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Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

fortran77

Comments (155)

  • _fat_santa
    The biggest issue I see is Microsoft's entire mentality around AI adoption that focuses more on "getting the numbers up" then actually delivering a product people want to use.Most of the announcements I hear about Copilot, it's always how they've integrated it into some other piece of software or cut a deal with yet another vendor to add it to that vendors product offering. On the surface there's nothing wrong with doing that but that just seems to be the ONLY thing Microsoft is focused on.Worse yet, most of these integrations seem like a exercise in ticking boxes rather than actually thinking through how integrating Copilot into a product will actually improve user experience. A great example was someone mentioned that Copilot was now integrated into the terminal app but beyond an icon + a chat window, there is zero integration.Overall, MS just reeks of an organization that is cares more about numbers on a dashboard and pretty reports than they are on what users are actually experiencing.
  • nitwit005
    I always remember the pointless integration of Google+ into YouTube that simply annoyed everyone. There's surprising willingness to damage an existing successful product to try to save a new struggling product.Microsoft has also tried hard to push Edge, annoying nearly every Windows user on the planet, with no real success.
  • keeda
    Important snippet that has bearing on the adoption of AI as a whole:> “Disorganized data silos” have been an issue for Copilot, analysts wrote.This is true in almost every large organization, and will affect every enterprise AI product out there. There was a relevant subthread just a couple of days ago recounting this exact, same dynamic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46861209In fact, Palantir's secret sauce may not be their tech, but their "Forward Deployed Engineers" model (i.e. a rebranding of "partner engineers embedded within their customers' organizations"). Because it turns out that's a lot of what they do is navigating these bureaucratic and political hurdles to unlock access to the data: https://nabeelqu.co/reflections-on-palantirIt gets even worse if you consider this data is going to be extremely messy, with multiple bespoke, partially-duplicate / overlapping, potentially conflicting versions of the data with varying levels of out-of-datedness, scattered across these silos. (I would know, in a past life, I worked on a months-long project called, self-explanatorily enough, "Stale Docs".)Yeah, untangling these bureaucratic webs and data horrors is not a quarter-long or year-long project, so investors are gonna be waiting a long time for the impact of AI to be visible. On the bright side, as TFA also hints at, AI providers themselves have been severely capacity-constrained. So hopefully by the time these issues get sorted out enough new capacity would be coming online to actually serve that traffic.In the meantime, I expect a prolonged period of AI companies feverishly splurging on AI CapEx spend even as Wall Street punishes them repeatedly for the lack of impact of AI being reflected anywhere.
  • overgard
    I think the difference with Copilot vs other tools is how it's being pushed on us, and where it's being pushed. Because Copilot is bundled with software people need, it's going to get a lot more scrutiny compared to AI products that aren't built into the OS/built into Office, etc. In a way, being an "agentic OS" isn't that different from say Moltbot (conceptually), but one of those ideas seems to have gotten quite a bit of excitement, and the other a lot of anger, because Moltbot isn't being forced on you.
  • shevy-java
    It is rather interesting how dead-focused Microsoft is on AI. Even if you look at their recent statements "We now admit there are AI problems with Microsoft-related products." (e. g. Win11 in particular), it seems to me that they really have no way back now. It's turtles down all the way; once the train is moving, it is hard to stop.It's definitely not what many users wanted or expected from Win11; nonetheless, and this also surprised me, more than one billion devices run on Win11. That's also strange - AI is not a big reason for most of these folks then, right? Probably neither positive or negative (or they may not even know about it).
  • JohnMakin
    Microsoft's fumble here is pretty spectacular.Back in early 2023, the state of google search was abysmal (despite that their leaders insisted it wasn't, it had become nearly unusable for me and I don't think was that unfounded of an opinion). Microsoft rolled out a new version of bing, which became bing chat - search worked for me again for a very brief window of time.They could have pounced on this opportunity to take a big chunk out of google's search, because google didn't really catch up there til the AI overview was rolled out, and even that is notorious for having issues. Eventually chatGPT seems to have carved out some of this search space with web-search being native to the tools now.But microsoft was way ahead of everyone here for a brief period! Instead they just rolled everything into bloatware vaguely called "Copilot" and called it a day.
  • Eddy_Viscosity2
    > push by Chief Executive Satya Nadella to transform Microsoft into an AI-first companyWhy can't we have a 'user-first' company. Maybe think about the user of your products a wee tiny bit. But no, it is not to be.
  • pjmlp
    It is remarkable how during the last 25 years (approximately), Microsoft has been improving their ability to deliver first (or be among the first), followed by messing up the whole process so that late comers end up taking the crown jewels.PDAs, mobile phones, tablets, tablets with detachable keyboards, managed OS userspace, HoloLens, the XBox mess, and now AI.There certainly other examples that I failed to address.This is what happens when divisions fight among themselves for OKRs and whatever other goals.
  • verdverm
    Microslop can never be a real Ai company if they can't build a frontier model and push the envelope themselves. Today they are completely dependent on 3rd party companies, not a good position to be in.
  • ryandvm
    Don't worry, after a decade or two of having Windows reinstall and re-enable it every couple weeks against their users' wishes I'm sure they'll get the market penetration they're looking for...
  • 1vuio0pswjnm7
  • cyrusradfar
    The 3.3% paid conversion is not great.Believe it or not, the Recon Analytics trend is actually worse primary usage among Copilot subscribers dropped from 18.8% to 11.5% since July while Gemini climbed past it.People who paid are leaving.That's a churn problem.The tell is buried in the article: workers who have access to Copilot, ChatGPT, and Gemini side by side choose ChatGPT and Gemini at higher rates.Some companies are using 10% of their paid seats. Microsoft's CMO of AI says growth is "unlike anything we've seen before" but won't share the numbers.That's the "we're thrilled with preorders" of AI.This is the Ballmer story all over again. - Massive distribution advantage - Captive enterprise base Somehow still losing to the thing people actually want to use.Windows Phone had carrier deals too.The problem is the same: you can't mandate delight.This part is laughable, can't believe it leaked: > "About a year ago, Nadella sent a frustrated email to Rajesh Jha, > executive vice president of experiences and devices, detailing an incident in which > Nadella had asked the enterprise version of Copilot on the Edge browser > to help with a public webpage he was on, > but it couldn't fulfill his prompt" Meanwhile three different orgs inside Microsoft all own something called "Copilot" and none of them talk to each other.Meanwhile, Anthropic ships Cowork after 10 days and it just explodes with the market.
  • mjr00
    Microsoft's focus was making it so that AI could allow unskilled workers to replace skilled workers. The hope was that everyone but sales/management could be offshored to SEA/India/etc and AI would somehow make up for the skill differential.The successful AI companies are making it so that skilled workers can use AI as a tool to be more productive and efficient.
  • smithkl42
    Copilot is basically ChatGPT after Microsoft hit it on the head with a pipe hard enough and long enough to drop it about 20 IQ points.
  • PaulHoule
    I think the plain ordinary chatbot behind the Copilot on the desktop is fine, it seems like a skin around ChatGPT-5 in the "Smart" mode and in the "Search" mode it compares to Google's AI mode.When it comes to anything multimodal it is an absolute disaster. Show it a photo of a plant for a plant id? Forget about it, just take a picture of the screen on your phone with Google Lens. If you ask it to draw something or make a Microsoft Word document you'll regret it.For advice about how to do things on the command line or how bootstrap works or how to get out of a pickle you got yourself in Git it is great. It writes little scripts as well as anybody but you can't trust it to get string escaping right for filenames in bash scripts which is one reason I'd want help. For real coding I use Junie because I'm a Jetbrains enthusiast but other people seem to swear by Claude Code.I do dread the day though when Microsoft decides to kill Copilot because I will miss it.
  • golfer
    Microsoft has access to all the OpenAI/ChatGPT tech. How is their chatbot so awful? Seems like they are trying their hardest to screw this up.
  • jjcm
    Product leaders should really measure internal usage as a litmus test for whether or not people actually want these things. It's honestly shocking how much MS's brand has diminished in the last few years because of them pushing the copilot brand into everything.
  • AJRF
    They really dropped the ball on this - they are down ~12% for the year.When they first started, they seemed to be firing on all cylinders and looked like they were going to be big winners, but the strategy has just been a slow motion car crash.I wonder if Satya is the right person for Microsoft.
  • fortran77
  • nl
    Copilot is such a typical MS product.It checks all the correct checkboxes on a feature list in comparison to the competition but it just sucks to use.It's like Sharepoint - the deathpit of all collaborative software
  • kotaKat
    Maybe Microsoft needs to fix the cart before they put the jet engines on top of it and try to kill the horses off.Go back to fixing what’s wrong with Windows, then worry about the AI software running on top of it and where you can add a value proposition, because right now the Windows value proposition is continuing to go right down the shitter as everyone flees Windows 11.
  • zwaps
    The reality is that Copilot’s laughable performance is almost entirely unrelated to AI models not being good at X.Every single thing Copilot does has been solved much better by other products.However, Copilot fails in extremely ridiculous ways, at very basic tasks which such a product absolutely must nail.Copilot should not have been released. A large majority of people involved have failed. People like managers, product managers etc should probably be fired. Technical leads equally so.For everyone who has been building similar products it is immediately obvious that Copilot is sloppy, unfocused and unprofessionally executed.People hate it, and for hood reason.It just boggles the mind how they would go and release it, or that it even exists in its current form.Those devs and managers rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars each, producing garbage that has been done better by dozens or hundreds of other teamsBah
  • iamleppert
    The Copilot they have integrated into Azure is absolutely useless. Every now and then I'll get frustrated at which one of the thousands of menus some switch is under and I'll ask their chatbot and it will spend a lot of time "Identifying the problem..." and "Gathering information..." only to give me links to generic help articles, have some sort of error, or give me flat out wrong information.These days I try to interact with Azure through the command line and asking Claude, which works pretty well most of the time but there are some things their API cannot do and you are forced to use their crazy Azure UI. It's not as bad as the AWS console UI, but still bad.It's amazing to me a company that spent so much and invested so much in OpenAI has such a terrible product and got almost nothing out of it. Even standard ChatGPT is way better at giving you directions on what to do than their useless Copilot.
  • dang
    Is there a readable link to this article? The workarounds posted in this thread so far seem all to have stopped working.
  • Drunkfoowl
    [dead]
  • copilot_king
    [dead]
  • th0ma5
    [dead]
  • 1vuio0pswjnm7
    . x=AA1VBKdf { echo "<meta charset=utf-8>"; (printf 'GET /content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/'$x' HTTP/1.0\r\n' printf 'Host: assets.msn.com\r\n\r\n') \ |busybox ssl_client assets.msn.com \ |grep -o "<p>.\*</p>"|tr -d '\134'; } > 1.htm firefox ./1.htm No Javascript, no CSS, only two HTML tags: <p> and <a> with href attribute; 1.htm can be viewed in _any_ browser, no matter how old or unpopular, firefox is just one example