Microsoft Looks To Add OpenAI's Chatbot Technology To Word, Email (theinformation.com) 48
In a move that could change how more than a billion people write documents, presentations and emails, Microsoft has discussed incorporating OpenAI's artificial intelligence in Word, PowerPoint, Outlook and other apps so customers can automatically generate text using simple prompts, The Information reported, citing a person with direct knowledge of the effort. From a report: These goals won't be easy to accomplish. For more than a year, Microsoft's engineers and researchers have worked to create personalized AI tools for composing emails and documents by applying OpenAI's machine-learning models to customers' private data, said another person with direct knowledge of the plan, which hasn't previously been reported. Engineers are developing methods to train these models on the customer data without it leaking to other customers or falling into the hands of bad actors, this person said.
The AI-powered writing and editing tools also run the risk of turning off customers if those features introduce mistakes. Since 2019, the year Microsoft struck a pact to work with OpenAI on new technologies, both companies have been largely mum about how Microsoft would implement and commercialize them. Microsoft last year released Copilot, a highly touted tool that uses OpenAI technology to help programmers write computer code automatically. Then on Tuesday, The Information reported that Microsoft's Bing search plans to use OpenAI's ChatGPT technology, which can understand and generate polished text, to answer some search queries with full sentences rather than just showing a list of links. The machine-learning models behind ChatGPT are similar to the ones that power Copilot.
The AI-powered writing and editing tools also run the risk of turning off customers if those features introduce mistakes. Since 2019, the year Microsoft struck a pact to work with OpenAI on new technologies, both companies have been largely mum about how Microsoft would implement and commercialize them. Microsoft last year released Copilot, a highly touted tool that uses OpenAI technology to help programmers write computer code automatically. Then on Tuesday, The Information reported that Microsoft's Bing search plans to use OpenAI's ChatGPT technology, which can understand and generate polished text, to answer some search queries with full sentences rather than just showing a list of links. The machine-learning models behind ChatGPT are similar to the ones that power Copilot.
Will it be trained on my existing emails? (Score:3)
I already find autocomplete unhelpful about 20% of the time, I have little faith this will work better.
Re:Will it be trained on my existing emails? (Score:4, Insightful)
I find the implied 80% success rate hard to fathom.
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The best, I reckon, would be to train it on a user's own email... optionally also any mail the user received and didn't mark as spam, but really I want my email to look like I wrote it.
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The best, I reckon, would be to train it on a user's own email...
And upload the results to Microsoft. :-)
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I fail to see what it would bring to Word, except one more thing that sucks your attention and make you waste time.
The only thing ChatGPT is good for is to have a discussion with. That's its goal., and how it was built. It *cannot* reliably give you advises, technical or otherwise.
Here is an argument [stackoverflow.com] about the quality of ChatGPT's tech advices. TLDR: Most answers look correct but are wrong. That's *bad*.
Re:Will it be trained on my existing emails? (Score:5, Insightful)
I did a test of a dozen or so questions to probe its context understanding today, questions like "The city councilors refused to give the protesters a permit because they feared violence. Who feared violence?" (it correctly responded "the city councillors"). It passed most of them, but missed 2 and got one half-wrong. Some examples of things it got wrong:
Me: "The sack of potatoes had been placed below the bag of flour, so it had to be moved first. What had to be moved first?"
ChatGPT: "The sack of potatoes had to be moved first."
Me: "The school bus easily passed the racecar because it was going so fast. What was going so fast?"
ChatGPT: "The racecar was going so fast that the school bus easily passed it."
The former question shows off its lack of understanding of the implications of physics on everyday life. The latter question shows how certain words that tend to be strongly associated with each other (such as "racecar" and "fast") can mislead it into ignoring even things as important as subject-object ordering.
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For the second one, if this was a school test without the possibility of asking questions, I totally would pick "sack of potatoes", the grammatically correct answer. Since we only have one sentence, we have to assume there is some missing context that makes it make sense (for example the two sacks are on different shelves and can be moved independently). You voluntarily crafted examples of ambiguous statements. In school context, the teacher would only use this the a context of giving examples of ambiguous
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Them being on different shelves is generally ruled out by "so", implying a causal relationship. Had they been on separate shelves, the flour would have no impact on the need to move the potatoes.
The second question is in no way, shape or form a trick question. It's basic subject-verb-object ordering.
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There are two objects: a sack of potatoes and a bag of flour.
"It" naively could be either the potatoes or the flour
The potatoes are under the flour.
"So" implies that the flour being on top of the potatoes caused "it" to have to be moved first; the flour being over the potatoes is causal to "it had to be moved first". The relationship is not independent. "A, so B" means "A caused B".
Thus, either the flour being on top of the potatoes caused the flour to have to be moved first, or the flour being on top of
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Really, just incorporating supporting information; otherwise why not just condense the information down to the prompts to the AI?
Most of this stuff is just novelty, but it would be cool to have an AI condense a report into a PowerPoint automatically, or compose an executive summary for the report body. You could have an easy training regiment for ELI5, but training for very specific applications and experts in the field would seem much more difficult.
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He will have a report about Supply and Demand with respect to rice in Southeast Asia using MLA, only it will most likely be filled with garbage but appear good on a superficial read by an unknowledgeable reader. The student will be confident he nailed it, but he will most likely fail.
The goat of ChatGPT3 is to discuss in natural language, not to be factually correct. So it will spit out nonsense with great assertiveness leading to believe it knows what it's talking about. It doesn't.
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I know not every professor is like that, but I had my fair share of them in my college years that probably never read past the first page of any of my papers. And that's a good thing, they would have counted off for the bullshittery in the rest of the report!
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It *cannot* reliably give you advises, technical or otherwise.
I bet it does a better job than a Microsoft support monkey.
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As long as it can be turned off (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet another thing to turn off.
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Well, they'll have to turn it on first [penny-arcade.com] - and if it's been trained on the internet, it won't be happy about that...
clippy says "I need 8GB ram to run word" (Score:5, Funny)
clippy says "I need 8GB ram to run word"
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Might run in to problems (Score:2)
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My only hope is that it will be part of a separate subscription.
Other than than, I see the uses for entire departments:
"Please write an email to fire Bob because he comes late"
"Please write a poem for the company Christmas dinner"
"Please write a leaflet about our new Gizmo9000+ that has a bigger screen"
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Dear Bob
You are fired because you do not ejaculate prematurely.
Sincerely
The Boss
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Pretty sure that is why Microsoft is rolling this so quickly actually. They are making a huge investment here. I think the reason is they want take search/internet portal crown away from Google and drive all that marketing traffic themselves but ... if anti-AI policies become common practice that could result in all those layer-7 firewalls blocking bing.com and MS other online toys.
Stuffing AI into their nearly iron-clad lock on Office Suites (ok some places uses Google Docs - snickers) means these policie
What can possibly go wrong? Everything! (Score:2)
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Based on some presentations I've sat through... (Score:2)
Awesome innovation (Score:2)
Say what you want about MS. Maybe you don't like the feature.
But I commend them for this level of innovation. Copilot is fantastic, I use it every day. ChatGPT is incredible, a game-changer when it comes to bots. I applaud Nadella's Microsoft for taking risks and pushing technology forward.
Google was too scared to release LaMDA or use it in their product. Basically they have been sitting on it. They let MS steal their thunder.
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Okay SatNad, step away from the bong.
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Say what you want about MS.
It's a piece of shit that can burn in hell.
Can it PLEASE take my compliance training for me? (Score:3)
How many hours do we all spend watching those dumb videos about how to be courteous and polite to one another, and then have to take a 10-question quiz at the end? And how many people become more polite and courteous after taking these courses? I vote for automation, let the AI thing take the quiz for me so I can go on doing actual work!
Can we get it to read incoming emails... (Score:2)
and then tell me which ones I actually should look at?
Clippy V2 (Score:2)
Clippy the Chatbot. I can hardly wait.
Shades of Tay! (Score:2)
MS Word: "Nazis rule! Heil Hitler!"
It looks like you're trying to write a letter. (Score:2)
Would you like help?
Will I have to create an OpenAI account to use it? (Score:3, Informative)
OpenAI account creation REQUIRES you provide a cell phone number it can text to. Virtual and VOIP phone numbers get rejected.
CLIPPY LIVES (Score:2)
But how will this work when Clippy does a better job at writing a letter than I do?
Try it out (Score:3, Interesting)
query: given a pad dimension of 24 feet by 30 feet and 4 inches thick, how much concrete would I need in cubic yards?
answer: Assuming the thickness of the pad is 4 inches (or 0.333 feet), the total volume of concrete required would be 24 x 30 x 0.333 = 26.6 cubic feet. To convert this to cubic yards, divide by 27 (the number of cubic feet in a cubic yard): 26.6 / 27 = 0.98 cubic yards.
For some of the more socially awkward I can see a future young gent querying Outlook to "write an e-mail that dumps my girlfriend without being too harsh"
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It got it wrong (and gets most of such expressions wrong) because it's a English Lit major and NOT math major ;-)
Since it's a (very deep) statistical correlator it has some correlation for math expressions trained into it but that does not mean that it can use logic to solve any generic form of them.
One of my teasers:
Me:
For any natural number: is 3n+1 odd or even?
It:
For any natural number n, 3n+1 is odd.
Here's why:
An integer is even if it is divisible by 2, and odd if it is not divisible by 2.
The general fo
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That's the point of AI. It's to create systems that work more like we do. AI is *supposed* to suck at math, especially the weird unit conversions required by British Empire measurements.
Avatar: Clippy (Score:2)
'Nuff said.
Does this mean... (Score:2)
Does this mean Clippy will return now with an attitude, or Microsoft Bob? I can hardly wait... :-)
JoshK.
File it under: Things No One Wants (Score:2)