I don't understand what microsoft is doing with their Copilot whatever push.
They have 50 different offers, all with their own pricing, and they all suck, and Microsoft themselves don't like their results in that field.
Let me solve it for you Microsoft: the money maker you're sitting on today, is "hey excel, make a summary of those 8 sheets to identify our 5 most profitables products and their evolution in sales the past 3 years, add that on a new sheet at the end with a visual graph". None of their product does that right now, instead they tell you the step on how to do it.
Instead of making a bazillion different weird thing, Excel and Office already have their API, just make your "AI" bridge natural talk to excel common task and see every company register it for their employee. I'm not even exagerating, I would in an instant.
I tried many AI tool for excel and none of them come anywhere close to that. It must be much harder than I first thought, but then again they spent BILLIONS on this.
For a company that own business logic as a basic idea, they're really terrible at exploiting it with new ideas. Even just natural talk to power query steps would be worth it.
> It must be much harder than I first thought, but then again they spent BILLIONS on this.
Which is why MS and every other company keeps pushing half-baked garbage AI products onto the public at every opportunity. So much money has been sunk into AI that they need something to show for it. They also hope that as people use it they can improve the AI they have so that maybe one day it can become something worthwhile. As a bonus it's one more way for them to collect your data and get you used to asking an AI for what you need instead of using your brain.
I asked o3 pro to do something like this a few months ago when I paid for a month of ChatGPT Pro. It got very excited and said it was on it and spent 20 minutes absolutely cranking. Then it spit out the world’s saddest excel file with no formatting, and half the data truncated.
OT: I wonder if we'll see some "core personalities" that are innate to each mega-LLM (Claude, O3, Copilot, Gemini)... methinks this has comedic potential.
Fully spot on, I want AI to feel natural, part of the workflows of using an OS, improved search, better OCR, handwriting, in general a better user experience, not something bolted on at all costs, with chat windows all over the place.
Thanks Microsoft, for giving me yet another reason not to use Edge beyond browser compatibility matrixes in project delivery.
Unfortunally this is also coming to all their developer tools, VS, VSCode, PowerShell, Windows Terminal, .NET Aspire, Azure,... everything is getting AI there somehow, as each team struggles to meet their AI OKRs, and reason of existence among endless layoffs.
I’ve been thinking about something similar - Microsoft needs to make dead simple “AI scripts” record: I download this csv file, I then manipulate the data this way, add these formulas, add a cover sheet, do these checks, and then upload the new sheet a with the following columns into system X. Once you have that recorded, and adjusted to what you want. Next you just download the file and run the script.
The amount of repetitive data manipulation at companies is literally insane, just ask anyone in accounting, operations, hr, etc… just being able to automate repetitive task in excel for people that can’t code or aren’t excel/Vba super users would be incredibly valuable.
> The amount of repetitive data manipulation at companies is literally insane
Serious question: why isn't coffee being thrown at the low-hanging-fruit takes? Not only would it make them quicker, it would make them more reliable as well.
Having recently watched a corporate trainer spend 15 minutes trying to figure out why Copilot wasn’t correctly importing a CSV with headers when “it worked fine when I showed this 2 weeks ago” —
my guess is that the tech isn’t quite there yet to sell (reliable) AI-powered Excel
> "hey excel, make a summary of those 8 sheets to identify our 5 most profitables products and their evolution in sales the past 3 years, add that on a new sheet at the end with a visual graph"
Aren't they just pattern recognition and regurgitation machines? How would it analyze and interpret unique data with a pattern it's never seen?
Some of the AI stuff is very useful, but it's been massively oversold. In my experience, it's great for working on documentation or creating a one-time-use script to query an API, but it's not good at the "big picture" tasks they want for a sales pitch.
> How would it analyze and interpret unique data with a pattern it's never seen?
That's called unsupervised learning, and it was field of study in machine learning long before LLMs were anything near viable. Surprisingly, LLMs are good at it too.
I would give the LLM statistical tools that work to find general anomalies, distributions etc. from the spreadsheet. Then it's about an LLM interpreting (or not) those results in natural language.
Of course this is a can of worms for a product because we can still not guarantee accuracy.
That makes sense to me in terms of tech, but I don't get how the economics will work. If one company has an agent that's a great statistical tool, another is great for making charts, another is great for grammar and spelling, etc., I'm guessing it'll cost a bazillion dollars in subscriptions.
The tech is arguably not there yet. From my own observations, normies get annoyed quickly because they expect it to work like deterministic software. And they tend to be way less interested in it in general, especially when I’m breathlessly telling them about this and that latest development.
> normies get annoyed quickly because they expect it to work like deterministic software
In very few use cases it is acceptable to have non-deterministic result for computation tasks. It does not matter if you are a normie or an advanced user.
Normal people don't understand what the word deterministic is, nor do they really expect their software to produce deterministic results. For one thing, they're not running the operation multiple times and comparing the outputs. For another, if they give the same task to three different people they're going to get three different results anyway, so what does it matter if the computer gives three different results, if they even notice.
> Normal people don't understand what the word deterministic is
I would argue that they implicitly do, as any user expects the same action performed on a computer or similar system to provide the same outcome.
> For another, if they give the same task to three different people they're going to get three different results
Give the same three tasks to a single user to be executed three times separately, and he will get supremely annoyed if his actions do not give him the same results.
Not even implicitly understand. A layman is perfectly capable of understanding what deterministic behavior is, and claiming otherwise is just condescension.
But I can ask the AI, it understand what I want and give me the steps. I can ask it to give it to me in api call instead and it does, after a bit of mashup.
Sure the api link and permissions and yada yada plays a part, but thats exactly how they can trap us into office365, with already use azure permissions and everything.
Again I'm sure it's harder than it looks, but it's not an AI problem anymore, and they're throwing billions at it.
Microsoft's branding is mostly about time and should not be assumed to have any other significance. You might think you can guess what "Visual Direct COM" would be or "Active Windows.NET" but the words have no meaning beside "Currently this word is hot so my new product needs that word". A Copilot XBox Edge might be a video game console with AI but it equally might be a new version of Excel. There is no coherent rationale.
A company with an actual rationale names products PlayStation, PlayStation 2, PS3, PS4, PS5
Microsoft called their rival products XBox, XBox 360, XBox One, XBox Series
Asked to put six animals in order, some might figure Anteater, Bear, Elephant, Fox, Goose, Pigeon makes sense - alphabetical order, English names. Others might try to rank them by size, the Elephant is definitely bigger than a Bear, but is the Fox bigger than a Goose? Not sure. You might give them Latin names, there are several reasonable things you might do or at least attempt
But Microsoft are like that's easy: Elephant, Dog, Squirrel, Another Squirrel, Sparrow, Bear, Elephant. And like, that's not even six animals, and it's the wrong animals, and your order makes no sense, what is wrong with you?
How many times has Microsoft had some kind of product that isn't taking off how they wanted to, so they just rename it and give it a new coat of paint? Microsoft Office? I think you mean Office 365! What does that mean? Nothing, it's just Office but you don't get to decide when to update.
Anyway, now it's Office 365 Copilot! What does that mean? It means it's Office, but with an AI which you didn't ask for, which doesn't really do much for you practically, and also which costs 50% more, and you can only opt-out by trying to cancel your subscription entirely.
You can tell AI is a grift because it's all dark patterns and lies with these people.
Just like most big corps, for a while they had a phase after Satya took over where it felt a new kind of Microsoft was coming, nowadays I would assert they are back to their former selves.
> I don't understand what microsoft is doing with their Copilot whatever push.
Anything they can think of. Honestly, anywhere they think that they could put AI to try to convince people that it's a real thing to care about, they put it there. Google is doing the same thing; I get popups any time I try to access any Google thing, like mail, docs, or the Google Cloud console. I don't care, Gemini, and I don't trust you.
Even Apple is jumping in on the AI train, presumably just to avoid getting beaten up in the press for being "behind the times", but thankfully they seem to be trying to start slow and make a good product out of it (which they have yet to do) rather than telling everyone that it can revolutionize everything that anyone ever does and forcing people to hear about it at every opportunity.
Check out Sourcetable, you might like it for your AI spreadsheet work. It's much better than Excel copilot in every aspect (financial modeling, data science, data cleaning, agent tools, etc.)
Not quite the thing you're describing, but I saw this demoed recently and thought it was pretty cool: The AI function in Google Sheets[1]. Call Gemini with the context of individual cells and have it respond in the same cell. Take a look if your company is in Workspace Labs.
My experience with Google Docs + Gemini is similar. Gemini is great for coding, but the integration with Docs / Sheets / Slides / Drive is absolute garbage; does hardly anything useful, doesn't do the actual tedious jobs I want it to do. It couldn't even find a document in Drive based on my description, or create a decent-looking slide.
(Gemini is proving excellent for coding, but it shocks me how poor the integration is for other uses.)
The "AI" integrations I've tried in other tools (Figma, Gamma) are pretty much garbage too.
It feels like one user-hostile move after another from Microsoft lately. Forcing Edge, using dark patterns to block Chrome, resetting telemetry with updates, the whole Recall fiasco... and now this. It's exhausting.
My working theory is they see Google's browser revenue and think, "we're the OS, we deserve a bigger cut." It's an incredible level of arrogance that's burning through decades of user trust for short-term gain.
Instead of all this, why not actually compete by being better? They could make Windows a bastion of privacy that protects users from app snooping. They could foster a real native app ecosystem again, like on macOS, so the OS itself adds unique value. That's how you build loyalty, not this constant squeezing of your user base.
I feel like Microsoft's attitude is that they can screw over their users, make money hand over fist by exploiting their private and personal data, and Windows users will be powerless because there's nowhere else for them to go. Anyone who was going to use an Apple computer is already doing it. They aren't afraid of linux either (although maybe they should be since it's been gaining ground). Why care about building loyalty or adding value when you're a monopoly?
They should be more scared... Mac, ChromeOS and Linux now have roughly 1/3 of desktop/laptop users. Linux having gained a lot of ground just this past year, and IMO Valve is probably solely responsible for most of that.
Even with the Valve store cut as high as it is, and some of their sketchy terms... they've been far better stewards to gaming than MS has been to Computing/OS.
Exactly... they've had glimmers of greatness here and there, and it feels like a handful of executive weenies literally twist it to try and wrench every penny of value from every user/customer they can.
For the love of $diety, complete a UI transition across the OS, get things in order, stop shoveling things onto people, don't return ads and internet search results from start-menu searches and just make great products. I was an Edge fan until they added all the garbage, starting with coupons, etc.
VS Code has been good, but they gimp their own .Net support... they do great with .Net/C# but turn around and dump their only SQL for ARM option as ARM is taking off... They rebrand RDP despite it being considered the best UI remoting option around. They keep releasing CoPilot everything that doesn't do the one thing that would give their users the most value, and are sub-par with open offerings.
At this point, I cannot support MS-SQL over PostgreSQL for any new projects given a choice. I definitely don't support developing solutions to run on Windows Server, and I'm questioning my use of VS Code despite it being by far my favorite editor since shortly after release.
Isn't Google Revenue mostly Ads? Chrome is free, YouTube is free, and most of the services targetting the general public are also free. With Microsoft, it was expected that you pay for anything useful (Windows, Office, Visual Studio,...).
When Edge first released, I really liked it... even made it my default on Linux for a while. Then came the in-the-box features, like coupon offers, etc... and I just had more and more crap to disable to where I just went back to Brave.
I like nice browser syncing between devices. I don't even mind what that means in terms of some slack on privacy... What I don't like are in your face marketing efforts. I absolutely abhor commercials, and have been willing to pay for services that don't have them. I switched to Linux literally the first time I saw an ad in the start menu search results.
I don't need Microsoft products. I'm a computer user first, and a consumer a distant second. MS really needs to learn this lesson. Just saw that US Gov is reporting 6% Linux desktop usage, which is higher than the 5% StatsCounter recently posted. Linux has gained 20-30% in just this past year, even Gaming on Linux while less than perfect/ideal is still relatively smooth for most games thanks to Valve/Steam, they definitely use their 30% cut well and while expensive seem to be at least a good steward of their ecosystem.
I feel like Microsoft has completely lost he plot in a lot of ways. Azure and .Net have had every opportunity to become darlings in the developer community... the tooling and options are pretty good. VS Code has become just about the most popular developer editor (not to mention forks). Why they choose to abuse their common users is beyond me... if they just stuck to the great parts without trying to wrench every penny of value from every user they would be much more well regarded.
As it stands, any company selling commercial software should seriously be working on packaging for Linux... at least appImage/Flatpak. There's especially good opportunity for competing software vendors to Adobe in this space. It's one of the few gaps, and the tide of software for Linux is definitely growing and there's plenty of room for commercial software here.
> you can let Copilot see all your open tabs so it can understand the full context of what you’re exploring online
Isn't that going to poison the context with low quality, SEO blog spam? How long is it going to be before content mills start filling the web with defensible lies?
For example, "exploding cell phone charger X is built with a high quality transformer." The AI will mindlessly regurgitate that without considering the nuance of source. When I evaluate that stuff the source plays a major role in the weight I give to the statement.
None of the AI I've seen does a proper job of considering the source and I'm guessing it's because they can't attribute sources due to the massive IP theft that was required to build the systems.
Google already has page score for every website out there. What makes you think that their LLM can't be made to use it? That statement sounds a lot like "AI can't generate human fingers, it will never be able to generate realistic images with humans in them" or "it can't do X so it will never be able to code Y". Shortsighted.
Not sure I like the fact that Copilot inferred that Dylan likes football so it offered to buy tickets when Dylan launched his browser.
In general, this seems to be less about empowering users and more about shoving AI in their faces. You don't need to prompt anything, it just is there.
Why has basic product management gone out of the window in this new era of AI enablement? Like on the most basic level: who ever asked for this, where is product-market fit for this kind of browser automation?
Well, it's a client-side AI spyware that monitors your activity in the internet or intranet. What Microsoft is doing makes sense if you consider that their clients are corporations and governments.
A big ongoing challenge is how to automate human actions on websites - specifically those that don't offer any API for the data needed, and and make it as hard as possible to scrape them. Almost every data job I've had, have had such part time projects going on internally, typical "How do we automate data extraction from [x] site" where the websites either refuse to provide any services, or simply can't (don't have the resources). And up until now it has been some sort of RPA / Robotic Process Automation problem.
I'm not talking about nefarious motives for doing such either, for our part it is just tedious task where humans spend too much time filling in forms / clicking on UI components, and doing the download manually.
So while letting agents run wild on problems like this can (and surely will) lead to abuse, it will likely also free up so much time for the people doing such tasks for actual work.
> or simply can't (don't have the resources). And up until now it has been some sort of RPA / Robotic Process Automation problem.
Wouldn't it be like half the cost to your organisation if you do it for them? If govt agency xyz doesn't have the resources to build this, offer to make it, get access to the source, plug it into a dead simple API, get your data and everybody's happy?
I've never held a data analysis position so I have no idea if such an org would be open to it. If not, it sounds more like the former issue (gatekeeping and unwillingness) than the latter (inability or resource lack)
Whoever starts by replacing the operating system with this style of interface wins. The point isn't to reinvent the browser, it's to change how we interact with technology completely. Right now it's all iteration but essentially if all you need is ChatGPT then just make the OS a chat interface to begin with.
> For decades, the way we’ve used browsers has remained linear: open a tab (or 20), search for something, read a page, repeat. It’s a model that’s worked well, but it hasn’t fundamentally changed.
Maybe it doesn’t need to change if it's working well? Have you considered that?
So interesting to read all these negative comments. I'm actually considering installing Edge because this something I've really been wanting for some time. I run Safari & Firefox and I know there're some plugins, but this deep integration (e.g. across tabs) is missing. I usually open 15+ tabs when I'm researching something, and then being able to ask an LLM questions across these tabs is awesome.
The main reason for me not to install this, honestly, is that I've heard that OpenAI is working on something similar and I already have their subscription. I might just wait a bit longer, but I really can see the appeal of this product.
It's kind of funny how “Copilot” has become the new “Live”—this Brand Word that Microsoft marketing seems obsessed with, branding everything they can with it, completely regardless of how much they dilute whatever positive qualities their users initially associated with it.
I (unfortunately) updated swiftkey to the latest version in an attempt to troubleshoot an issue I had, low and behold, a new copilot button has appeared!
(Ironically, I was trying to remove an @ key that popped up in an app which reduced the length of my space key by 1/3rd)
Edit: Disabling the copilot options in settings is necessary as they are on by default, disabling does not remove the button. Thanks to this post for reminding me to review settings after an update.. *unhappyface
Edit2: So I just discovered that that you can obtain several types of debug info by triple tapping on the version number in the about screen... That's nifty!
"built to the highest Microsoft standards of security, privacy and performance" seems perhaps importantly different from "but to the highest standards".
Translation: plain-text/no security, as much telemetry as possible, and performance depends on how beefy of a computer you have, but it better be beefy.
"the highest Microsoft standards of security, privacy and performance" is a very low bar. It doesn't add any confidence. They might as well not talk about it at all.
> For decades, the way we’ve used browsers has remained linear: open a tab (or 20), search for something, read a page, repeat. It’s a model that’s worked well, but it hasn’t fundamentally changed.
Is it linear though? I think most people are using tabs the way everyone use documents. Open one, find the passage you need and keep it there. Lots of current web app makes that hard (lazy loading, memory leaks,...).
A better augmentation would be annotations. Create a new notetaking session which appears in a side bar, then either screenshot or highlight a section, then it is saved alongside the comment (and tags) and the context (link, date,..). No need for a lurking agent.
ADDENDUM
A somewhat simpler version can be found in Orgmode and Emacs. You can store link to almost anything and then the capture feature in Org mode can use them in templates.
We already build websites for Googlebot so I don't really see much a difference. Maybe designers should be worried because if there's nothing to "look at" there's no point in making it look nice. This feels like XML/XHTML all over again.
I tried using it and am not impressed. I don't know if it's possible to do any of the things shown in the promotional videos. It seems like a typical web-enabled LLM, but in a browser extension. I didn't see ANY functionality from "Copilot mode" that doesn't already exist in any other web-enabled LLM. It couldn't book anything. It didn't move through the site. It did poor analysis. It hallucinated links. It gaslit me and told me that I needed to manually do the things I was asking - and gave me incorrect instructions on how to do that.
I had to double-check that I was correctly opted into this new feature because it seemed like a terrible implementation of very established technology. Every task I attempted was a frustrating failure. Embarrassingly bad stuff.
If you really want to know my specific gripes:
I navigated to a major hotel chain's site that I have discounted rates at, subject to availability. I asked Copilot to find me a hotel within driving distance to my home with those discounted rates available for certain dates. It claimed that it checked that the rates were available (something I didn't expect it to be able to do), and gave me a few hotels. The hotels exist, but every one of the "View hotel details" links were broken. Although it said it checked to see if rooms were available under the discounted rates, it definitely didn't. I tried to get it to book a reservation anyway, and it said that the "page isn't loading properly right now - either it's been moved or there's a glitch on the hotel's site." The hotel's site was working just fine.
I navigated to a recipe website I often use. I asked Copilot to find me some recipes fitting certain basic criteria ("vegan," "quick and easy").
The links it provided to each recipe were all to the main page - not actually to the recipes themselves, even though the labeled link text suggested it would be to the individual recipe.
Although the site has a plethora of vegan options, 2/4 of its recommendations were non-vegan recipes that it gave tips on how to make vegan. Recommending that I make quesadillas by "swapping nutritional yeast instead of dairy cheese" is a terrible, awful idea. Especially in the context of all the other great, already vegan recipes on the site it ignored to make this recommendation.
For the other converted-to-vegan recipe, I manually searched for the original recipe (since it couldn't provide recipe-specific links) to see that the author already had a vegan version of the recipe linked in the original instructions. Copilot's veganization was unnecessary and lower quality than what the author had already provided on the site.
For what it worth: nutritional yeast is great to replace parmigiana-like cheese. For mozzarella it’s probable a bad choice if you want to be as close as possible, but yeast is definitely not an hallucination as a cheese replacement. I’d be interested to see one or two propositions if you’re willing to share.
I get the MS Copilot hate, but Perplexity, Dia, Open AI and others are entering the AI browser space. I don't think Google and MS can just sit it out and hope AI browsers don't catch on.
At this point most of us have a ChatGPT tab (or 20) open at all times- it's more convenient just having it on the page. It's also genuinely revolutionary when integrated into things like Colab notebooks.
I don't understand what microsoft is doing with their Copilot whatever push.
They have 50 different offers, all with their own pricing, and they all suck, and Microsoft themselves don't like their results in that field.
Let me solve it for you Microsoft: the money maker you're sitting on today, is "hey excel, make a summary of those 8 sheets to identify our 5 most profitables products and their evolution in sales the past 3 years, add that on a new sheet at the end with a visual graph". None of their product does that right now, instead they tell you the step on how to do it.
Instead of making a bazillion different weird thing, Excel and Office already have their API, just make your "AI" bridge natural talk to excel common task and see every company register it for their employee. I'm not even exagerating, I would in an instant.
I tried many AI tool for excel and none of them come anywhere close to that. It must be much harder than I first thought, but then again they spent BILLIONS on this.
For a company that own business logic as a basic idea, they're really terrible at exploiting it with new ideas. Even just natural talk to power query steps would be worth it.
> It must be much harder than I first thought, but then again they spent BILLIONS on this.
Which is why MS and every other company keeps pushing half-baked garbage AI products onto the public at every opportunity. So much money has been sunk into AI that they need something to show for it. They also hope that as people use it they can improve the AI they have so that maybe one day it can become something worthwhile. As a bonus it's one more way for them to collect your data and get you used to asking an AI for what you need instead of using your brain.
I asked o3 pro to do something like this a few months ago when I paid for a month of ChatGPT Pro. It got very excited and said it was on it and spent 20 minutes absolutely cranking. Then it spit out the world’s saddest excel file with no formatting, and half the data truncated.
Sounds like my post-coffee morning routine, with similar results
Your description was hilarious!
Thank you for the laughs :D
OT: I wonder if we'll see some "core personalities" that are innate to each mega-LLM (Claude, O3, Copilot, Gemini)... methinks this has comedic potential.
Fully spot on, I want AI to feel natural, part of the workflows of using an OS, improved search, better OCR, handwriting, in general a better user experience, not something bolted on at all costs, with chat windows all over the place.
Thanks Microsoft, for giving me yet another reason not to use Edge beyond browser compatibility matrixes in project delivery.
Unfortunally this is also coming to all their developer tools, VS, VSCode, PowerShell, Windows Terminal, .NET Aspire, Azure,... everything is getting AI there somehow, as each team struggles to meet their AI OKRs, and reason of existence among endless layoffs.
I’ve been thinking about something similar - Microsoft needs to make dead simple “AI scripts” record: I download this csv file, I then manipulate the data this way, add these formulas, add a cover sheet, do these checks, and then upload the new sheet a with the following columns into system X. Once you have that recorded, and adjusted to what you want. Next you just download the file and run the script.
The amount of repetitive data manipulation at companies is literally insane, just ask anyone in accounting, operations, hr, etc… just being able to automate repetitive task in excel for people that can’t code or aren’t excel/Vba super users would be incredibly valuable.
That’s how custom agents in Microsoft copilot and Microsoft copilot studio work.
You pretend it’s AI, but in reality you’re just building literally power automate flows which you can call through an LLM lmao
Having recently watched a corporate trainer spend 15 minutes trying to figure out why Copilot wasn’t correctly importing a CSV with headers when “it worked fine when I showed this 2 weeks ago” — my guess is that the tech isn’t quite there yet to sell (reliable) AI-powered Excel
> "hey excel, make a summary of those 8 sheets to identify our 5 most profitables products and their evolution in sales the past 3 years, add that on a new sheet at the end with a visual graph"
Aren't they just pattern recognition and regurgitation machines? How would it analyze and interpret unique data with a pattern it's never seen?
Some of the AI stuff is very useful, but it's been massively oversold. In my experience, it's great for working on documentation or creating a one-time-use script to query an API, but it's not good at the "big picture" tasks they want for a sales pitch.
I would give the LLM statistical tools that work to find general anomalies, distributions etc. from the spreadsheet. Then it's about an LLM interpreting (or not) those results in natural language.
Of course this is a can of worms for a product because we can still not guarantee accuracy.
That makes sense to me in terms of tech, but I don't get how the economics will work. If one company has an agent that's a great statistical tool, another is great for making charts, another is great for grammar and spelling, etc., I'm guessing it'll cost a bazillion dollars in subscriptions.
The tech is arguably not there yet. From my own observations, normies get annoyed quickly because they expect it to work like deterministic software. And they tend to be way less interested in it in general, especially when I’m breathlessly telling them about this and that latest development.
oh wow people want their software to be deterministic and with the same set of inputs get the same set of outputs! What is this, the 90s?
> normies get annoyed quickly because they expect it to work like deterministic software
In very few use cases it is acceptable to have non-deterministic result for computation tasks. It does not matter if you are a normie or an advanced user.
Normal people don't understand what the word deterministic is, nor do they really expect their software to produce deterministic results. For one thing, they're not running the operation multiple times and comparing the outputs. For another, if they give the same task to three different people they're going to get three different results anyway, so what does it matter if the computer gives three different results, if they even notice.
> Normal people don't understand what the word deterministic is
I would argue that they implicitly do, as any user expects the same action performed on a computer or similar system to provide the same outcome.
> For another, if they give the same task to three different people they're going to get three different results
Give the same three tasks to a single user to be executed three times separately, and he will get supremely annoyed if his actions do not give him the same results.
Not even implicitly understand. A layman is perfectly capable of understanding what deterministic behavior is, and claiming otherwise is just condescension.
Then you and I work with very different people. Here it seems "reset it and try again" is considered a viable problem solving technique.
I think “normal” (non-computer) people have a mental model for computing that is more like a (possibly bad) coworker.
They would quickly adapt to “reload it a few times if it doesn’t work right away”.
Isn’t this what people are already doing when they browse the web? I know I am.
What are you basing those claims on?
But I can ask the AI, it understand what I want and give me the steps. I can ask it to give it to me in api call instead and it does, after a bit of mashup.
Sure the api link and permissions and yada yada plays a part, but thats exactly how they can trap us into office365, with already use azure permissions and everything.
Again I'm sure it's harder than it looks, but it's not an AI problem anymore, and they're throwing billions at it.
> normies
do you mean users?
Yeah they don't understand we're in the equivalent phase that the commodore 64 was for the computer.
Microsoft's branding is mostly about time and should not be assumed to have any other significance. You might think you can guess what "Visual Direct COM" would be or "Active Windows.NET" but the words have no meaning beside "Currently this word is hot so my new product needs that word". A Copilot XBox Edge might be a video game console with AI but it equally might be a new version of Excel. There is no coherent rationale.
A company with an actual rationale names products PlayStation, PlayStation 2, PS3, PS4, PS5
Microsoft called their rival products XBox, XBox 360, XBox One, XBox Series
Asked to put six animals in order, some might figure Anteater, Bear, Elephant, Fox, Goose, Pigeon makes sense - alphabetical order, English names. Others might try to rank them by size, the Elephant is definitely bigger than a Bear, but is the Fox bigger than a Goose? Not sure. You might give them Latin names, there are several reasonable things you might do or at least attempt
But Microsoft are like that's easy: Elephant, Dog, Squirrel, Another Squirrel, Sparrow, Bear, Elephant. And like, that's not even six animals, and it's the wrong animals, and your order makes no sense, what is wrong with you?
How many times has Microsoft had some kind of product that isn't taking off how they wanted to, so they just rename it and give it a new coat of paint? Microsoft Office? I think you mean Office 365! What does that mean? Nothing, it's just Office but you don't get to decide when to update.
Anyway, now it's Office 365 Copilot! What does that mean? It means it's Office, but with an AI which you didn't ask for, which doesn't really do much for you practically, and also which costs 50% more, and you can only opt-out by trying to cancel your subscription entirely.
You can tell AI is a grift because it's all dark patterns and lies with these people.
Just like most big corps, for a while they had a phase after Satya took over where it felt a new kind of Microsoft was coming, nowadays I would assert they are back to their former selves.
On my Android, it's called "M365 Copilot", which is even more wtf...
We use https://www.quadratichq.com for this. It works pretty well too!
Easy. 50 different teams get to 'make impact'.
> 50 different offers, all with their own pricing
They also randomly time out mid-task, e.g. in image generation, without an obvious way to pay for more compute time.
> I don't understand what microsoft is doing with their Copilot whatever push.
Anything they can think of. Honestly, anywhere they think that they could put AI to try to convince people that it's a real thing to care about, they put it there. Google is doing the same thing; I get popups any time I try to access any Google thing, like mail, docs, or the Google Cloud console. I don't care, Gemini, and I don't trust you.
Even Apple is jumping in on the AI train, presumably just to avoid getting beaten up in the press for being "behind the times", but thankfully they seem to be trying to start slow and make a good product out of it (which they have yet to do) rather than telling everyone that it can revolutionize everything that anyone ever does and forcing people to hear about it at every opportunity.
I feel like companies are getting there, it's just that everyone is scrambling now and things are in early stages.
Check out Sourcetable, you might like it for your AI spreadsheet work. It's much better than Excel copilot in every aspect (financial modeling, data science, data cleaning, agent tools, etc.)
It really is super obvious that the winning move for most apps is to add an text interface with LLM capabilities. Like autocad - but LLM accessible.
You say "text interface" because that's what you're most used to. It could as well be audio interface.
Not quite the thing you're describing, but I saw this demoed recently and thought it was pretty cool: The AI function in Google Sheets[1]. Call Gemini with the context of individual cells and have it respond in the same cell. Take a look if your company is in Workspace Labs.
1. https://support.google.com/docs/answer/15820999
Disclaimer: Googler, opinions my own.
They’re going for the “if we throw shit at everything then some of it will stick”. The problem is everything is covered in shit.
The things that aren’t shit are harder than they thought.
My experience with Google Docs + Gemini is similar. Gemini is great for coding, but the integration with Docs / Sheets / Slides / Drive is absolute garbage; does hardly anything useful, doesn't do the actual tedious jobs I want it to do. It couldn't even find a document in Drive based on my description, or create a decent-looking slide.
(Gemini is proving excellent for coding, but it shocks me how poor the integration is for other uses.)
The "AI" integrations I've tried in other tools (Figma, Gamma) are pretty much garbage too.
It feels like one user-hostile move after another from Microsoft lately. Forcing Edge, using dark patterns to block Chrome, resetting telemetry with updates, the whole Recall fiasco... and now this. It's exhausting.
My working theory is they see Google's browser revenue and think, "we're the OS, we deserve a bigger cut." It's an incredible level of arrogance that's burning through decades of user trust for short-term gain.
Instead of all this, why not actually compete by being better? They could make Windows a bastion of privacy that protects users from app snooping. They could foster a real native app ecosystem again, like on macOS, so the OS itself adds unique value. That's how you build loyalty, not this constant squeezing of your user base.
I feel like Microsoft's attitude is that they can screw over their users, make money hand over fist by exploiting their private and personal data, and Windows users will be powerless because there's nowhere else for them to go. Anyone who was going to use an Apple computer is already doing it. They aren't afraid of linux either (although maybe they should be since it's been gaining ground). Why care about building loyalty or adding value when you're a monopoly?
They should be more scared... Mac, ChromeOS and Linux now have roughly 1/3 of desktop/laptop users. Linux having gained a lot of ground just this past year, and IMO Valve is probably solely responsible for most of that.
Even with the Valve store cut as high as it is, and some of their sketchy terms... they've been far better stewards to gaming than MS has been to Computing/OS.
Not even close, still around 70%.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide
Exactly... they've had glimmers of greatness here and there, and it feels like a handful of executive weenies literally twist it to try and wrench every penny of value from every user/customer they can.
For the love of $diety, complete a UI transition across the OS, get things in order, stop shoveling things onto people, don't return ads and internet search results from start-menu searches and just make great products. I was an Edge fan until they added all the garbage, starting with coupons, etc.
VS Code has been good, but they gimp their own .Net support... they do great with .Net/C# but turn around and dump their only SQL for ARM option as ARM is taking off... They rebrand RDP despite it being considered the best UI remoting option around. They keep releasing CoPilot everything that doesn't do the one thing that would give their users the most value, and are sub-par with open offerings.
At this point, I cannot support MS-SQL over PostgreSQL for any new projects given a choice. I definitely don't support developing solutions to run on Windows Server, and I'm questioning my use of VS Code despite it being by far my favorite editor since shortly after release.
Isn't Google Revenue mostly Ads? Chrome is free, YouTube is free, and most of the services targetting the general public are also free. With Microsoft, it was expected that you pay for anything useful (Windows, Office, Visual Studio,...).
why? they already sell your data to all the 3 letter agencies
Bloomberg's piece on Microsoft Copilot, if you haven't read it:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-24/chatgpt-v...
And HN discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44367638
Basically, nobody wants to use Copilot, because it sucks.
> Microsoft is struggling to sell its Copilot AI assistant to corporations because many of their employees want ChatGPT.
So Copilot isn't using GPT?
I tried googling it and one thread said they use GPT4. Maybe it's the wrapper they built that doesn't work well.
GPT and ChatGPT are two different things. One is an LLM, the other is a full product.
> Maybe it's the wrapper they built that doesn't work well.
That's the issue. It's almost difficult to imagine you can build a bad product on top of GPT models, but Microsoft showed us how.
When Edge first released, I really liked it... even made it my default on Linux for a while. Then came the in-the-box features, like coupon offers, etc... and I just had more and more crap to disable to where I just went back to Brave.
I like nice browser syncing between devices. I don't even mind what that means in terms of some slack on privacy... What I don't like are in your face marketing efforts. I absolutely abhor commercials, and have been willing to pay for services that don't have them. I switched to Linux literally the first time I saw an ad in the start menu search results.
I don't need Microsoft products. I'm a computer user first, and a consumer a distant second. MS really needs to learn this lesson. Just saw that US Gov is reporting 6% Linux desktop usage, which is higher than the 5% StatsCounter recently posted. Linux has gained 20-30% in just this past year, even Gaming on Linux while less than perfect/ideal is still relatively smooth for most games thanks to Valve/Steam, they definitely use their 30% cut well and while expensive seem to be at least a good steward of their ecosystem.
I feel like Microsoft has completely lost he plot in a lot of ways. Azure and .Net have had every opportunity to become darlings in the developer community... the tooling and options are pretty good. VS Code has become just about the most popular developer editor (not to mention forks). Why they choose to abuse their common users is beyond me... if they just stuck to the great parts without trying to wrench every penny of value from every user they would be much more well regarded.
As it stands, any company selling commercial software should seriously be working on packaging for Linux... at least appImage/Flatpak. There's especially good opportunity for competing software vendors to Adobe in this space. It's one of the few gaps, and the tide of software for Linux is definitely growing and there's plenty of room for commercial software here.
I moved to Vivaldi.
+1 for Brave!
Brave it's Spyware.
> you can let Copilot see all your open tabs so it can understand the full context of what you’re exploring online
Isn't that going to poison the context with low quality, SEO blog spam? How long is it going to be before content mills start filling the web with defensible lies?
For example, "exploding cell phone charger X is built with a high quality transformer." The AI will mindlessly regurgitate that without considering the nuance of source. When I evaluate that stuff the source plays a major role in the weight I give to the statement.
None of the AI I've seen does a proper job of considering the source and I'm guessing it's because they can't attribute sources due to the massive IP theft that was required to build the systems.
Google already has page score for every website out there. What makes you think that their LLM can't be made to use it? That statement sounds a lot like "AI can't generate human fingers, it will never be able to generate realistic images with humans in them" or "it can't do X so it will never be able to code Y". Shortsighted.
Google search results are much worse than they used to be. And how would an LLM extrapolate good outputs from garbage inputs?
Not sure I like the fact that Copilot inferred that Dylan likes football so it offered to buy tickets when Dylan launched his browser.
In general, this seems to be less about empowering users and more about shoving AI in their faces. You don't need to prompt anything, it just is there.
Why has basic product management gone out of the window in this new era of AI enablement? Like on the most basic level: who ever asked for this, where is product-market fit for this kind of browser automation?
Well, it's a client-side AI spyware that monitors your activity in the internet or intranet. What Microsoft is doing makes sense if you consider that their clients are corporations and governments.
A big ongoing challenge is how to automate human actions on websites - specifically those that don't offer any API for the data needed, and and make it as hard as possible to scrape them. Almost every data job I've had, have had such part time projects going on internally, typical "How do we automate data extraction from [x] site" where the websites either refuse to provide any services, or simply can't (don't have the resources). And up until now it has been some sort of RPA / Robotic Process Automation problem.
I'm not talking about nefarious motives for doing such either, for our part it is just tedious task where humans spend too much time filling in forms / clicking on UI components, and doing the download manually.
So while letting agents run wild on problems like this can (and surely will) lead to abuse, it will likely also free up so much time for the people doing such tasks for actual work.
> or simply can't (don't have the resources). And up until now it has been some sort of RPA / Robotic Process Automation problem.
Wouldn't it be like half the cost to your organisation if you do it for them? If govt agency xyz doesn't have the resources to build this, offer to make it, get access to the source, plug it into a dead simple API, get your data and everybody's happy?
I've never held a data analysis position so I have no idea if such an org would be open to it. If not, it sounds more like the former issue (gatekeeping and unwillingness) than the latter (inability or resource lack)
The site wont give you a dead simple API.
No, because then they would realize their data is worth money.
The person above said they were approaching these places already, so latest at that time, they've realised that
Whoever starts by replacing the operating system with this style of interface wins. The point isn't to reinvent the browser, it's to change how we interact with technology completely. Right now it's all iteration but essentially if all you need is ChatGPT then just make the OS a chat interface to begin with.
> For decades, the way we’ve used browsers has remained linear: open a tab (or 20), search for something, read a page, repeat. It’s a model that’s worked well, but it hasn’t fundamentally changed.
Maybe it doesn’t need to change if it's working well? Have you considered that?
Next they'll be trying to sell you on eating with your ear or something because "for millennia, the way we eat food hasn't fundamentally changed".
So interesting to read all these negative comments. I'm actually considering installing Edge because this something I've really been wanting for some time. I run Safari & Firefox and I know there're some plugins, but this deep integration (e.g. across tabs) is missing. I usually open 15+ tabs when I'm researching something, and then being able to ask an LLM questions across these tabs is awesome.
The main reason for me not to install this, honestly, is that I've heard that OpenAI is working on something similar and I already have their subscription. I might just wait a bit longer, but I really can see the appeal of this product.
It's kind of funny how “Copilot” has become the new “Live”—this Brand Word that Microsoft marketing seems obsessed with, branding everything they can with it, completely regardless of how much they dilute whatever positive qualities their users initially associated with it.
I (unfortunately) updated swiftkey to the latest version in an attempt to troubleshoot an issue I had, low and behold, a new copilot button has appeared!
(Ironically, I was trying to remove an @ key that popped up in an app which reduced the length of my space key by 1/3rd)
Edit: Disabling the copilot options in settings is necessary as they are on by default, disabling does not remove the button. Thanks to this post for reminding me to review settings after an update.. *unhappyface
Edit2: So I just discovered that that you can obtain several types of debug info by triple tapping on the version number in the about screen... That's nifty!
Who would thought that Microsoft did not change a single bit after two decades?
A link that I found on a different HN thread that is somewhat related: https://www.osnews.com/story/19921/full-text-an-epic-bill-ga...
Don't forget about MSN, Windows Live, Metro. I wonder what will be the "next big thing" they'll gonna push as a brand
"built to the highest Microsoft standards of security, privacy and performance" seems perhaps importantly different from "but to the highest standards".
Translation: plain-text/no security, as much telemetry as possible, and performance depends on how beefy of a computer you have, but it better be beefy.
"the highest Microsoft standards of security, privacy and performance" is a very low bar. It doesn't add any confidence. They might as well not talk about it at all.
I wonder if "the highest Microsoft standards" are above of below "military grade"?
And then just a beat later:
“…with you as the user always in control.”
What a joke.
A feature nobody wants in a browser nobody uses.
What I really need is a copilot plugin for my copilot. Coming up with good prompts is hard, I want an LLM fine tuned for this particular task.
> For decades, the way we’ve used browsers has remained linear: open a tab (or 20), search for something, read a page, repeat. It’s a model that’s worked well, but it hasn’t fundamentally changed.
Is it linear though? I think most people are using tabs the way everyone use documents. Open one, find the passage you need and keep it there. Lots of current web app makes that hard (lazy loading, memory leaks,...).
A better augmentation would be annotations. Create a new notetaking session which appears in a side bar, then either screenshot or highlight a section, then it is saved alongside the comment (and tags) and the context (link, date,..). No need for a lurking agent.
ADDENDUM
A somewhat simpler version can be found in Orgmode and Emacs. You can store link to almost anything and then the capture feature in Org mode can use them in templates.
I had no idea that Microsoft set up a discord server for copilot.
This new browser mode is a robot that replaces visitors on websites. It can't be good news for website editors...
Should we (developers) start building websites for robots?
We already build websites for Googlebot so I don't really see much a difference. Maybe designers should be worried because if there's nothing to "look at" there's no point in making it look nice. This feels like XML/XHTML all over again.
Well, guess what we are doing when we say SEO?
AI is building websites for AI. Let the enshittification Olympics commence!
[dead]
I tried using it and am not impressed. I don't know if it's possible to do any of the things shown in the promotional videos. It seems like a typical web-enabled LLM, but in a browser extension. I didn't see ANY functionality from "Copilot mode" that doesn't already exist in any other web-enabled LLM. It couldn't book anything. It didn't move through the site. It did poor analysis. It hallucinated links. It gaslit me and told me that I needed to manually do the things I was asking - and gave me incorrect instructions on how to do that.
I had to double-check that I was correctly opted into this new feature because it seemed like a terrible implementation of very established technology. Every task I attempted was a frustrating failure. Embarrassingly bad stuff.
If you really want to know my specific gripes: I navigated to a major hotel chain's site that I have discounted rates at, subject to availability. I asked Copilot to find me a hotel within driving distance to my home with those discounted rates available for certain dates. It claimed that it checked that the rates were available (something I didn't expect it to be able to do), and gave me a few hotels. The hotels exist, but every one of the "View hotel details" links were broken. Although it said it checked to see if rooms were available under the discounted rates, it definitely didn't. I tried to get it to book a reservation anyway, and it said that the "page isn't loading properly right now - either it's been moved or there's a glitch on the hotel's site." The hotel's site was working just fine.
I navigated to a recipe website I often use. I asked Copilot to find me some recipes fitting certain basic criteria ("vegan," "quick and easy").
The links it provided to each recipe were all to the main page - not actually to the recipes themselves, even though the labeled link text suggested it would be to the individual recipe.
Although the site has a plethora of vegan options, 2/4 of its recommendations were non-vegan recipes that it gave tips on how to make vegan. Recommending that I make quesadillas by "swapping nutritional yeast instead of dairy cheese" is a terrible, awful idea. Especially in the context of all the other great, already vegan recipes on the site it ignored to make this recommendation.
For the other converted-to-vegan recipe, I manually searched for the original recipe (since it couldn't provide recipe-specific links) to see that the author already had a vegan version of the recipe linked in the original instructions. Copilot's veganization was unnecessary and lower quality than what the author had already provided on the site.
For what it worth: nutritional yeast is great to replace parmigiana-like cheese. For mozzarella it’s probable a bad choice if you want to be as close as possible, but yeast is definitely not an hallucination as a cheese replacement. I’d be interested to see one or two propositions if you’re willing to share.
more ways to try and track user behaviour and steal… i mean, request private user data.
Not enabled for Linux I see
I get the MS Copilot hate, but Perplexity, Dia, Open AI and others are entering the AI browser space. I don't think Google and MS can just sit it out and hope AI browsers don't catch on.
At this point most of us have a ChatGPT tab (or 20) open at all times- it's more convenient just having it on the page. It's also genuinely revolutionary when integrated into things like Colab notebooks.
From the Privacy Policy: There will always be clear, visual cues on your browser when Copilot is viewing or listening.
"CoPilot, please install Firefox for me"
"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that"
Legitimately reads like an April fool's joke