[saidinesh5]

> But with "AI", not only is it not a product in itself, it's a feature to a product, but it has OpEx and CapEx costs that dominate the balance sheet based on their public disclosures. Worse, as a feature, it demonstrably harms business with its hallucinations.

I think it depends on how the feature is used? I see it as mostly as yet another user interface in most applications. Every couple of years I keep forgetting the syntax and formulas available in Excel. I can either search for answers or describe what i want and let the LLM edit the spread sheet for me and i just verify.

Also, as time passes the OpEx and CapEx are projected to reduce right? It maybe a good thing that companies are burning through their stockpiles of $$$ in trying to find out the applicability and limits of this new technology. Maybe something good will come out of it.

[bunderbunder]

The thing about giving your application a button that costs you a cent or two every time a user clicks on it is, then your application has a button that costs you a cent or two every time a user clicks on it.

[Lio]

For the usecase of "How do I do thing X in Excell" you could probably get pretty far with just adding a small, local LLM running on the user's machine.

That would move the cost of running the model to the end user but it would also mean giving up all the data they can from running prompts remotely.

It would probably also make Office users more productive rather than replacing them completely and that's not the vision that Microsoft's actual customers are sold on.

[bunderbunder]

Fair. But I sure wish we could instead solve this problem the way we did 20 years ago: by not having Web search results be so choked off by SEO enshittification and slop that it’s hard to find good information anymore. Because, I promise you, “How do I do thing X in Excel?” did not used to be nearly so difficult a question to answer.