Copilot is the worst AI agent on the market. Over 50% of people I've spoken to that say AI is overhyped, when pressed, admit they were only using Copilot.
This would be profitable if they could ship garbage for cheap, a la Microsoft Teams or Internet Explorer. But Copilot is worse at integrating with Office than Claude!
This is because Copilot has aggressive context pruning to meet its price point of $20/month. That prevents the AI from meaningfully using tools or being multimodal or anything else their competitors have.
If they added a $200/month tier many of their issues would go away.
Their target is not coders, it is the professional world who do 90% of their work in Office applications, like me. A $200/m model absolutely does not fly when rolled out to entire corporations. It needs to be a $20/user/month product.
But I agree, it sucks. It is the only AI we are able to use at work and for tasks that it should be good at (compare comment sheets against a deliverable register and assign to specific packages) and it just can’t do it. It can read the spreadsheet and understand them just fine but outputs are garbled nonsense.
> A $200/m model absolutely does not fly when rolled out to entire corporations. It needs to be a $20/user/month product.
That isn't possible with the technology right now and it will not change. Multimodal computer use and long context for high quality outputs are expensive.
This is like complaining about buying an automobile because it's more expensive than a horse.
“Copilot” is not one product, it’s around 15 different products, seriously.
I think that people often compare apples to oranges by comparing the “copilot” they have in Windows/Office/Teams etc to Claude Code which is ridiculous.
A better product to compare Claude Code to would be “Github Copilot CLI”, but I haven’t seen the two seriously compared anywhere.
In the context of knowledge workers, It is really about Claude Cowork against Microsoft Copilot suite for all their applications, which is what the OP is referencing ?
Github Copilot can use Claude APIs and has its own problems and challenges.
Microsoft AI performance is primarily not being affected by Github - while significant is much much smaller part of the enterprise revenue stream and their DAU compared to their Office suite apps.
Same for their PR exposure. It is lot more likely to here about Copilot in the office context than Github outside of small niche's like this forum.
Absolutely. They've made the same mess with "Copilot" as with ".NET" in the early 00's [0]. Everything was ".NET" from consumer oriented services (".NET Passport"), to "Visual Studio .NET" without anyone understanding what ".NET" was.
Now it's "Microsoft Copilot" which is different from "Microsoft 365 Copilot", which is different from "Copilot Chat" and from "GitHub Copilot", and the many other flavors.
It's a mess.
Still, their developer-focused offering seems to be "GitHub Copilot", which among other things includes "GitHub Copilot CLI" [1], their terminal-based agent. It's not bad.
It’s odd to me how much Microsoft over committed to Copilot. They added unwanted Copilot buttons to laptops. They renamed Office to Copilot. And in the end, it’s a terrible product anyways. They can only get away with this because of the control they have over OEMs, distribution channels, and the inability for consumers to opt out of all of thus.
Meanwhile startups can’t compete fairly because they don’t have the same channels to flood with their own branding.
Copilot was by far the worst for coding. Not that the code snippets it would generate were not good, but due to the insane number of bugs in its UI. It would just spit out blank blocks thinking they contained code. When I asked it to repeat the steps which were empty, it would generate the same empty blocks like "here's your code" lol
We have copilot at work integrated very deeply in our E5 landscape. It def sucks in Office, and I can break Copilot very easily when building small notebooks. It often crashes and the next page build in a notebook doesn’t come close to the previous iteration. That’s maddening.
But, the Teams integration for meeting summaries and in-meeting “what did Bob just say about the data center project?” prompts is magical and very useful. If you live in meetings or are trying not to. They need to put that team on rescue duty.
I have no interest in Copilot from Microsoft in general but I do like GitHub Copilot overall. That said, I’m _very_ interested in a viable alternative. I only use it for “fancy autocomplete” and have zero use for the agent/chat capabilities (I use Claude Code for that). It’s been a year or so since I looked at and tried alternatives but when I last did, copilot was the best IMHO.
> It's a $3 million verdict in compensatory damages. Even if reduced on appeal, that's a lot of money.
Where are you seeing that?
The article says:
> Jurors found there were thousands of violations, each counting separately toward a penalty of $375 million. That’s less than one-fifth of what prosecutors were seeking.
> Meta is valued at about $1.5 trillion and the company’s stock was up 5% in early after-hours trading following the verdict, a signal that shareholders were shrugging off the news.
> Juror Linda Payton, 38, said the jury reached a compromise on the estimated number of teenagers affected by Meta’s platforms, while opting for the maximum penalty per violation. With a maximum $5,000 penalty for each violation, she said she thought each child was worth the maximum amount.
Until we start to penalize companies by percentage of global revenue rather than some arbitrary dollar amount that pales in comparison to their revenues this sort of stuff is going to keep happening.
$3m is nothing. 10% of global revenues (not profits) for each year in which this occurred would be something that might actually make them think twice about breaking the law and harming people for money.
Once there's a pattern of abuse, you can go after the execs personally for purposes of the carrying out of justice. Courts don't like the idea of bad actors hiding themselves behind corporations. You don't even need to "piece the veil" — you just go straight for the Zuck.
Will literally never happen. It's impossible. I'm not talking figuratively impossible. At his level of wealth and influence, there are good odds he could murder someone on live stream and walk away. You are dangerously underestimating the influence the rich have in every aspect of society and law.
C-levels need to face real consequences. A ban on moving to a new executive position or serving on a board for 10 years would rapidly fix the systemic ethical problems.
> Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people. We are glad they do that and we are doing that too, but we also feel strongly that we need to bring AI to billions of people who can’t pay for subscriptions.
This is a glaring admission ChatGPT is a poor man's Claude in the literal sense.
Nonetheless, de facto, they are independent. And if you'd glance back at my comment, I deliberately referred to it as "assimilating with mainland China" to pay lip service to them seeing themselves as the true government of China, in an attempt to avoid this very nitpick.
> On one hand, you have Microsoft's (awful) Copilot integration for Excel (in fairness, the Gemini integration in Google Sheets is also bad). So you can imagine financial directors trying to use it and it making a complete mess of the most simple tasks and never touching it again.
Microsoft has spent 30 years designing the most contrived XML-based format for Excel/Word/Powerpoint documents, so that it cannot be parsed except by very complicated bespoke applications with hundreds of developers involved.
Now, it's impossible to export any of those documents into plain text that an LLM can understand, and Microsoft Copilot literally doesn't work no matter how much money they throw at it. My company is now migrating Word documents to Markdown because they're seeing how powerful AI is.
Tim Berners-Lee thought pages would become machine-readable long ago, with "obvious" benefits, and that idea partly drove XML, RDF and HTML 5. Now the benefit of doing so seems even bigger (but are they?), and the time spent making existing documents AI readable seems to keep growing.
> Microsoft has spent 30 years designing the most contrived XML-based format for Excel/Word/Powerpoint documents, so that it cannot be parsed except by very complicated bespoke applications with hundreds of developers involved.
I had interns use c++ to unzip, parse, and repackage to json a standardized visio doc. I had no say in the standard, but specific blocks meant specific things, etc. The project was successful. The xml was parse-able... at least for our needs. The overall project died a swift death and this tidbit will probably be forgotten forever in the depths of repo heirarchy.
Totally agree, though ironically Claude code works way better with Excel than I expected.
I even tried telling Copilot to convert each sheet to a CSV on one attempt THEN do calculations. It just ignored it and failed miserably, ironically outputting me a list of files that it should have made, along with the broken python script. I found this very amusing.
There are still networks that ban users for posting on /r/Israel and /r/Jewish. Famously the ones that run /r/interestingasfuck, /r/therewasanattempt, /r/soccer. /r/bannedforbeingjewish tracked this until it was banned.
