You get a Copilot, and you get a Copilot – Microsoft now the Copilot company Microsoft continues to push its Copilot concept onto users and shoehorn the technology into every crevice of the Windows giant line-up and others via Copilot Studio. Whereas Copilot for Microsoft 365 works from an enterprise's data already lurking in the Microsoft Graph, the plan for Copilot Studio is to extend the technology' …
This has a whiff of cortana about it. It’s one of those things that few people will use (especially at 50 USD a month!) beyond the initial “seeing what it’s like” phase. People will want solid result from their office apps, not AI-generated content. And I believe the reason for this is quality. Everyone can now tell AI-generated text — it “talks a lot but doesn’t really say anything”.
People will end up trying to “get the edge” by doing the work themselves rather than get AI to do it.
At least for now. Eventually the technology will improve.
But I think Microsoft are too soon with it, and as we have all seen, they have a track record for making fairly unreliable software.
LLMs can do prose, which includes syntactic grammar, but goes beyond just grammar, to something that *sounds* natural and confident. That is worth something, just like an expensive tailored suit is a prerequisite for many jobs in the finance, sales, advertising, etc.
What LLM can not do reliably is create new valid semantic context. It can rehash existing content, but even then, that's risky, because it doesn't have the ability to validate the semantics and the rehash might not make sense.
But does that matter? Consider ... In a recent exclusive interview with the Financial Times, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman unveiled a grand vision for the future: "Those (ChatGPT, DALL-E) aren’t really our products…Those are channels into our one single product, which is intelligence, magic intelligence in the sky. I think that’s what we’re about."
ChatGPT could have created that "truth". Is anyone checking to see if Altman is wired - the Hans Niemann of venture capital gaming?
"just like an expensive tailored suit is a prerequisite for many jobs in the finance, sales, advertising, etc"
Only if the value you offer elsewhere isn't sufficient to complete the package. It's all about perceived value. You need a suit to indicate to people that might not know you that you have some value...you have an expensive suit and watch, you must be successful.
If you are *actually* successful and bring a lot of value, then the suit adds nothing. If you are some sort of genius level savant at what you do, you could turn up to work with your dick out...it won't matter.
"We anticipate an AI-powered business process reengineering wave that will sweep over every organization and every industry."
MD - AI, tell me how to improve my business
AI - There are too many pointless meetings that waste people's time. You have two layers of management and reporting that could be ditched if you tasked your people properly and trusted them to do their jobs. You should run with a 17% resource surplus so that every unforseen issue wouldn't delay multiple projects as you try to juggle staff around to fix them.
MD (turning off the AI) - Just as I expected - bloody useless.
I tried it. Sounds exactly like the sort of meaningless drivel management consultants come up with.
---
Improving your business is a great goal to have. There are many ways to do that, depending on your specific needs and challenges. Here are some general tips that might help you:
- Organize your processes and workspace. Having a clear and efficient system for your daily operations can save you time, money, and stress. You can use digital tools to streamline your workflows, automate tasks, and collaborate with your team. You can also declutter your physical space by getting rid of unnecessary items, filing documents properly, and creating a comfortable and productive environment for yourself and your employees.
- Revisit your finances. To improve your business, you need to know how much money you are making and spending, and how to manage it wisely. You can use accounting software to track your income and expenses, create budgets and forecasts, and monitor your cash flow. You can also look for ways to reduce costs, increase revenue, and optimize your tax strategy.
- Connect with your community. Your customers are not only the ones who buy from you, but also the ones who support you and spread the word about you. You can improve your business by engaging with them on social media platforms, responding to their feedback, offering incentives for referrals, and creating loyalty programs. You can also network with other businesses in your industry or niche, join local events or associations, and participate in charitable causes.
- Connect with your employees. Your employees are the backbone of your business, so you need to treat them well and motivate them to perform at their best. You can improve your business by hiring the right people for the right roles, providing them with training and development opportunities, rewarding them for their achievements, and creating a positive work culture. You can also communicate with them regularly, listen to their ideas and concerns, and involve them in decision-making processes.
These are just some of the ways to improve your business in 2022. Of course, every business is different, so you may need to do more research or consult with experts to find the best solutions for yours. I hope this helps you get started on your journey of growth and success
Yep. You could probably get something slightly less tiresome with some prompt engineering and a higher temperature, but ultimately LLM output is going to primarily fall into basins — that's how gradient descent works, after all — and with LLMs trained on large and indiscriminate corpora ("the Web"), those basins are going to be sloughs of averaged dullness.
I don't think the current strategy, which is basically I Can Haz Moar Parameters?, will help, either. If we had some huge alien corpus, like a body of quality writing from an alternate universe, that approach might produce interesting output. But with deep transformer stacks trained on existing widely-available texts, there doesn't seem to be a temperature optimum that will produce useful output (in the broad sense, including fiction) that is also stylistically interesting. And with such a machine to get anything intellectually interesting above the prosodic level — argument or plot, say — you essentially have to encode it all in the prompt, so you'd be better off actually avoiding the learned helplessness and loss of serendipity and do your own work.
It's possible that a sufficiently-large transformer stack would be computationally capable of hosting Boltzmann brains, but as I've written before, I think we're at least several orders of magnitude shy of that mark.
Seems like a perfect fit for 99% of the marketing crap most companies churn out.
The vast bulk of it reads like AI generated content, even though it's created by humans, so may as well chop all that deadwood away and do the world a favour.
I've already tested it by asking it questions about some contentious issues. As expected, it parrots the approved line every time - no nuance, no indication that there are alternative viewpoints!.
This thing is going to be a wet dream for propagandists - even better for shaping opinion than filter bubbles in search engines, and nearly as good as social media!
So glad I finally ditched Microsoft entirely for home use. Not looking forward to my work being made more insufferable than before though. If this takes off I can already tell I am going to be wading through far more e-mails which are all far less coherent. If it isn't worth your time to write it, it isn't worth my time to read it.
I hope this crashes and burns, given MS' track record with these things it probably will.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
