Microsoft Will Charge Businesses $30 Per User Per Month For Its 365 AI Copilot (engadget.com) 58
At the Microsoft Inspire partner event today, the Windows maker announced pricing for its AI-infused Copilot for Microsoft 365. From a report: The suite of contextual artificial intelligence tools, the fruit of the company's OpenAI partnership, will cost $30 per user for business accounts each month. In addition, the company is launching Bing Chat Enterprise, a privacy-focused version of the AI chatbot with greater security and peace of mind for handling sensitive business data. Revealed in March, Microsoft 365 Copilot is the company's vision of the future of work. The GPT-4-powered suite of tools lets you generate Office content using natural-language text prompts.
Could be worth it. (Score:3)
All it would take is for it to save one hour and it will have more than paid for itself.
Re:Could be worth it. (Score:5, Insightful)
AI is an amplifier. I can write more long winded reports that my coworkers must read and respond to. For $30 I may be able to collectively waste up to $300 worth of company time.
Re: (Score:2)
AI is an amplifier. I can write more long winded reports that my coworkers must read and respond to. For $30 I may be able to collectively waste up to $300 worth of company time.
"Copilot, give me a summary of this shit OrangeTide just sent over"
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
You'll get an impressive summary ... of things he didn't say. Such is the nature of this type AI.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
Yes, it does. If you can't trust the output, what good is it?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
How did you come to that conclusion? AI will handily fuck up both.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Your inability to read isn't my problem, it's yours.
Re: Could be worth it. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
He's using it to auto-generate bullshit in order to waste your time.
You are attempting to use it to reduce the wasted time by raising the signal-to-noise ratio. The problem, is that there is no signal to raise from the noise floor.
Ergo, he would be successful in wasting your time, but you would not be successful in reducing the time wasted, because any time spent on it is by definition wasted.
AIs all the way down (Score:2)
Your AI generates a response to my AI generate report. And my AI provides a plausible defense to your response. We both have mail filters to shuffle this conversation into a folder we never check. AI will be hard at work, our employer pays $30/month for it, and we employees extract zero knowledge from the exercise.
GIGO (Score:2)
Garbage in, garbage out.
Re: (Score:1)
True, but can AI also Reply-All to Company Wide emails?
Re: (Score:1)
If college-educated humans can't figure out BCC, what hope does a chat bot have?
Re: Could be worth it. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
AI is an amplifier. I can write more long winded reports that my coworkers must read and respond to. For $30 I may be able to collectively waste up to $300 worth of company time.
You're assuming those reports wouldn't get written anyway. At least you can reclaim some of the cost by minimising the time writing it.
Re: (Score:2)
"Microsoft revealed pricing ($30/user/month) for AI-infused Copilot in Microsoft 365, developed with OpenAI. Bing Chat Enterprise, a secure AI chatbot for handling sensitive business data, was also launched. Copilot uses GPT-4 to generate Office content from natural-language prompts."
In other words, the winding reports should just be summarised again to be easier / quicker to digest. Naturally, the AI may miss the point, but for stretched reports, so may humans, and that is not even taking into account that the stretching may not have been done properly, since it was also going to be an AI job...
Re: (Score:1)
All it would take is for it to save one hour and it will have more than paid for itself.
Uh huh...then after users become dependent on it, Microsoft will start integrating it with more and more products, so eventually you need an Exchange 349 E-3 license with a Microsoft 359 E-1 license (minimum) and and don't forget your Defender licenses, System Center licenses, device CAL permission slips, and you probably need AutoPilot licensing too. Oh, and get an Azure AD cloud sync thingy and do cloud authentication. Oh, and there are extortionate licenses if you want to install it on a terminal serve
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Could be worth it. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Would I? No. Pay a competitive wage or GTFO
Re: (Score:2)
Monty Python Spam Sketch (Score:3)
In addition, the company is launching Bing Chat Enterprise, a privacy-focused version of the AI chatbot with greater security and peace of mind for handling sensitive business data.
Wife: Have you got anything without spam?
Waitress: Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Wife: I don't want ANY spam!
Man: Why can't she have egg bacon spam and sausage?
Wife: THAT'S got spam in it!
Man: Hasn't got as much spam in it as spam egg sausage and spam, has it?
Re: (Score:2)
It looks like you're writing a letter. (Score:5, Funny)
Would you like help?
$30 per month for wrong information (Score:2, Insightful)
Sounds like a steal!
Re: $30 per month for wrong information (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Can we please establish a slashdot kids table for juvenile conversations like this so the adults can talk about what this really is?
The adults left /. years ago.
Re: (Score:2)
I second that motion.
How about we get an AI troll bot to lure people into pointless conversations -- just limit it to flamebait but never topics related the summary.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, but it's Microsoft we're talking about here, so they'll probably try to give you wrong information and accidentally get you correct info, followed by a release that "fixes" the error.
Required? (Score:2)
Looking at the article, it seems that Microsoft will charge the $30/month if you have a particular license REGARDLESS whether you want it or not. Maybe I'm misreading, but that's how it seems.
Re: (Score:2)
I guess the $30/month will be used to pay for your psychiatrist after dealing with this for extended periods of time.
That's a great deal for malware authors! (Score:5, Interesting)
If anyone has doubts, look at Generative AI images. There are a few generative AI sites, like pornpen.ai. There are more freely available pictures of tits on the internet than anything else. If you couldn't post tit pics on the internet, would we even have one? I doubt it would be as popular, certainly, especially in the early days. How many 56k baud Serial Port modems were sold to young men looking to get porn? How many broadband accounts would have been opened in the late 90s/early-2000s if it wasn't for porn? Your dad didn't pay all that money to get sports scores!
The generative AI images look horribly airbrushed...correct proportions, but FAR from realistic. If you view them on a monitor, there's no way to be fooled. They look like fancy video game graphics. Not even early 2000s-era CGI grade. Every AI image I've seen was the same way. You submit an impressive number of parameters to these, they get nearly every detail wrong (model's race, age, etc)...they frequently have 12 fingers or 4 legs.
Why am I talking about porn? For starters, I'm a perv and love porn, but more importantly, the Java code I've seen generated is the same. It "looks" correct at a glance, but often doesn't even compile. If you read it and know what you're doing, you quickly find bugs. It's garbage. However, it takes me several minutes to evaluate 20,000 lines of Java. It takes me 1 millisecond to look at a porn pic and see the model has fingers with 5 joints or 4 legs or plastic skin.
If the world's smartest and most well-funded software companies can't make this work with years of experience, we're nowhere close. They've had a massive focus and dumped an insane amount of money into this. The very best minds in their field stumble over each other to work for these companies and are paid handsomely if hired. If Google, MS, Meta, etc can't make it work after investing several billions, do you think you can?
If it was any good, they wouldn't be selling us tools, but Microsoft would be selling us software made with generative AI. There would be a service to build your own RTS or FPS. You would pass in a swagger file or a DB URL and they'd generate a full GUI....and it would actually work.
Re: (Score:3)
If it was any good, they wouldn't be selling us tools, but Microsoft would be selling us software made with generative AI.
I think this is the important point. They're selling us a tool that makes something of *dubious* value, while at the same time it collects data of *definite* value (prompts, interests, AI guidance, etc)
Re: (Score:2)
It doesn't need to be fully functional nor correct for businesses to turn a profit. "Near enough is good enough" is how all these schemes fly. If you need a non-Microsoft example here then look at Tesla and all the sales they've produced with their self-driving cars that aren't self-driving at all.
Re: (Score:2)
Let's be real. If you're running a business accuracy matters.
Errrr no. An incredibly amount of business writing has nothing to do with accuracy. It's about impact and presentation, reports and marketing so long that it actively defends itself against being taken seriously.
You're confusing running a business and engineering a piece of technology. If I design a bridge you better hope that accuracy matters. When I write a fancy summary about my awesome bridge for management, offload that shit to ChatGPT. It's not like it'll get read anyway.
It takes me 1 millisecond to look at a porn pic and see the model has fingers with 5 joints or 4 legs or plastic skin.
You have missed the point. The
All the hype of AI is about business (Score:2)
Let's be real. If you're running a business accuracy matters.
Errrr no. An incredibly amount of business writing has nothing to do with accuracy. It's about impact and presentation, reports and marketing so long that it actively defends itself against being taken seriously.
You're confusing running a business and engineering a piece of technology. If I design a bridge you better hope that accuracy matters. When I write a fancy summary about my awesome bridge for management, offload that shit to ChatGPT. It's not like it'll get read anyway.
It takes me 1 millisecond to look at a porn pic and see the model has fingers with 5 joints or 4 legs or plastic skin.
You have missed the point. The point is not if the model has the right number of joints on the fingers. The point is if someone is masturbating to it. And they are. MOST DEFINITELY.
Again, accuracy does not matter in many of the things we do in life.
No one is going to have Open AI generate sales literature when their funding is on the line. Even if errors are tolerated, they want a human to polish it to ensure they get their millions of dollars in funding to keep the lights on. The stakes are too high. Inaccuracies may be tolerated, but excellent vs adequate may be the difference between getting your funding renewed and attracting enough investors or total bankruptcy. NO ONE will risk that.
The stuff people "want" AI to replace is the tedious ov
No..no no no no (Score:1)
paying sources of training material (Score:2)
Just what we need (Score:1)
A crap generator to pump out vast quantities of crap faster
While managers think this stuff is useful, it actually impedes progress
Maybe the chatbots will generate so much crap that the companies will be buried in a crap-valanche, leaving space open for others who actually produce valuable products and services
PASS! (Score:1)
No thanks.
This is just the latest "On The Internet" buzzword fad.
Clippy on steroids (Score:2)
Who will be stupid enough to buy this?
"Hey! It looks like you're trying to write a letter! I already have prepared one for you!"
I don't know who'll be masochist enough to tolerate the abuse.
This is so stupid... (Score:1)
Extortion (Score:2)
It will be worth it for some (Score:2)