Consumers Aren't Flocking to Microsoft's AI Tool 'Copilot' (xda-developers.com) 100
Microsoft Copilot "isn't doing as well as the company would like," reports XDA-Developers.com (citing a report from startup/VC industry site Newcomer).
The Redmond giant has invested billions of dollars and a lot of manpower into making it happen, but as a recent report claims, people just don't care. In fact, if the report is to be believed, Microsoft's rise in the AI scene has already come to a screeching halt:
At Microsoft's annual executive huddle last month, the company's chief financial officer, Amy Hood, put up a slide that charted the number of users for its Copilot consumer AI tool over the past year. It was essentially a flat line, showing around 20 million weekly users. On the same slide was another line showing ChatGPT's growth over the same period, arching ever upward toward 400 million weekly users. OpenAI's iconic chatbot was soaring, while Microsoft's best hope for a mass-adoption AI tool was idling. It was a sobering chart for Microsoft's consumer AI team...
That's right; Microsoft Copilot's weekly user base is only 5% of the number of people who use ChatGPT, and it's not increasing. It's also worth noting that there are approximately 1.5 billion Windows users worldwide, which means just over 1% of them are using Copilot, a tool that's now a Windows default app....
It's not a huge surprise that Copilot is faltering. Despite Microsoft's CEO claiming that Copilot will become "the next Start button", the company has had to backtrack on the Copilot key and allow people to customise it to do something else, including giving back its original feature of the Menu key.
They also note earlier reports that Intel's AI PC chips aren't selling well.
At Microsoft's annual executive huddle last month, the company's chief financial officer, Amy Hood, put up a slide that charted the number of users for its Copilot consumer AI tool over the past year. It was essentially a flat line, showing around 20 million weekly users. On the same slide was another line showing ChatGPT's growth over the same period, arching ever upward toward 400 million weekly users. OpenAI's iconic chatbot was soaring, while Microsoft's best hope for a mass-adoption AI tool was idling. It was a sobering chart for Microsoft's consumer AI team...
That's right; Microsoft Copilot's weekly user base is only 5% of the number of people who use ChatGPT, and it's not increasing. It's also worth noting that there are approximately 1.5 billion Windows users worldwide, which means just over 1% of them are using Copilot, a tool that's now a Windows default app....
It's not a huge surprise that Copilot is faltering. Despite Microsoft's CEO claiming that Copilot will become "the next Start button", the company has had to backtrack on the Copilot key and allow people to customise it to do something else, including giving back its original feature of the Menu key.
They also note earlier reports that Intel's AI PC chips aren't selling well.
Copilot sounds dumb and has a bad UI (Score:2, Troll)
Make your product for idiots, MS should have the opposite of its research division, a tester division exclusively for people with an IQ of 80 or und
Very much agree (Score:4, Interesting)
I've used CoPilot for iOS development and it's a real mess there.
There is a plugin for Xcode but it's pretty crude.
There's a better version (as you'd expect) that you can use with VSCode that you can point at iOS projects, and that does technically work.. but it's still hard to really get it to increase context to a large number of files.
Fundamentally coding models I've found have a lot of issues with getting larger requested changes right. They were more helpful in the role of suggesting small blocks of new code, but even there I found I took maybe 10-20% of the suggestions, which meant that using CoPilot was kind of like having pop-up ads in your code editor, with all the annoyance that metaphor implies as a pup-up would sometimes randomly spring up when I was simply trying to read through some code.
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Recently they had a short course on how to use AI in Excel.
Curiously they used ChatGPT and not CoPilot...
Anyhow, I tried to get a new North American flag by replacing all 50 stars on the normal USA flag by 51 small Maple Leafs but so far ChatGPT has made a mess of it c.q. refused it.
Re: Very much agree (Score:5, Interesting)
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Microsoft's branding is typically horrible from stem to stern - and it's probably mostly caused by executive dysfunction.
I'm still massively annoyed by the recent rebrand from "Microsoft Remote Desktop" (a name that - gasp! - made some sense) to "Windows.app".
Re: Copilot sounds dumb and has a bad UI (Score:2)
Perhaps Apple should rename the Screen Sharing app to âoeMacâ then? Thatâ(TM)s dumb. And what should VNC be renamed to because I use it to access Linux, Windows and Macs?
If I want Windows, I run VMWare Fusion. It actually runs Windows. The Windows app doesnâ(TM)t, it gives me remote access to Windows machines.
As dumb and irritating as this renaming was, itâ(TM)s not as bad as renaming the Microsoft Office app on iOS to "M365 Copilot". At least somebody ensured that the Spotl
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FWIW the RDP client (mstsc.exe) is not what was rebranded. It is some app in the Windows Store. It is still Microsoft's fault that there is so much confusion.
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As far as I know, this old "Remote Desktop" that got renamed didn't even use the Remote Desktop protocol, but something entirely different, so the renaming actually reduces confusion. It's a rare case of MS doing something right (to correct something they did utterly wrong).
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So... i avoid ads through ad blockers and paying for some streaming services, and i don't actually know what microsoft wants people to DO with Copilot.
And this is even though i use Edge which now has a copilot sidebar. Hmm... i think i'm going to go over and ask it.
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When I fly a plane, can I ask Copilot to fly it instead of me for couple hours, while I rest?
Asking for a pilot friend.
Usual MS shit (Score:4, Interesting)
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Obviously. (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft still has not learned that forcing people to use an application they didn't ask for will backfire. But no, they keep trying this shit over and over and over again, expecting a different result for some reason.
This is why ChatGPT is so successful - it is not intrusive. People use it when they want, not when some manager thinks it is a good idea.
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I do wonder, though, whether ChatGPT's numbers are getting fudged in some manner.
Re: Obviously. (Score:4, Interesting)
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No idea. I use it, mostly as a sort of a tutor in a variety of different topics that interest me, and what it does is absolutely worth the about 22 euros I pay for it monthly.
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I dont think so. I know a *lot* of people who use ChatGPT and Claude (my preference out of the two) but I dont know anyone who uses copilot in any capacity outside of IDEs
Then again my sample is skewed as a tech worker.
Last time I used a microsoft AI intentionally was the original bing bot. That utter lunatic of an AI was actually fun.
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Microsoft still has not learned that forcing people to use an application they didn't ask for will backfire. But no, they keep trying this shit over and over and over again, expecting a different result for some reason.
This is why ChatGPT is so successful - it is not intrusive. People use it when they want, not when some manager thinks it is a good idea.
Windows 11 already has a prominent search window, that says "Search". Microsoft should just tack Copilot onto that search window silently. Tell people that the search window solves all your problems. Have a question about how to use Windows or any other app, just type into the window. Need to tweak a Windows setting, use the search window. Need to search the internet, just type into the window. Eventually, people will just use it. It's sort of stupid to separate search from whatever it is that copilo
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Their first shot at slamming bing into the search box was a huge disaster. Power users use the windows key to open the "run box", and they ruined it in windows 8 when they put "cortana" in there. I 100% do not want a chatbot polluting the search experience, just like I 100% did not want search to pollute the command line interface.
Re: Obviously. (Score:2)
Just wait until they start letting Copilot process everything you type into the command line /s
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Just wait until they start letting Copilot process everything you type into CMD or Powershell /s
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Damn buggy Slashdot.
Re: Obviously. (Score:1)
Yet, remarkably *nothing* has backfired. People grumble, but financials are strong and for some reason everyone still uses MS for everything.
You will use copilot and you will like it.
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if microsoft/intel only builds and sells models with the copiliot in it... then you will buy it... then you will use it because there is no opt out.
Just sayin' if the only thing on the shelf is grapefruit, you gotta buy grapefruit, if you want to eat.
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Same with Apple's Siri. Ugh.
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At times this strategy does work for them. Teams has made major headway thanks to it suddenly appearing as part of Office and even auto-starting on many Windows machines. They were successful at cutting into Slack and Zoom's businesses by forcing Teams onto the whole corporate world. Why use something else when Teams is already there. They're hoping to do the same with AI.
However, this Copilot stuff seems extra forced and comes off as desperate. They've re-branded their entire office suite to be "Copilot",
Copilot is just Bing (Score:2)
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Well (Score:2)
Well who could have predicted this? Pretty much everyone since this whole CoPilot thing was announced, that's who. Microsoft trying to force feed their crap into the mouths of their consumers. Works against them every time.
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All LLMs are not equal (Score:3, Informative)
ChatGPT is at least to the point where, with a decent prompt, you can get it to output something that mostly was what you were going for. Copilot still just feels like glorified version of Alexa, or Google's AI summary. It's fine if you want a quick answer to something that's most likely going to be incorrect, but how often does that happen?
Like, just for fun I asked Copilot "How can I keep rats out of my collection of antique McDonalds cheeseburgers?". It took me seriously, offering several suggestions on how I could keep those pesky rodents away from what obviously wasn't a real thing. ChatGPT? It caught on and threw some snark right back at me:
Security Theater (optional): Put up a tiny "Employee Entrance Only" sign. Rats respect bureaucracy.
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It is an AI. A tool. Not a person with rationale and street smarts. The hammer is not going to refuse to hit your finger if you let it.
Re:All LLMs are not equal (Score:4)
We're kind of passed the point where "a computer can't do that" is an acceptable excuse. A LLM can have the capability of correctly responding to humor, innuendo and metaphors. Even your hammer analogy kind of falls apart if you worked modern image recognition capabilities into the mix, since you absolutely could design a hammer that won't allow you to strike anything that isn't a nail. Would it get it right 100% of the time? Nah. But the technology has certainly reached a point where it's firmly in the realm of science fact, not science fiction.
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I beg to disagree, somewhat. It is our expectations, fueled by startups promises, of such performance rather than actual capability. I still see LLM as tool that is often wrong but still worth using. Maybe it's the cost of preparing right data and training itself as your modification to hammer analogy suggest - ie technology capable of this performance exist but is not economically feasible?
Here is the beginning of the answer from
Gemini:
Ah, a fellow connoisseur of vintage McDonald's fare! Protecting your co
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They are statistical parrots after all. ...
Stochastic. And no, they aren't.
LLMs are quite capable of understanding, as it is defined, as long as you remove the anthropocentric requirement.
Forget the startups an what they're trying to sell.
The science (papers) on the topic are quite real.
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So what answer would you have thought to be a good one? and why?
As a (afaik) NT, reasonably educated, and reasonably socialized human i would probably respond the same way it did. Perhaps w/ some sort of "not sure if serious, but..." as a preface. ( Past several years (but BEFORE LLMs started doing it) i've made it somewhat of a point to answer questions more directly rather than asking up front why the questioner is asking the question. At least in "peaceful times". )
Re: All LLMs are not equal (Score:2)
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> how many rs are in strawberry
> There are three letter "r"s in the word strawberry
> how many rs were in my last question?
> Your last question was:
> "how many rs are in strawberry"
> There are three letter "r"s in that sentence too!
Such clever much improved
https://chatgpt.com/share/680e... [chatgpt.com]
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weren't there 4? "how many rs are in strawberry"
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Using qwq-32b-fp16 [markdownpastebin.com]
But also, using your own specific prompting, ChatGPT isn't the end-all of LLM performance. [markdownpastebin.com]
QwQ is a reasoning model, so that output doesn't include the nearly 2000 reasoning tokens.
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Considering what people collect, it's not at all obvious there is no such thing. It seems likely there is no sich thing, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if someone collects something like that.
Either way, both tools simply generate the statistcially most likely response from their input data. Apparently ChatGPT has input data that contains a lot more sarcasm, which I'm not sure I would agree is in any way a good thing.
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Either way, both tools simply generate the statistcially most likely response from their input data.
Incorrect.
The only statistical element is the reduction of the logits to a token.
The high-dimensional vector within the hidden state isn't anything approaching "most likely".
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That's... so completely wrong it's even impossible to address. You don't even comprehend the concept of a token.
Wow.
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That's... so completely wrong it's even impossible to address.
Funny way to say, "shit- I've been caught in over my head- quick- bullshit my way out of this!"
You don't even comprehend the concept of a token.
Tokens are merely an an integer encoding 1 or more bytes.
Only at the input, and the output, does an LLM deal with tokens.
In the middle, it's an N-dimensional vector moving through the attention and hidden layers of the network.
"Wow."
Dipshit.
Three step solution: (Score:4, Funny)
Step 1. Make even/warning message more verbose and technical
Step 2. Add a "ask co-pilot what this means" button.
Step 3. Forcibly deploy a new large service pack (with minimal QA testing) to every Windows PC.
Just like magic, Co-pilot usage will be way up! It's a flawless plan.
Soonyou won't be allowed to uninstall Copilot (Score:2)
Usability and marketing. (Score:3)
confusing pricing is why (Score:5, Interesting)
Open notepad, type some text, press the copilot button in the upper right. Guess what it says after a short progress bar. "Subscription Required".
"Clippy" of 2025 (Score:3)
As Gibbs would say, "Gee, ya think?" Shoving "supposedly helpful" shit into people's faces doesn't end well.
BUT, Microsoft forced this to all users of Windows 11, so they can claim massive "user counts/popularity metrics." I guess this shows that, despite Nadella's refocusing of the company, you can't change Microsoft's core culture of "ramming mediocre junk down the user's throats and claiming success."
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Yep... Microsoft really has never been very good at "creating things people didn't know they wanted". They've historically done much better at figuring out what people were demanding and reacting to it (including buying other people's products out when necessary, such as Exchange Server or Great Plains accounting).
I really felt this a LONG time ago when watching that famous interview they did with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs sitting together on stage. There was a real sense that Bill envied Jobs' ability to i
Do people need a programmed minder to follow them? (Score:2)
Clippy. (Score:4, Funny)
I used it so you don't have to (Score:5, Informative)
Copilot is absolutely useless. I was voluntold to enter a pilot in our company and I think it just has cost me time and effort. It hasn't helped me with anything. Everything it generates is either incorrect, useless, or misses the point (seriously don't let Copilot sumarise your outlook email inbox, you WILL miss important things).
I briefly tried chat GTP (Score:3)
There's a extremely detailed ars Technica article about a guy making heavy use of AI and his programming job but for
Somewhere out there is an llm (Score:2)
At that point I'm not just living rent free in their heads they're paying me rent.
Re: I briefly tried chat GTP (Score:2)
But adding bubble sort to a program is almost never the right move. It's the naive move, and these types of poor decisions will get reinforced by LLMs, who will be happy to answer "Bubble sort in Xlang", when the answer should be "are you sure? Xlang has its own sort that runs faster than bubble sort in typical cases" or "are you sure your use case is appropriate for bubble sort? Generally it's pretty slow in the average case. If you can tell me the size of the data sets, I can make a more pointed recommend
I was going to say I was just using it as an examp (Score:2)
But holy hell you're right if you go to chat GTP and ask it to write a sort algorithm you get fucking bubble sort.
If you tell it you want something faster at least it gives you quick sort.
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Re: I used it so you don't have to (Score:2)
Same here, voluntold to be part of the corporate pilot. Equally worthless.
Yet, I note, despite certainly logging everything I do every moment, copilot has not helped an iota with the list of repetitive things I do every day - I open the same programs, filter my mail the same way, forward a bunch of mails that are rather distinctive in specific ways... Basically my first 30-45 mins of every day are that.
Where the fuck is copilot?
Every query is a loss (Score:2)
AFAIK OpenAI looses money with every query - so except for hype I'm not sure what MS would win if they got more queries.
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Remember the old adage: "We're losing money on every sale, but we'll make it up in volume."
Re: Every query is a loss (Score:2)
Lol
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OpenAI projects profitability by 2029 (Revenue of $129B - they're at ~$13B now). If they're wrong, we can re-address this, otherwise, this is a perfectly normal business plan for a startup.
Re: Every query is a loss (Score:2)
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3 years for Google.
You sound like a not very successful person.
A race for dominance (Score:2)
The best AI is going to get most of the customers and exponentially dominate the marketplace. I haven't used Copilot but there are a lot of negative reviews.
I don't expect MS to ever recover from this, they are too far behind. They'll have to pay for 3rd party AI services.
Re: A race for dominance (Score:2)
Nah. The best tools will be those with the best integrations into conventional human developed architectures.
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If you look at the developer docs on the websites for these AI's you will see that the companies are trying to make it as easy as possible to integrate them with whatever you want. Already there are lots of derivative products that use the AI on the back end through these interfaces. But giving correct and useful results also matters quite a bit.
https://console.anthropic.com/ [anthropic.com]
The AI companies are selling their services for much less than it costs them to provide it. They are competing for widespread adoption
Re: A race for dominance (Score:2)
They made me hate it before they called it copilot (Score:2)
Copilot a'la Futurama... (Score:2)
Copilot a'la Futurama...For some reason the word "copilot" makes me think of Leela in Futurama, when she get's a demotion...
Morgan: And for those six and a half reasons, I am demoting Leela to co-pilot.
Leela: Co-pilot? Under who?
Morgan: The autopilot.
Leela: That drunk?
[Bender laughs.]
Futurama Season 2 Episode 11, "How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back"
https://futurama.fandom.com/wi... [fandom.com]
JoshK.
OpenAI numbers (Score:2)
The fun part of this, is this is written as if OpenAI's "400 million" numbers are in any way credible and believable. OpenAI are not very *open* about how they calculate that number, how they determine unique vs repeat uses, API calls verses an actual human directly using ChatGPT.
Maybe because it is a piece of... (Score:3)
,..something else
I was building a repository of knowledge like you do in ChatGPT - adding text and prompts and iterating on it. However, once I hit 30 queries copilot said that I couldn't add anymore! After doing some research it appears that is by-design, implemented to avoid hallucinations.
If you query a text more than 30 times it will refuse to continue new questions on the topic.
This is a showstopper for me.
MS and LLMs (Score:2)
Microsoft will start providing value with its "AI" investments only once the tech begins disappearing into its other apps. If you know you're using Copilot, the tech sucks. If Word automatically knows I want to import an Excel sheet and finds it for me without me asking, then the tech is solid.
Re: MS and LLMs (Score:2)
Apple... (Score:2)
The first thing I do is turn off all that "intelligence" BS on all the devices I have, because it is an impediment.
AI is still worse than natural stupidity
This just in (Score:2)
The core problem remains (Score:2)
Copilot Is This Generation's Clippy (Score:2)
Enough with these new-fangled programs... (Score:2)
Even Worse for Enterprise (Score:1)
Control (Score:2)
Granted, I've been at this for a long time now, but I've watched the model shift from "here's software, we're not monitoring you and trusting you to install it only the number of times that you've paid for," to "here's software that will require constant phoning-home to us in order for it to stay 'activated' with its full feature set and by the way the upgrades are coming whether they're fully vetted or not and we won't let you choose to put them off, oh and by the way we've judged your hardware to be too o
People don't like being told what to do... (Score:1)
for code or general use? (Score:2)
At work (a well-known multinational) they paid for Copilot subscriptions for the plugin for a (non-MS) IDE. Sometimes it was just brilliant, especially on the code completion front. Other times it was utterly moronic (as one example, it struggles with different versions of 3rd party libraries we use - no comprehension of what version even means). The plugin sometimes stopped logging in after an update to the IDE, and the only way we could get it to work was to uninstall, wipe any remaining directories (wit
Who actually trusts Microsoft? (Score:2)
Obviously, not many.
Fuck Microsoft.