We use it in finance for the reasons above. Microsoft actually just added GPT 5 to Copilot so it’s much better than it used to be. I’ve used it to help write scripts in VBA and it’s really good for my use cases. Before GPT 5 it was worse than useless.
> just added GPT 5 to Copilot so it’s much better than it used to be
Only marginally in general office use. Maybe is has better coding capabilities, but there is no way its the same sized model used on ChatGPT or via. OpenAI API.
This is the impression I get too and I hear it a lot from our users too. Some have provided clear examples of something prompted to their personal ChatGPT sub and the company copilot one, and yes, it is often much lower quality. As it is the same product under the hood, there must be some kind of squeezing going on behind the scenes. And understandably because they're just reselling a third party service and they want their own margin on it.
I also wonder why Microsoft pushes it so hard when they don't even have a competitive LLM themselves. They're basically admitting failure (similar to when they moved Edge to a rebranded Chrome by the way).
I think you answer your own question: because it doesn't matter if they can sell it and still make a profit.
Microsoft has a lot of already existing clients and those clients (mostly) trust them. They don't need to do a lot of convincing or marketing/sales to get them to use just one more thing from them even if it is moderately useful.
If they can manage to resell whatever the LLM makers have made and still generate a profit, that's all they really need. They can figure out later how to make their own version if that turns out to be profitable enough.
This is the same thing with the browser; there is not much money to be made from building/maintaining an engine in the end. But packaging an already existing one with their own UI and tools (and ads) that may make them money indirectly is a good enough approach.
The thing that impresses me the most about Microsoft is that they rarely come up with the best solution right away but they always manage to stick to the new stuff and work out over time the useful parts that will make money. It's quite ruthless but in the end it's good business and this is why they manage to stay relevant.
Good old, "embrace, extend, extinguish" is quite effective indeed.
Oh, I have a similar pet peeve but for watching live sports. Sometimes they’ll cut from the ‘main’ camera angle to a different one mid-action but it will be slightly out of sync and noticeable. For whatever reason this is super noticeable to me and bugs me to no end.
I like to joke that it's an array indexing issue. Some people loop through their array task list starting at 1 instead of 0, and so if they only have one task it never gets started. :P
No, you're pretty much exactly right. I am not a programmer by trade and when searching around and trying different technologies the first one that really clicked for me was HTMX. For whatever reason, handling all of that logic on the backend felt more natural. I've since started learning React and it's amazing how much 'easier' some of those UI conveniences really are. However, in places where they aren't truly necessary it's hard to beat the convenience and ease of a small Flask/SQLite/HTMX app, for me.
But yeah, if that doesn't really fit your mental model then I don't see a huge reason to give it a try.. other than it IS fun!
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