General

Topic All things AI

MrBean

* 20-Feb(#1)

We had a thread going at some point, assuming it died off. Figured it'd be good to get this going again with all the advancements lately between Copilot, Gemini, OpenAI, and more.

I've had Copilot at work since before general release. Lots of awesome functionality, but more than anything, it slightly augments what I do today. The biggest gain I've had in my daily life regarding efficiency, is meeting recaps/notes/action items, etc. I'm not technically hands on as much these days, but I've tested it randomly playing in code and ... it largely does well. A few of the more complex SQL tasks I threw at it, struggled, but it was more than enough starting point to work from.

Although, general ability to crawl internal data in a single shot, is amazing. I've been able to quickly find answers using Copilot on Windows to get answers that would have traditionally required jumping through multiple sites, engaging with different resources, and regular hunting. Answering questions for myself, and my customers, has become vastly easier in this regard.

Overall, my usage of all things AI has been minimal compared to others. I use it for more personal uses and messing with friends by turning dialogue/texts into silly/creative pictures. I'm also old now, and find myself relying on what I know best, and shaking my hands at the young kids with their new fancy tech! I'm also a bit cynical because I see far too many people using AI to create presentations, write emails, sound smart, etc. and it's glaringly obvious that they've become overly reliant on the tech and will slowly lose their ability to properly interact with other human beings in a meaningful way. It's alarming how much communication sounds overly similar with a clear trace of AI utilization, which lowers your credibility to the recipient (at least once more catch on).

I'm privy to some insight on what we're doing at MSFT, and honestly while so much of it is amazing and such a wow factor, a fair amount of it truly does scare me. We're not at the point of all things Terminator or Wall-E ... yet ... but it does feel like we're building that foundation overall. I'm happy with companies like Microsoft/Google trying to build ethical and responsible guidelines and frameworks, but that won't be enforced worldwide. It's a race for power/control, and the advancements in the past 6-12 months alone, goes to show that the next 1-5 years are going to be crazy to say the least.

I agree somewhat with the overall charter of AI. Our population is decreasing, and we may not be able to keep up with the workforce demands of the future. AI may truly be the answer to help offset a lot of that. While I can understand and accept that, reality is, it's going to massively disrupt the existing workforce aggressively. I see so many roles being easily eliminated with the next several years.

On the flip side, specifically within Healthcare, man is it exciting the tools and power we'll be able to arm our providers with to ultimately give us, the consumer, better support.

I am just amazed with Sora at the moment! Can't wait till we get hands on with it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HK6y8DAPN_0

Anyway, what are some of your experiences with AI - personally or professionally?

bumsplikity

20-Feb(#2)

I've used Microsoft co-pilot exactly once. I asked it what I believed to be a simple question. It was completely incorrect. Haven't messed with it since.

ClearSights

21-Feb(#3)

Our company has fully integrated AI into our work (strategy) so I used it daily to help me write/build documents and briefs for projects.

Also, just bought Stable Diffusion access for my personal computer to start playing around with image AI and face swapping. Been having a blast with friends and that.

Still very new to it all but it’s been very fun to use

John

21-Feb(#4)

@MrBean - can you give some examples of how you are using it? I've seen a few MS presentations on Co-Pilot and they keep going "We're hearing from all kinds of people that they are saving 3-4 hours per week using Co-Pilot." But then I asked one of them for a couple of real world examples of what they were doing that saved them that much time -- and, in both cases, all they could give me were people writing up a letter or document and it helped do that. In neither case did it involve any significant company DATA. Basically, ChatGPT could have done it just as well.

The point of Co-Pilot is supposed to be the knowledge from your internal data. But I've yet to see anyone give me some good examples of what they are DOING with it. Someone suggested using it to analyze an Excel spreadsheet and give some results based on that -- but then the MS rep had to admit that while it could grab a bit of data from Excel if asked specifically, it was not yet able to do anything really WITH the data from an AI standpoint. It was still on the "coming soon" map.

So, I am curious for some real-world examples of where it was used for something more than just what ChatGPT can do already without access to any company data. Again, the whole point of Co-Pilot being better than ChatGPT is that knowledge of your data (via MS Graph usually, I guess?).

John

21-Feb(#5)

ClearSights wrote:

> Our company has fully integrated AI into our work (strategy) so I used it daily to

> help me write/build documents and briefs for projects.

So, what AI are you using at your work? And how is it integrated? Co-Pilot using MS Graph? Or something else. And are you using the "integration" much? Or does it just help you write a document or brief based on what you tell it.

In other words, I'm more interested in that integration and what it "knows" without you telling it.

MrBean

21-Feb(#6)

@John just some random things I do ... nothing (yet) earth shattering. Several yes, you can do in ChatGPT, but the cohesion of integrated products within the MSFT ecosystem, do make it appealing.

- Searching all company data I have access to (who is resource X, when is product Y coming out, etc.) that isn't publically available
- Asking Powerpoint to create a presentation based on just a few thoughts. It still requires updating of course, but carves out a fair amount of upfront time.
- Having an email composed automatically based on the context of the thread (I've only played with this, doubt I'll ever adopt it).
- Drafting some bullets/talking points in OneNote/Word for upcoming meetings ... works well if you're not well versed on a topic
- I want to find more uses cases for Excel, but coming from a data/SQL background, I'm typically faster at this on my own. Haven't had a good data set to play with, but on my to do to play.

More than anything, it's all about Teams for me right now:
- Recap a meeting - even those I didn't join, or joined late (jumping into a meeting 10 mins late and getting a recap in seconds of what's happened, is stupid awesome)
- Provide follow ups/actions items - surprisingly accurate, but I still prefer my OneNote and manual notes as I get more meaningful details
- Ask questions of the meeting context (when was I called on, who said word/phrase XYZ)

I'm pretty OCD as it pertains to meeting notes/follow ups/etc., so for me, it's more about augmenting what I do and capturing details I may have missed (especially on topics I'm not well versed on). That and I'm pretty verbose, I love some of the high level summary/simplicity that it can bring to a mountain of notes.

Overall, it's clearly still early. I see the value, but (for me anyway), it's not yet game changing on daily life. Now If I was more hands on and still developed code, absolutely I would be way more in love with it all.

John

21-Feb(#7)

Yeah, from what I've seen, the Teams integration seems the best usage. Mainly because people have to sit through hour-long meetings that should have taken 5 minutes. Now people can just get AI summaries.

I do see some value. But we'd have a hard time getting most of our clients to pay $360/user/year for it! Not right now, at least.

SwiftJAB

21-Feb(#8)

We use a few different AI applications. We have Fellow's AI agent to listen in on Zoom meetings and summarize the meeting. We have another one for our chat bot that is trained on our help center to provide answers to questions that are answered by our articles. That same tool also provides summaries and draft replies for our support staff to hopefully reduce handle times. We also added an integration with Chat GPT 4 into our email product for customers to rephrase their email content and generate images.

Our marketing team uses some AI tool that takes long form video and creates snippets and auto captions them for short form videos. I've also heard that we're going to start using a service to translate our videos into other languages.

The token caching of Google's Gemini is nuts and Sora's ability to have some sort of permanence when objects become obstructed is nuts. They are making so much progress here. AI is going to be able to do some super complex things beyond creating photorealistic videos. I wouldn't be surprised if governments use it heavily for determining the possible outcomes and lasting impacts of global events. The prompt writing for this stuff is going to be crazy.

ClearSights

22-Feb(#9)

John wrote:

> ClearSights wrote:

>> Our company has fully integrated AI into our work (strategy) so I used it daily

> to

>> help me write/build documents and briefs for projects.

> So, what AI are you using at your work? And how is it integrated? Co-Pilot using

> MS Graph? Or something else. And are you using the "integration" much? Or does

> it just help you write a document or brief based on what you tell it.

> In other words, I'm more interested in that integration and what it "knows" without

> you telling it.

I’m not sure at all into the backend of AI and how it works. But it looks like our company uses an internal AI called “Sidekick”, they limit us heavily on using other outside generative AI tools.

And yeah, I’m using it very limitedly, just asking prompts to help me pull statistics or rewrite copy. Nothing too crazy.

ryanflucas

25-Feb(#10)

I know what I want to do, I just don't know how to achieve it.

-- I want a closed off GPT that will protect my data from leaking out onto the web. It can phone home for updates but I don't want data from my interactions to get sent to general access pool.
-- I want to feed it data about my business so it can give me informed answers.
-- I want it to perform basic tasks like read and summarize my emails or perform complex search inquiries.
-- I want to talk to it like a human being, outloud and have it respond back to me outloud. Voice to type is fine and the voice can even be alexa/robotic sounding. I just don't want to sit at a keyboard all day. I want to hit a button and talk to it.

InigoMontoya

26-Feb(#11)

MrBean wrote:

> On the flip side, specifically within Healthcare, man is it exciting the tools and

> power we'll be able to arm our providers with to ultimately give us, the consumer,

> better support.

And I guarantee you the other side of that coin will be insurance using AI to find every avenue possible to screw consumers to benefit the bottom line, limiting the upside gained from health care professionals using AI themselves.

MrBean

26-Feb(#12)

@ryanflucas - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ai-service...

MrBean

26-Feb(#13)

@InigoMontoya - you're not wrong but also, current medical coding and billing is already a turd sandwich that gets messed up constantly. This is an area where I do welcome some change.