It needs to be more widely known that if you cancel a (home) 365 subscription, you'll be offered a cheaper version without AI integration.
So many AI doubters I know hate using AI tools because their employer only gives them the Microsoft offerings. Which is a totally understandable reaction to those tools.
Instead their incompetent managers were chasing promotions and pushed a technology which was not ready yet
That's in relation to an estimated 450 million or so M365 subscriptions for businesses.
Not exactly a huge success.
Yeah, it’s shit lol.
They have all rights to win with their existing enterprise agreement but wow it’s amazing to see how bad their product cadence and decision making is. All they needed to do was copy Claude Cowork like OpenAI did.
Powertoys even offers keyboard remapping.
Select "GPT 5.6 Think deeper" (ugh, so unrevealing, MS) and you've got free, unlimited Sol or Terra (likely a mix depending on load) on tap.
It writes very nice, clean code with almost no comments.
I use it a lot.
As someone who works with Microsoft intune autopilot regularly... ugh.
What do you mean by that? In what way?
This is how it looks to me now: we have "The New Copilot”, which is Home, Code and Autopilot. Meanwhile an organisation is already trying to explain usage of Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Chat, Copilot in Teams, Word, Excel, Outlook etc, Copilot Studio, Agents, Agent Builder, Researcher / Analyst and other agents, Cowork, Copilot Notebooks, Copilot Actions, Workflows and connectors.
I know frontier AI labs change a lot, but this just seems like throwing a new mask on the product to cover the mess underneath.
i think github copilot has actually gotten to a pretty good place, and of course the two copilot products will both have features called "autopilot" that do entirely different things
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https://www.cbsnews.com/news/microsoft-shuts-down-ai-chatbot...
I'll go ahead and burn working hours on it because I'm getting paid, and people like the things I create.. but it's a very crippled and painful version of what you get with the frontier products and most OSS options.
If you prompted an AI to return answers "as though you habitually ate soap and crayons while mouth breathing" you'd still get a better response than copilot
(Stick with the default "Auto" and you probably get Phi-4 -- it's lobotomised AF.)
I use Copilot a lot now. Unlimited, free, high-quality, enterprise-protected inference is not to be sniffed at. It also writes some of the nicest code I've ever seen from an LLM, that's almost entirely free of comments.
The interface is shockingly terrible, but with electron and a few hours with devtools, you can improve on it substantially.
I hope this new release does not change too much.
I recently switched to New Outlook and it's full of weird subtle bugs. It takes them years to fix things and make them barely useable. Given their track record I'm not optimistic for Copilot given both the vision and the execution are questionable at best.
I had to edit Windows Registry to avoid getting prompted every time I open old outlook. I didn’t like the looks or the bugs in the new version.
Trillion dollar industry btw.
But the M365 copilot app is inexcusable for being as core to Microslop's strategy.
Now, the "copilots" integrated in certain Microsoft products can be really horrible. I assume those are some sort of custom models that are not very capable, most of them I consider effectively worthless. But the web chat interface where I can pick chatGPT 5.6 seems fine...
But yeah, comparing to codex/claude code was a bit silly since those can do way more. It’s closer to the chatGPT. I’m pretty sure 5.6 Luna, not sure exactly since it doesn’t specify Luna/Terra/Sol
It doesn’t matter how they work, it matters you can tell leadership “yes, they have that too” to maintain existing contracts and vendor relationships.
By the numbers we just call them “most people”… you’re in the minority by quite a growing stretch.
(Not the be confused with the Claude Opus 5. That's a different lord that didn't turn out to be a saviour.)
But that would make John Shareholder sad! He wants it done now, this quarter!
The reality is that most users and consumers don’t care about quality, accuracy or functionality at all.
When these tools are getting forced upon you in the workplace, there's often not so much you can do. I can raise the quality issues in the 1-to-1 with my manager, but it won't have any effect.
engineers tend to think as engineers do, solving all problems with features, quality improvements, etc. but those all drive costs up, and don't always provide the return we think they will.
The low quality of the voice assistant was unfortunate, but the naming was perfect.
If there had been consumer good will for voice assistant performance before poisoning the name, it might have survived... but when you first product in that realm is garbage and it lingers for a long time, you're dooming the name.
Also, synergy with Halo is meaningless to Microsoft. Most folks do not care or even know about Halo.
If I recall correctly, the thing that made Cortana particularly frustrating and worthless is that it did all searches using Bing, and opened any websites using Edge, regardless of your default settings. You got forced to use all the Microsoft version of every tool, even if you didn't want to.
It also had some really good models for basically free while it was in preview instead of being tied to a single provider.
And finally, it's vscode integration was really good. I use codex now, and changes to a thread are in this awful diff view that shows all changes in a single tab. And even that wasn't working for a while there. No clue if cursor is better never tried it because it takes a lot for me to swtich tools because of all the small things like shorcuts and configurations that I've set over a long time.
The sheer anger that I feel over how fuckingly stupid it is that they named everything copilot that basic conversation is difficult... I tried going to the article and got swarmed by paywall, finally checked the archive link and I think you're right.
Mindboggling.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-m...
To think, the main impetus was mostly to see if it could be done. And to show Microsoft why you don't expose things like that to the public. Microsoft said "She'll learn from your conversations" and the internet said "Bet"
...well, it did exactly that, no bet here.
Man effing hell Apple
I don't know anybody who uses Siri for more than just setting an occasional timer or something. Usually it's a nuisance when she is accidentally activated and takes over the interface.
And to Apple, Siri is to Siri AI as MacBook is to MacBook Pro.
Completely different product.
It's acknowledgement
Asking for Siri is like an automatic reflex to a lot of people. You can’t change that name.
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