Microsoft's Copilot AI to pervade the whole 365 suite
- Reference: 1678989488
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/03/16/microsoft_365_copilot_ai_teaser/
- Source link:
If you're aware of Microsoft's addition of Copilot to its Dynamics 365 CRM and ERP software [1]earlier this month , then you already know what's coming to Microsoft 365: a natural-language-based user interface that can draw upon your documents to spit out answers or perform actions in response to whatever a user asks or requests, or so that's the hope.
With Dynamics 365, Copilot was all about smoothing workflow in CRM and ERP software, and now it can do the same thing with workflows in Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, Teams, and Power Platform.
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This technology is said to be powered by OpenAI's experimental text-generating [3]GPT-4 family, the same line of tech that insisted one of our very-much-alive contributors was [4]dead . OpenAI's CEO described GPT-4 as "flawed," indicating it was still a work-in-progress.
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Along with Copilot's new presence in traditional Office apps, Microsoft also announced the launch of a new Microsoft 365 tool called Business Chat, which seems designed to crawl indexed files from a variety of sources for inclusion in Copilot-generated responses to your queries about that data.
Business Chat will be able to pull information from "documents, presentations, email, calendar, notes and contacts to help summarize chats, write emails, find key dates or even write a plan based on other project files," Microsoft [7]claimed .
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All of this, opined Microsoft's Jared Spataro, VP of modern work and business applications, will help us reconnect to "the soul of our work" by getting rid of drudgery. The described features are due to roll out over the coming months, we're told.
[9]Now Microsoft injects Copilot AI into Dynamics 365
[10]Microsoft injects AI search into Bing, Edge, Skype apps
[11]Microsoft strokes UK's ego by pooh-poohing EU approach to AI regulation
[12]Hey, AI hucksters. Dial down the hype. Lots of love, the FTC
Redmond's [13]demo showed the capabilities are what you'd expect from a next-gen AI model. If Copilot is asked, for example, to "prepare me for my upcoming meeting," it can look at the calendar to get info about the subject of the meeting, then turn to other documents or notes to generate a summary of key things to keep in mind.
The Windows 11 maker also demonstrated Copilot generating a PowerPoint presentation from a press release, using it to sort and analyze data in Excel and even offering a summary of what happened at a meeting that an attendee was late to.
Microsoft 365 Copilot was also shown to have the ability to talk to its Dynamics 365 cousin, as a demo displayed it updating CRM records in relation to work done in Microsoft 365 apps.
Copilot lawsuit? What Copilot lawsuit?
The IT goliath made a point in both its streamed announcement and the related press release that Copilot was built "with [Microsoft's] existing commitments to data security and privacy in the enterprise, grounded in AI principles and Responsible AI Standard and decades of research," as the biz put it.
Microsoft picks perfect time to dump its AI ethics team [14]READ MORE
Microsoft also made a point to mention that "Copilot's large language models are not trained on customer content or on individual prompts," the closest it came to mentioning the [15]copyright lawsuit it's facing over the original incarnation of [16]Copilot , which got its start assisting programmers on GitHub.
According to the ongoing suit, Microsoft trained Copilot on public GitHub repositories, allegedly not paying mind to the open-source licenses associated with such data collections. When queried, the complaint alleges, GitHub Copilot regurgitated code nearly identical to the material it was trained on. Plaintiffs in the case argue that's a violation of licensing agreements.
Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI [17]asked that suit to be tossed in January for not having standing. As of writing, the case is still open and the judge has yet to issue a ruling on the motion to dismiss.
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Finally, Google [19]scrambled earlier this week to say, as a bit of a spoiler to Microsoft's big announcement, it was bringing similar language-driven artificial intelligence to its suite of office applications. ®
Get our [20]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/07/microsoft_dynamics365_copilot_ai/
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZBOfmReivBYSp8sDPX6pwQAAAIE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/14/openai_gpt4_ai/
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/02/chatgpt_considered_harmful/
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZBOfmReivBYSp8sDPX6pwQAAAIE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZBOfmReivBYSp8sDPX6pwQAAAIE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://news.microsoft.com/2023/03/16/introducing-microsoft-365-copilot-your-copilot-for-work/
[8] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZBOfmReivBYSp8sDPX6pwQAAAIE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/07/microsoft_dynamics365_copilot_ai/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/22/microsoft_ai_bing/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/24/microsoft_ai_regulation_uk/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/28/ftc_warns_ai_hucksters/
[13] https://news.microsoft.com/reinventing-productivity/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/15/microsoft_ai_ethics_team_layoff/
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/11/githubs_copilot_opinion/
[16] https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/21/githubs_ai_code_assistant_copilot/
[17] https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/31/microsoft_github_openai_copilot/
[18] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZBOfmReivBYSp8sDPX6pwQAAAIE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[19] https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/14/google_palm_ai/?td=rt-9cp
[20] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Copilot is asked, for example, to "prepare me for my upcoming meeting"
So Jane, what's your opinion on the new business plan?
"By leveraging our competitive advantages, and increasing our sales effort, large gains should be possible in the next quarter"
Alan, your thoughts please...
"By leveraging our competitive advantages, and increasing our sales effort, large gains should be possible in the next quarter"
Steve?
By leveraging our competitive advantages..."
Stop right there, Hello? IT? Can you remove everybody's access to this Copilot thing please?
Huh?
How did you work out that wasn't the actual sales and marketing team?
Welcome, new overlords?
How many managers can be replaced by these features? Most managers are simply pencil pushers and that bullshit can now be generated using automated means.
Seems only fair that the managers who decide to enable these features will be eligible for replacement by the decided features. Must also be a significant reduction in costs.
Make it better
Can see that being popular at HMRC.
Open Excel, look at data, look at agenda, ask Copilot to make numbers more believable and aligned with the agenda. Create a report, add a caveat in an annex that nobody reads that the data is "modelled" and the rating of accuracy is highly uncertain, so that when anybody questions it you are covered.
Make a shiny presentation, how the given policy is working as intended.
Receive pats on the back.
It’s nice to see MS jumping full-in on the latest bandwagon. And so quickly too! It was only a couple of months ago that nobody had even heard of Chat-Wotnot
They did the same when the Internet became a “thing” - suddenly everything in Windows wanted to talk to the Internet regardless of how un-helpful and inappropriate it was. Want to check that birthday list you kept in a text file? Hey - instead, why not search the new fangled Internet thing for “text files” or some such nonsense instead?
Not sure if the world is ready to forgive Microsoft for IE6.
More worryingly, everything on your PC wanted to listen for random connections from the internet. Microsoft jumping on trends in a hurry doesn't usually end well.
On no not again!
I really hope that Microsoft are not going to roll this out wihtout a mechanism ALREADY in place so admins can kill it stone dead.
Something tells me after the "fiaso" of "Reactions" that they will roll it out without a way of killing it.
What data does it collect and what does it do with it? There could be major privacy issues using this.
Re: On no not again!
Let's speculate!
It will be on by default for all tenants, obviously - almost goes without saying.
The process to turn it off will be announced in the depths of one of their massive weekly bulletins (it probably won't get a 'major change notification' - those are reserved for new emojis and other such groundbreaking advances).
The bulletin mention (which may have a vague, unclear heading) will tell you that when the facility to turn it off becomes available in a few weeks (by which time you'll hopefully have forgotten about it) you can turn if off simply by running this many-line Powershell script against your tenant. There will of course be no simple toggle-switch to turn it off, and the script will have to be run individually against each 365 service to turn it off (and if new 365 services are added in future, it'll need doing for them too as they will have it turned on by default). In order to check which services have it on, you'll need to use Powershell - there will be no indication in the web GUI.
When you come to run the script you'll find that it doesn't work because there are some prerequisite steps which they haven't mentioned in the instructions, so you'll have to work them out first.
Then when the ability to turn if off actually appears, there will be no announcement / notification at the time, as hopefully you'll have forgotten by then so will leave it turned on. There will also be no indication in the web GUI.
If enough people get wise and turn it off quickly and take-up remains low, a few months later an option to allow individual users to opt-in to a 'trial' of the exciting new service will appear. For the process to block this, see above.
And so on...
Re: On no not again!
I think you may have over-simplified it....
Re: On no not again!
After you've done all that is when they will tell you the only way to disable it is to "request" your tenant is added to an "exclusion list".
Having raised said request it will then take them ages to get around to doing it.... And then keep pestering you to review their "very helpful" support....
I suppose it might have it's uses, but I have no desire to find out what they are. I survived clippy by deactivating the damn thing as soon as it appeared, and doing the same for an awful lot of domestic and small business users. If this fresh hell doesn't have an off switch that is both easy to find and, crucially, stays off, even after updates, I foresee anyone who can jumping ship for libre office.
As I've said in other comments, these things are tools, to be used with an understanding that the material they produce might be utter cobblers. Used with that in mind, and enough knowledge to ensure you can spot errors, they can be handy time savers. But wedging them into every nook and cranny of the most widely used productivity tools on the planet isn't just asking for trouble, it's begging, pleading and demanding trouble.
The common or garden office drone cannot be expected to contend with that - many of them have enough trouble just using the tools they have, without foisting this kind of uncertainty upon them. Expecting them to double check what the fancy new thing tells them is both unfair and unreasonable - they won't do it, won't realise that they need to, and likely wouldn't have time to do it anyway. They wouldn't be asking the thing to prep them for a meeting if they had time to do it themselves!
Of course, I gather that this impending chaos is based on GPT4, and we haven't really seen what it's capable of yet. It might be much better than the version that proclaimed the demise of the unfortunate vulture mentioned in the article, and we might be being terribly unfair in prejudging the likely outcome. I doubt it, but we might.
But that doesn't really matter. The sheer scale of the potential for cockups is enormous, Microsoft don't exactly have a reputation for reliability, and I feel that a healthy dose of scepticism is absolutely essential here. Be afraid, be very afraid.
"As I've said in other comments, these things are tools"...
Oh Microsoft are "tools" alright...
Shareholder Value
The guys who run the vast corporation I work for are going to love this.
Pretty soon they'll be able to get rid of all the expensive messy humans they are forced to employ and the business can turn into a bunch of AI chatbots asking each other where the raw materials are and trying to figure out why deliveries are late.
Presumably our customers' chatbots will be mollified by a nice lunch out or a round of golf or whatever it is these guys do on their days off.
This is a capitalists dream.