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Microsoft Scales Back AI Goals Because Almost Nobody Is Using Copilot

32 points

by mtdewcmu

22 hours ago

| past

| 10 comments

| extremetech.com

| HN

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1970-01-01

22 hours ago

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The title here should be Almost Nobody, Including Microsoft QA, is using Copilot. I tried to use Copilot to create a PowerPoint presentation from a Word document. The output was complete trash. Bullet points were out of alignment, and several things just went off-screen. Re-prompting to try and correct the slides did nothing but create more trash.

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kodama-lens

17 hours ago

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Since customers carry out QA, the title is correct.

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Festro

22 hours ago

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Copilot is basically just whitelabelled ChatGPT. It's a big ask for people to use it over the source system.

ChatGPT gets the headlines, is seen as an innovator, and costs less.

Copilot offers what? A physical button on a Windows keyboard, OS integration when we're in our browsers 24/7 and Atlas exists?

My main gripe is that if Copilot has any value MS do a piss-poor job of promoting it. I can see AI functions in MS365 being useful, I can see MS-related headaches being solvable quicker with an AI buddy nudging me along to a resolution. But their press releases and and demos, if they exist, do not compete with OpenAI's, Google's, hell Deepseek gets more coverage.

MS might as well give up and pursue integration and compatibility with the rest of the ecosystem. I know they won't though, they'll cut costs and still shove Copilot down our throats with feature creep and useless opt-out bulk.

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lumost

21 hours ago

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IMO the wrapper products all suffer from the same problem. The LLM is trained to do a specific set of tasks such as Chat, Coding, Image understanding, and image/video generation, and tool use in support of the above. If you suddenly ask the LLM to do something it was not trained for such as producing power points - you get a few surprisingly successful results, followed by a large set of crap. There is no reason for customers or your own team to expect the underlying model to improve unless token usage is so massive it motivates training investment in this area.

LLMs are a facsimile of general intelligence on tasks similar to their training set and which can be solved in finite context length. If you are outside of the training set - you will have poor results. Likewise if you are in the training set, then the foundation model vendor will already have a great product to sell you (claude code/chatgpt etc.)

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RicoElectrico

22 hours ago

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For something that is supposedly a "strategic priority" the implementation is half-assed as well. When I edit my prompt post-fact, it is instead sent as a new message.

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leopoldj

17 hours ago

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>As for Copilot? I don't know anyone who uses it. Do you?

This sloppy journalism. One should probably read the original report in The Information [1].

Bloomberg has updated its story today with a note from Jeffries [2]. "The analysts also said their checks showed robust adoption of Microsoft’s Copilot line of AI assistants"

1. https://www.theinformation.com/articles/microsoft-lowers-ai-...

2. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-03/microsoft...

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versavolt

15 hours ago

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All it takes is for the dot com of chatGPT to be blocked in my organization, and copilot has succeeded. Now we have a presentation from microsoft and half of their thinking problems didnt even work. Of course, i have used copilot chat extensively, and since the rollout of deep thinking, it has provided many benefits. Writing and editing workflows in excel or officesript, for instance. Custom JSON formatting in sharepoint. It has even made a regression model in an excel workbook. Takes knowledge to edit it, but it does get me there.

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Havoc

14 hours ago

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I use the employer paid enterprise versions. Works well…which you’d hope for the fancy version

The normal consumer accessible one in contrast routinely gives me broken incomplete output

Idk MS you’re not gonna win with a chatbot that doesn’t chat complete stuff

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mtdewcmu

14 hours ago

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This all reminds me of Bing. It already lost the technology race, but it serves MS's own interests to keep it around, apparently.

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wkat4242

14 hours ago

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It's a service they sell to eg DuckDuckGo and ecosia. I think the og bing is just there because they still think Google may fall out of favour one day. Oh and they offer a corp version spiced up with internal results from SharePoint.

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mtdewcmu

13 hours ago

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I think they also make money from people that don't know the difference and use it because, for instance, it's the default in Edge when you search from the URL bar.

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arbol

21 hours ago

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If copilot could could take instructions in excel and create pivots and formulae then it would be useful. I can't think of other Windows operations I'd use it for.

For coding it's incredible - both in ide and on GitHub.

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JSR_FDED

20 hours ago

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No bonuses will be paid until every text box has an “improve this text in some way” option.

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ChrisArchitect

22 hours ago

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[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46148748

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