1+2=12 12+3=15
seems legit
Shouldnt it be 123 then
no 1 and 2 are strings 3 is an integer m’okay?
Also, working upward, 3+2=5, “1”+5=“15”.
I wonder which “inspired” path it chose.
Storytime. I tried to use copilot to get some rather convoluted dataset analyzed in Excel. Not a huge task, but basically I wanted it to count me the occurrences of certain values, grouped by that value. Of course that’s easy with Pivot, and there’s probably also some formula for that, but it wasn’t very urgent, so I figured I’d see what Copilot could do. Now of course I didn’t want to use that =COPILOT() formula, but instead asked Copilot to create me a formula to correctly count how often each value occurs. So it created this multiple lines long formula, which from first glance seemed plausible (though way overcomplicated). I asked it to insert this into cell F13. „Of course“, it said — and then proceeded to do nothing. Confronted with this, it tried again, and failed. After some asking why it didn’t just go that, it told me that this is not possible in Excel in Mac. I’d have to use the web version of Excel. WTF? Why doesn’t the fully featured version do this? Well, of course: Microsoft doesn’t like Apple too much. So I tried copy pasting the formula and failed. Some syntax error cropped up. I asked Copilot about this, and it came back with a typical „oh sorry, my bad, here is the correct formula“ and the same formula again. Of course this failed. And since I didn’t want to debug this stupid thing (the error message of course also didn’t give any indication what exactly could be wrong), I just created a Pivot and got my result in seconds.
Now this is only one of many experiences I had when trying to really use that 365 Copilot for anything useful. Maybe I should write a book about it. And then ask Copilot to write a book about it and put this into the epilogue.
If people stopped trying to make it something it’s not and built it as a proper tool, this is one of the few things AI is good for. It can proccess data quite well, or could. Because of all that’s being shoved in the hallucinations are getting worse, but I’ve been able to use it to proccess data sets with very specific instructions. Saved me hours of tedious work.
But a way to organize and proccess data faster isn’t exciting for investors so
Thumbs up the bad and the good, with about 10% thumbs down randomly. Poison their data set.
It pains me to defend an AI feature, but this whole tweet is disingenuous and stupid. The documentation for
=COPILOT()says a few things which are relevant to understand what we’re seeing here:- You’re not supposed to use it for math
- It only has access to the parts of the spreadsheet you pass it as the second argument
In this case the user has not provided copilot any cells to look at, so they’re just asking what the typical answer on the Internet is for the request “sum the numbers above”. And the sum of numbers above things are apparently often 15.
if you’re not supposed to use it for math, maybe it shouldn’t produce numbers/formulas.
If it’s “not supposed to be used for math” then it should pop a modal that says “I don’t do math”.
The issue isn’t about what it can and can’t do, it’s that it is CONSTANTLY attempting to step in and “fix” my spreadsheet in bizarrely inane ways. Why won’t it give me the “shut up and stay the fuck out of my way” option? There is no option to remove or silence copilot. That damn thing follows my cursor like a ring wraith after Frodo. It has already fucked up more than one of my spreadsheets without asking or being asked. If I hadn’t been paying attention, I might not have caught the absolutely bat shit insane edits it was making to simple and correct functions I’d already entered. No, copilot you don’t know what I’m doing. Clippy was less intrusive.
That sounds like a different thing than
=COPILOT (). There are like 75 completely different things all called Copilot, because Microsoft are masters at naming things.The reason they have Copilot act eithout you requesting it is so they can show their investors Copilot is being used.
Big part of the problem with AI features is that way too many people believe they are silver bullet for everything and they are marketed like that.
Computer savvy people know better ways of doing math and can figure out that context is needed.
Overwhelming majority of people, including bosses and managers, are too lazy and ignorant to care about the points you mention.
This is true for every field: people knowledgeable in that field know that there are better ways to do it then AI and easily spot the errors AI makes. AI only looks good in fields you are ignorant about.
Keep in mind that if you allow a user to make this mistake, people will DEFINITELY make this mistake. A lot.
Dont you just tell the AI to make no mistakes
And if that’s true, just imagine something any more compex, that could get lost amid the rest of the slop for a long time
Is the analogy like giving access to a nuclear reactor to users and giving them access to AI to help them run the nuclear plant by allowing the AI to give users the most common answers and responses into how to run a nuclear power plant.
Every job is just some sort of troubleshooting, it just makes it harder to do when your manual is making stuff up
That is true for a lot of things, particularly every AI feature ever.
… You aren’t supposed to use it for math… In excel? What is the point?
People do all sorts of weird non-math stuff in Excel. The stated use-case for this feature is stuff that operates on text. Say for example you fill column A with quotes from your customers about your product. Then you can tell Copilot to provide a summary of each row in column B, and whether the sentiment is positive or negative in column C. You could aggregate the results as well.
There are better tools for that sort of thing, but a lot of people really love their Excel hammer, and they see nails everywhere.
But haven’t the makers of Excel said in the past that you shouldn’t use Excel for non-math stuff because that’s not what it’s designed for? Now their putting in a “tool” that’s useless for math stuff?
I don’t know, I’m not that deep in Excel lore. But sometimes things change.
Is there a layperson-accessible way to paste a large number of email adresses and concatenate them with "; " that’s more recommended than spreadsheet software?.
True, I did forget that it might have been useful for me in one very specific instance where there was a comments section in one of our excel forms and I wanted to summarize the most common words mentioned in those comments. Couldn’t figure out how at the time but this could potentially have figured it out. Not sure I would trust the accuracy of it’s result though
How is this easier than just typing in sum(a1:a3)??
Bc this way gives profits to AI…
deleted by creator
Yeah, the “skill barrier”
It obviously added “A+1+2+3” and got 15 after looking up the typical value of A.
When they called the function, they didn’t specify any cells. The copilot function, like any other Excel function, cannot see cells that aren’t given to it.
The second argument is blank, so it just Gave a typical answer to a sum question.
And it was still wrong
Assuming you are right, according to ascii A is 65 so it should be 71…
Im honestly struggling to figure out how it got 15. Yes I know it’s just a fancy text prediction engine. Yes it doesn’t think, it just calculates what is the most likely string to follow the previous one. But seriously 1+2+3 equaling 15 makes no sense… Wait holy shit… I got it
2+3 = 5
1 = 1
Now instead of adding them, imagine they are strings and concatenate them together (str) “1”+(str) “5” = “15”
It didn’t consider any of the numbers, because the user didn’t provide the context argument to the function.
I’m betting the one is formatted as text and the other rows are formatted as a numbers. Can’t confirm as I don’t use excel but that seems to be the issue.
No, it’s a lot more basic than that. You provide
=COPILOT()the cells to operate on in the second parameter, and the user didn’t provide it. Copilot cannot see any of the spreadsheet and just reported what a typical answer for a request like that is.Wait… Is that really true? The integrated copilot in excel can’t see the data in excel? That’s insane. Copilot in vscode or visual studio can see all the code your working on so I don’t see why excel wouldn’t be able to…
Excel sees the cells you tell it to operate on. When you’re working with code, all the code is relevant. Usually in Excel, you have specific cells you want to do an operation on, and those are provided to the function, just like any other thing you do in Excel. If you want to operate on the entire spreadsheet, just provide a range including the entire spreadsheet, but this is not done unless you ask for it.
Wow, yeah most people who want to use a function like this will mess that up…
Or A can be 10 in hexadecimal, but that wouldn’t fit either.
Yeah but then in hex it would equal 16, not 15. I’m betting he set the format of the 2 and 3 to number but forgot to set the format of the 1 and it defaulted to text. 2 and 3 got added but adding a string to an integer defaulted to concatenation, since they integrated python within excel and this how it would work in python.
How many gigawatts did it take for you to figure that out?
1.21 jiggawatts!
Great Scott!!
The typical value of A is 9, according to copilot.
Off by 1. Not too bad.
Whenever I’m feeling suicidal, I remind myself that I have never had to use Excel
It doesn’t always work, but it often works
Edit: although, I did have a brief affair with Lotus 123 and Lotus Notes, back in the day
