The best cancers of both worlds.
this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2025
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Technology
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They're out smarting the sheet that's for sure.
Oh it's going to do it for Word too?
Prompt: Termination letter telling my boss and bosses to kindly go fuck themselves and make it professional
The best you can do in any job is to care as little about them as they care about you.
They will barely read it, and they won’t care nearly as much as you do.
I resign my position as a [position], effective [DATE].
Microsoft says its Agent Mode in Excel has an accuracy rate of 57.2 percent in SpreadsheetBench, a benchmark for evaluating an AI model’s ability to edit real world spreadsheets.
It generates 42.8% bullshit.
Just keep regenerating data until it's something the stock holders like. Doesn't matter if it's BS. They're already accustomed to that.
They probably view that as a statistic worth bragging about. It's not. If Excel got calculations right 57.2% of the time it would be completely worthless.
I asked copilot to look through my every spreadsheet and find how many instances of a category occurred. I was curious to see if it was any good. Gave me 2 different numbers. Neither were correct.
Copilot: Putting the "Artificial" in Artificial Intelligence.
The tech behind LLMs could have just been Clippy and everyone would be happy.
Did you read the next sentence? Humans only get like 72% right. It’s not far off at all.
I wonder where that "human accuracy" statistic is coming from. Plenty of people don't know how to read and interpret data, much less use excel in the first place. There's a difference between 1/4 of people in the workforce not being able to complete a task, and a specialized AI not being able to complete a task. Additionally, this is how you get into the KPI as a goal rather than a proxy issue. AI will never understand context isn't directly provided in the workbook. If you introduced a new drink at your restaurant in 2020 AI will tell you that the introduction of the drink caused a 100% decrease in foot traffic since there's no line item for "global pandemic". I'm not saying AI will never be there, but people using this version of AI instead of actual analysis don't care about the facts and just want an answer and for that answer to be cheap.
Depending on where you go to school, 70% is passing while 50% is not. While "not far off," one is a C, the other a F.
So it achieved the actual proficiency of a middle manager…
Decades ago. The company that replaced it's CEO with a LLM thrives.
Nice. Basically a coin flip
Slightly better than Vegas. Unfortunately, plenty of people are okay with Vegas odds.
Not enough accuracy to be useful. Not enough bullshit for politics.
So let me fast forward a bit, ->underpaid stressed out techworkers in the global south pretending to be AI for incompetent upper management in wealthy countries?
Not related but does global south refer to south of the equator or just everything south of north America?
I don't know if it is a perfect term, but it doesn't literally refer to any specific "South", rather I think it is a reference to the coincidence that many of the heavily industrialized empires of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries have been in the northern hemisphere, and the general colonial power dynamic therein set up has lead to the term "Global South" meaning pretty much anywhere that has gotten the short end of the colonialism stick, vs the long end.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_North_and_Global_South
Excel is one place where AI makes sense. All the data is there, in a nice structured and typed format with headings etc. Easily verifiable and to provide the reasoning for its work.
LLMs can't count. Can't add. Can't deal with actually large datasets
How is excel a good fit for vibe-coding?
It could be good to layer in standard machine learning (ML), and it already does have some features (like line of best fit).
However, in today's context AI means LLMs, and that is not a good fit due to its unpredictability.
Until it starts pulling data from nonexistent worksheets