[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.