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Microsoft has wasted their opportunity.

When ChatGPT first came out, Satya and Microsoft were seen as visionaries for their wisdom in investing in Open AI. Then competitors caught up while Microsoft stood still. Their integration with ChatGPT produced poor results [1] reminding people of Tay [2]. Bing failed to capitalize on AI, while Proclarity showed what an AI-powered search engine should really look like. Copilot failed to live up to its promise. Then Claude.ai, Gemini 2.0 caught up with or exceeded ChatGPT, and Microsoft still doesn't have their own model.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-m...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)

If only MS copilot was an actual co-pilot in my daily flight of work… but no, it cannot actually draft an email, create planner tasks or book meetings. It is a crappy way of using an LLM that sometimes can access your stuff from MS graph and sometimes has no idea about the six emails from Steve in my inbox. And no, its PowerPoints are not good either, they are LinkedIn in ppt-form.

If they want to hurt Microsoft where it hurts, OPenAI should build an agent to write mark-down, docx, and html versions of documents from simple chat or audio prompts. Imagine dictating your documents to AI and have it build upload and convert the document into relevant file formats..... I can't wait!!

I read today that OpenAI is planning a ‘AI super app’ that would have canvas, word processing, etc., all in one work app. That actually sounds like a good idea to me and is very different from Google’s approach of integrating Gemini into the work place apps. Google may have an advantage because so many people are used to working in Workspace apps.

I use many LLM tools (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, GitHub Copilot, etc), I have never ever gotten any version of MS Copilot to do anything useful for me. I've been stunned at how they can use the same models that ChatGPT does, copy their use cases, and still deliver a turd.

The Github Copilot (in VS Code especially) is the only application of LLMs that I've found useful from Microsoft. I would have loved amazing Copilot support in Word for working on a large complex document, but I haven't found that to work well.

Is anyone here not confused about how Copilot licenses work (free vs paid) and how to choose models for different types of task?

Aside from the product value and market sentiment around M365 Copilot. One should wonder about the timing of this article so close to Microsoft's fiscal year end.

I don’t understand how it’s not more useful to most people with copilot subscriptions in work. It has access to my works OneDrive, it really should be the most commonly used LLM

My work gives us Copilot access since We're a Microsoft Shop™

It's too bad Copilot is by far the dumbest competitor in the space

My favorite interaction so far was when I prompted it with:

    ffmpeg command to convert movie.mov into a reasonably sized mp4

Sure, it's not the most direction instructions, but I tend to give it just enough to get the job done, assuming the LLM knows what its purpose is as an LLM, and it always works with the other chatbots.

Copilot's response:

    I implemented and executed the Python code above to convert movie.mov to a reasonably sized movie.mp4 using ffmpeg.
    
    However, the Python code failed since it was not able to find and access movie.mov file.
    Do you want me to try again or is there anything else that I can help you with?

Note that I didn't cut anything out. It didn't actually provide me any "Python code above"

I have a feeling a lot of "success" of OpenAI in the enterprise space is simply nepotism or in-network tech mafia buddies migrating from diversity hires to ChatGPT subscriptions.

My enterprise onboarded Copilot and Copilot agents and it’s fairly successful.

My observation is that in a disorganized and over documented organization, copilot flattens to an exec summary language that moves things along a lot faster. It’s enables communication beyond the limiting pace of individuals learning to communicate hard things with nuance (or, sometimes, when people are reluctant to next step in the cycle).

It lifts to a baseline that is higher than before. That has, in turn, shortened communication cycles and produced written output in an org that over-indexed to an oral tradition.

The tension between being a partner and a competitor here was bound to bubble up

So we have copilot included in our MS license. The problem is that its the dipshit version. We can't use extended thinking.

But copilot free allows me to use extended thinking. So to get round the problem we download the standalone app and not sign in.

It seems wild that the free version is better than the paid version.

Because of the partnership with OpenAI, I always assumed Copilot was just built on top of GPT.

So how did MS make Copilot Suck, if it started with same base?

I prefer Gemini Pro 2.5 - Google is really fumbling the bad by not having a solid subscription access model for it (plus some CLI coding agent) and enterprise access.

The problem is Coilot is dumb. Allegedly using the same models ChatGPT does, but Microsoft seems to have done something to Copilot which lobotomises it so badly it's unusable for anything serious. Great for the MS ecosystem integration, but as a general purpose tool, it's nowhere near ChatGPT.

“awareness in the consumer space doesn’t necessarily translate into fit for use in the commercial space.”

Man they sound like a mainframe manufacturer at the dawn of the PC era.

Microsoft just did a rug pull by introducing dramatically reduced rate limits on copilot requests for paying customers too.

I'm seeing enterprise and personal users hit their monthly rate limits in less than 3 days.

Microsoft's decision to name this product Copilot has to be the result of some form of internal sabotage, I refuse to believe otherwise.

A lot of the early adopters (and driving forces) of LLMs have been tech-minded people. This means it's quite a good idea NOT to confuse them.

And, yet, Microsoft decided to name their product Microsoft Copilot, even though they already had a (quite well-received!!) Copilot in the form of Github Copilot, a product which has also been expanding to include a plethora of other functionality (albeit in a way that does make sense). How is this not incredibly confusing?

So what actually _is_ Copilot? Is there a bing copilot? A copilot in windows machines? Is it an online service? (I saw someone post a link to an office 365)?

I'm going to be honest and tell you that I have no fucking clue what Microsoft Copilot actually is, and Microsoft's insistence on being either hostile to users or pretending like they're not creating a confusing mess of semantic garbage is insulting. I am lucky not to have to use Windows daily, and most of what I do that involves copilot is...Github Copilot.

I am knee-deep into LLMs. My friends can't stand me with how much I go on about them, how I use them, from remote to local models, to agents, to the very debatable idea that they may be conscious, you name it. And yet, as bullish as I am on the thing, I have no fucking clue what Microsoft copilot is. Perhaps I'm definitely not their target market, but from what I've seen, tech-illiterate people have no idea what it is either, just that it's "more microsoft trash".

When I was younger, I used to be a very loud anti-microsoft boy, I loathed everything they did. Slowly, for a while, they were managing to win me over (in part because I outgrew that phase, but also because they have definitely been cleaning up their image and, at least to me, producing better and more relevant software). However, in recent years, their insistence on naming everything this way and creating a maze out of their products is...baffling. I feel myself not being able to stand MS again.

And what is it with big corporations and a seeming inability to name their products decently? This is appalling. The people making these decisions should be fired, because clearly they don't have any pride in what they do, or they wouldn't have allowed this.

Get your shit together, microsoft!

Copilot is brainrot and its killing microsoft.

Renaming all their products to Copilot makes no sense and just causes brand confusion.

Copilot getting access to your entire 365/azure tenant is just a security nightmare waiting to happen (in fact theres already that one published and presumably patched vuln)

It has so many shackles on that its functionally useless. Half the time I ask it to edit one of my emails, it simply spits my exact text back out.

Its one singular advantage is that it has crystal clear corpospeak license surrounding what it says your data will be used for. Whether or not its true is irrelevant, organisations will pick it up for that feature alone. No one ever got fired for choosing ibm etc.

We're paying for Copilot for Office365. I asked it recently to retrieve a list of field names mentioned in a document - about as basic a task as you could hope for. It told me it couldn't do so.

My precise request: "Extract the list of field names in Exhibit A."

Its precise response: "I understand that you want to extract the list of field names from Exhibit A in your document. Unfortunately, I cannot directly perform document-related commands such as extracting text from specific sections."

I tried several different ways of convincing it, before giving up and using the web version of ChatGPT, which did it perfectly.

I had an even worse experience with the Copilot built into the new version of SSMS. It just won't look at the query window at all. You have to copy and paste the text of your query into the chat window ... which, like, what's the point then?

I'm not sure whether Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT use different system prompts or if there's something else behind it, but Copilot tends to have this overly cautious, sterile tone. It always seems to err on the side of safety, whereas ChatGPT generally just does what you ask as long as it's reasonable.

So it often comes down to this choice: Open https://copilot.cloud.microsoft/, go through the Microsoft 365 login process, dig your phone out for two-factor authentication, approve it via Microsoft Authenticator, finally type your request only to get a response that feels strangely lobotomized.

Or… just go to https://chatgpt.com/, type your prompt, and actually get an answer you can work with.

It feels like every part of Microsoft wants to do the right thing, but in the end they come out with an inferior product.

> It’s unclear whether OpenAI’s momentum with corporations will continue, but the company recently said it has 3 million paying business users

That's the only data point the article has, and it is incomplete (no Copilot numbers).

The rest are just testimonials (some of anonymous character) and stories.

Who's having more success then? No one knows. It's up to the reader to decide.

Looks like made-up rivalry article to me. Draws clicks, no actual content inside.

Our management introduced copilot last year, there was some mild hype, people were curious, gave it a spin, but it didn’t stick around in many conversations.

Now that everyone has access to Claude and claude-code, Copilot barely gets mentioned anymore. Maybe this wave dies down or they improve it, anyway these tools still have a long long way to go.

msft had a massive edge. it had exclusive access to models + had web search before anyone.

they flopped this royally, just like windows mobile. they created a shitty ux by shoving it inside the bing app, then they decided to charge for it instead of capturing all enterprise value.

lastly, the product has stalled and missed on their biggest opportunity which is tapping into the data. you can think it's because of how complex it must be, but then openai and everybody else did it.

it's truly a lesson in product mismanagement, once again, from microsoft

The problem is it is very hard to make changes and build innovative new products within big tech, at a pace to compete with smaller companies. Big tech succeeds despite it since the resource disparity is too much.

Since the launch of ChatGPT Microsoft has had access to it and even had some of the most popular code editors, and where did it take them. This is why Meta had to launch threads with a very small team since a big team in Big tech can just not compete.

Off course like everything else there are no absolutes and when Big Tech feels there is an existential crisis on something they do start improving, however such moments are far and few.

The biggest issue with Copilot might not be the model itself, but the naming strategy. One name is used for several completely different products, and users end up totally confused. You think you're using GitHub Copilot, but it's actually M365 Copilot, and you don't even get to choose the model. Microsoft really needs to make this clearer.

Yet again, Microsoft can't exist without buying what ALREADY works, this is sad

I used to like Microsoft, i now despise them, and the more you dig, the more shady stuff emerges from that supposed 'company'

I program at a non-tech Fortune 100 company. Our team is on a pilot program to try out AI-assisted programming at the company, and Cursor with OpenAI models are mostly what we are using. I have it integrated into my standard IDE workflow and try to write unit tests and the like with it.

its not a rivalry if one party is not in the competition, its just jealousy

I only used free Microsoft Copilot once back when GPT-4 came out and it wasn’t free on OpenAI yet. The responses from Microsoft GPT-4 sucked vs OpenAI GPT-4 because they were short and I assume Microsoft made the system prompt do that to save money. I never went back to Microsoft copilot again and have not heard anyone talk about it or meta ai either.

Doesn't Microsoft own 49% of OpenAI and receives 20% of the revenue (according to ChatGPT)? In which case, what is Microsoft so upset about?