetics papers and found that of the 3,600 or so that used Excel spreadsheets to provide lists of genes, a little over one in five contained at least one error. https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a22577/genetics-papers-excel-errors/
2021
30% https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2021/08/30/excel_autocorrect_errors_still_plague_genetic_research_792143.html#!
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
