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Posted by fortran77 2 days ago

Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems(www.wsj.com)
Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/microsofts-pivotal-ai-product-is...
295 points | 371 commentspage 3
kittikitti 2 days ago|
What I find deeply troubling is that, from people I know, Microsoft is making it harder to use any other AI tool in the enterprise. Copilot operates like a computer virus where you can only use it for AI or you will be fired. It's really frustrating to hear about people I know when they can't do basic things with AI and their organizational policy changes it day-by-day in order to get the numbers up for Copilot. Their basic workflows involving PyTorch or Sklearn are being kneecapped and it's getting worse. Microsoft is becoming a huge liability for AI professionals that I know of.
jsemrau 2 days ago||
I am building Agents for a long while now. The problem with Copilot is that it gets in the way too many times without being useful. Examples: When I open an email with 3 short lines of text, why do I need a "summary by copilot" button?

When I open a meeting invote from someone else the first 1/3rd of the screen is occupied with "Prepare for your meeting" nonsense. The "insights" button just provides general knowledge akin to "read the documentation".

uyzstvqs 2 days ago|
Absolutely. And trying to be invasive by adding Copilot buttons everywhere. It's reminiscent of "free toolbar" adware.

Solution: Add MCP to MS applications, then isolate Copilot to its own app.

direwolf20 2 days ago||
Make MCP as pervasive as OLE Automation once was
hansmayer 2 days ago||
You know things are running bad when they've lost even the likes of WSJ. And yet Satya and his ilk (across the LLM space) keep pushing it. It does not matter that this technologically on its own can never reach what they kept promising. Is the pride and ego of a couple of CEOs so important that we'll all just watch them bringing the whole market down ?
iamleppert 2 days ago||
The Copilot they have integrated into Azure is absolutely useless. Every now and then I'll get frustrated at which one of the thousands of menus some switch is under and I'll ask their chatbot and it will spend a lot of time "Identifying the problem..." and "Gathering information..." only to give me links to generic help articles, have some sort of error, or give me flat out wrong information.

These days I try to interact with Azure through the command line and asking Claude, which works pretty well most of the time but there are some things their API cannot do and you are forced to use their crazy Azure UI. It's not as bad as the AWS console UI, but still bad.

It's amazing to me a company that spent so much and invested so much in OpenAI has such a terrible product and got almost nothing out of it. Even standard ChatGPT is way better at giving you directions on what to do than their useless Copilot.

throwaheyy 2 days ago||
Yup, I asked it how long an azure subscription had existed and it could not even tell me that. Literally now() minus the object’s creation date and it had no idea what to do.
reddalo 2 days ago||
Agree. In general, the whole Microsoft "Admin" panel is utter garbage. Messy, slow, with ten different interfaces. Finding something without Googling it first is impossible.
golfer 2 days ago||
Microsoft has access to all the OpenAI/ChatGPT tech. How is their chatbot so awful? Seems like they are trying their hardest to screw this up.
AJRF 2 days ago||
They really dropped the ball on this - they are down ~12% for the year.

When they first started, they seemed to be firing on all cylinders and looked like they were going to be big winners, but the strategy has just been a slow motion car crash.

I wonder if Satya is the right person for Microsoft.

pjmlp 2 days ago||
It was a fresh air after Balmer and he helped opening the company to open source, naturally not without their own intentions, however Satya has been a disaster for the consumer branding, anything related to Windows.
bitwize 2 days ago||
Just because Satya is bald and Indian, doesn't make him Gandhi. Ballmer was Bill's bulldog, but he couldn't direct the company's strategy nearly as effectively as his predecessor; Nadella is craftier. Microsoft has been Microsofting harder than ever lately, and their open source strategy is very subtly embrace-extend-extinguish. I honestly think that by 2030 they will have begun executing a plan to disallow Linux (or any other OS) from running on new PCs without a Windows hypervisor underneath it.
pjmlp 2 days ago||
Luckily you can use "Linux" on Google's products, or Amazon for that matter. /s

In what concerns EEE in open source, there are plenty of candidates, expecially everyone that has contributed for the detriment of GPL based licenses in favour of business friendly licenses.

simoncion 2 days ago|||
> ...they are down ~12% for the year.

Given how unstable stock prices typically are over the short term, and given that we're currently something like thirty-five days into the year, I don't consider that fact to mean much.

Also, wow, your comment is almost exclusively metaphors. I've not seen the like since the last all-hands email from the CEO.

tokioyoyo 2 days ago||
I mean, Apple is at ATH from basically waiting out and picking the winner from its throne. Everyone clowned them, but it also made them not waste money until things are a bit more clear.
zwaps 2 days ago||
The reality is that Copilot’s laughable performance is almost entirely unrelated to AI models not being good at X.

Every single thing Copilot does has been solved much better by other products.

However, Copilot fails in extremely ridiculous ways, at very basic tasks which such a product absolutely must nail.

Copilot should not have been released. A large majority of people involved have failed. People like managers, product managers etc should probably be fired. Technical leads equally so.

For everyone who has been building similar products it is immediately obvious that Copilot is sloppy, unfocused and unprofessionally executed.

People hate it, and for hood reason.

It just boggles the mind how they would go and release it, or that it even exists in its current form.

Those devs and managers rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars each, producing garbage that has been done better by dozens or hundreds of other teams

Bah

haritha-j 2 days ago||
I think it comes down to..not every product in the world is improved by AI. but shareholders believe they all should be. So its crammed into all of them, instead of the few that would really benefit.

The AI background remover in the windows image viewer is really helpful. Many things I used to use an online tool or photoshop for now happens easily within the image viewer.

codebolt 2 days ago|
MS Copilot for Android has some annoying UI bugs which they seemingly refuse to fix. The biggest is that the chat area sometimes gets randomly resized so that you can hardly read anything. There is also no way to search past chats. For all the billions they are spending on AI, their chat interface seems inexplicably half-assed.
podgorniy 2 days ago|
They seemingly forgot to ask their "almost-agi-future-of-economics-the-best-thing-ever" to fix the UI...
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