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Microsoft has a problem: lack of demand for its AI products

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336 points mohi-kalantari | 1 comments | 08 Dec 25 16:54 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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ZeroConcerns ◴[08 Dec 25 17:40 UTC] No.46195233[source]▶
Well, the major problem Microsoft is facing is that its AI products are not only shoddier than average, which is nothing new for them in many categories, but that this time the competition can actually easily leapfrog them.

Like, I have a 'Copilot' button prominently displayed in my New Outlook on MacOS (the only platform where the app-with-that-designation is sort-of usable), and it's a dropdown menu, and it has... zero items when expanded.

I asked my 'Microsoft 365 Bing Chat AI Bot Powered By ChatGPT<tm>' about that, and it wasn't able to tell me how to make that button actually do something, ending the conversation with "yeah, that's sort-of a tease, isn't it?"...

Oh, well, and I actually also have a dedicated Copilot button on my new Lenovo laptop powered-by-Windows-11. And, guess what, it does exactly nothing! I can elect to either assign this button to 'Search', which opens a WebView2 to bing.com (ehhm, yeah, sure, thanks!) or to 'Custom', in which case it informs me that 'nothing' meets the hardware requirements to actually enable that.

So, my question to anyone in the Microsoft C-suite: have you ever tried to, like, actually use, like anything that you're selling? Because if you would have, the failings would have been obvious, right? Right??

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throw310822 ◴[08 Dec 25 17:46 UTC] No.46195308[source]▶
The other day I've clicked on one of Outlook calendar's copilot prefilled questions: "who are the main attendees of this meeting". It started a long winding speech that went nowhere, so I typed in "but WHO are the attendees" and finally it admitted "I don't know, I can't see that".
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flkiwi ◴[08 Dec 25 19:26 UTC] No.46196505[source]▶
Me: Can you access my inbox and Teams messages?

Copilot: Yep!

Me: Please find any items in my inbox or sent items indicating (a) that I have agreed to take on a task or (b) identifying me as the person responsible for a task, removing duplicates and any items that I have unambiguously replied to via email or Teams. Time window is preceding 7 days.

Copilot: Prints a list with, at best, 5% accuracy

I know some folks have the peculiar idea that search is dead in favor of AI, but if AI can't accurately find information, it is useless. As near as I can tell, Copilot finds 3-4 items (but rarely the SAME 3-4 items across runs) and calls it a day. It just seems like nobody is actually testing any of this stuff. Microsoft is actively destroying its credibility because it's offering a tool with a party trick but is utterly unreliable. I will, therefore, not rely on it.

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1. PLenz ◴[08 Dec 25 19:32 UTC] No.46196564[source]▶
It's a generalization problem. We can train LLMs that 'know' a lot of stuff in the global sense but the tasks that are interesting to people require the LLM to know a lot about you and your world in a very specific sense. The technical problem is that it's all corner cases and that's impossible to scale right now. No amount of context window is going to get you there either.