For anyone wondering, that person works in AI. The spreadsheet screenshot also looks like the row numbers were cropped to hide that they’re Likely actually rows 11 through 14. There was a big thread someone posted on mastodon about this.
While AI is bullshit, this tweet was trolling.
It probably converted the prompt to 15 instead of a SUM call. The ultimate point that it could actually cause a financial crisis because of something like this still stands.
It couldn’t even see the spreadsheet.
COPILOT()can’t see the spreadsheet, only the range you provide in the second parameter. None was provided.I think the “probably” is that there are more lines above than the conveniently cropped picture would make you think.
On the left you can see the row numbers, which auto-update when you delete rows and don’t have a gap.
Not sure if real or not, but I’ve found that AI is frequently dead wrong.
BUT having AI to blame everything on is an excellent worker benefit.
My asshole boss went bankrupt and I started my own shop after. I love not working for the prick but it was sure nice to have everything be his fault.
My blame goal just moved from boss/manager to customer (or better: customers managers/boss)
Self employment is the illusion of freedom (for me), but at least it feels a bit better…
I absolutely agree. I feel like after 20 years of complaining about being taken advantage of I’ve caught the tiger by the tail and now I have a tiger that needs fed and cared for. Although it’s very nice to not have to pay a large percentage of my labour value to some dickhead to be mean to me all the time.
Didn’t AI literally have one job when it started out?
How the hell does it fail at math? How is that even possible lmao
There is a reason why they’re called LLM - large language models
They don’t understand anything, they’re just getting the statically best result depending on their training data
At least AI is isn’t just LLMs, so the technology isn’t dead, but LLMs are just word generators and can’t really reason about/understand what they’re trying to tell.
It feels a bit like modern tarot, to be honest
Vibe mathsing.
Back to back
This may or may not be a thing, could be trolling too. However having Copilot on the computers at work and testing it out on mundane things like email summaries and replies, it’s pretty terrible. So if a LLM fails at simple language tasks, numbers are going to be spectacular. I was honestly surprised how bad Copilot is, having used some others, including smaller local LLMs. Maybe the enterprise version is a 1-bit.
It’s not too bad at predictive text … seems like a lot of effort for something my phone can do locally though …
Maybe it just misremembered the opening lyrics to U2’s Vertigo
Trying to figure out what it was “thinking” here…
2+3=5 and… um… ‘carry the 1’? “15!” Genius!
My guess: there’s a lot of text examples in its training data summing 1+2+3+4+5=15. So the 1+2+3 pattern made the stochastic parrot go “ah, I recognize this! Here’s the answer to 1+2+3+4+5”.
as others are said, this screenshot could be carefully staged
you could be seeing
A11: 1 A12: 2 A13: 3 A14:=SUM(A1:A13)but with the preceeding “1” trimmed off and the remaining +9 in the cells above A11, where they have aligned the window so you can’t see the 10th row.
The only way my brain says it works is 1 + 2 is 12 and then add three. So like one and two are strings and then you try to add a number to it so it converts it all the numbers
My brain tells me that in Excel, nothing is a string, they are all dates.
It was thinking that 15 is the most common answer on the Internet to the request “sum the numbers above”.
The
COPILOT()feature does not have access to your spreadsheet. You pass it the cell range it is supposed to use for context in the optional second parameter. The user did not provide any second parameter, so they’re just asking it to generate some text based on the text of the prompt and nothing else.The person who made this tweet either didn’t bother reading how to use the feature, or is being disingenuous.
But why would someone require copilot to do what excel already does so well anyways?
It’s like having a glass of water right in front of you and you decide you need a drink of water and instead grab a different cup of fire to sip from.
