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Early Adopters of Microsoft’s AI Bot Wonder if It’s Worth the Money (www.wsj.com)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Artificial-intelligence aide handles email, meetings and other things, but its price and limited use have some skeptical

Microsoft’s new artificial-intelligence assistant for its bestselling software has been in the hands of testers for more than six months and their reviews are in: useful, but often doesn’t live up to its price.

The company is hoping for one of its biggest hits in decades with Copilot for Microsoft 365, an AI upgrade that plugs into Word, Outlook and Teams. It uses the same technology as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and can summarize emails, generate text and create documents based on natural language prompts.

Companies involved in testing say their employees have been clamoring to test the tool—at least initially. So far, the shortcomings with software including Excel and PowerPoint and its tendency to make mistakes have given some testers pause about whether, at $30 a head per month, it is worth the price

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

I use it all the time at work as a programmer. Not that often for generating code but for learning new languages and frameworks quickly.

I noticed our juniors are able to get up to speed incredibly fast by leaning on it when picking up new things as well.

We also experimented with it for sentiment analysis of customer feedback and the results were very impressive.

It is genuinely a game changer when used correctly. The issue I see is people trying to push it everywhere.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)

As a reference, I'd use a search engine first, but it's a matter of personal preference. Usually I'm only short in syntax and a particular language's native functions. The only benefit I could foresee is avoiding the rude, condescending snarky comments from the experienced developers on stackexchange and the like, but I almost never register to post, so avoid all that. I did see a benefit in the area of (real) language learning, when I can ask it to translate something. Then break down specific parts of the response for clarification, switching between my native and the language I'm trying to learn. That was mind blowing.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I use it instead of a search engine now.

Rather than skimming a few blog/SO posts looking for the particular info I want it pulls exactly what I need, summarizes it, provides sources and allows follow up questions.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

That's exactly it. I know HOW to program generically. I know what control flow is, how memory works, what a pointer and an object is. I just need some coaching on syntax because it's all just too much to memorize in one lifetime. But once I see it written and used in front of me, I can easily determine if it's any good or not.

It's amusing when it just makes up methods to objects of mine that don't exist. I can spot crap like that immediately. On one of those occasions I actually wrote it into the class so it would actually compile because I thought it was a useful thing.