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We put the Thing That Can't Do Numbers™ in your spreadsheets (programming.dev)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/iiiiiiitttttttttttt@programming.dev
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[–] 32 points 1 year ago (4 children)

IIRC, you're supposed to also pass a range of cells for the "AI" to work on.

But the fact that it just returned a number rather than "You're using this wrong, dickhead" is a problem in itself.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Passing the range is optional, as per the documentation. However, when used with a separate range parameter, it does return correct results. Note that specifying a range inside the text prompt will not work, even though it should be the exact same request sent to the model.

    I'm not sure what the intended purpose for this is, but it can return crazy numbers when doing math. You can ask it to add some cells in a completely empty spreadsheet and it'll return some random numbers.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    Yeah, plenty of warnings in there about not using it for numbers.

    And also this:

    The COPILOT function only has access to data provided through the context arguments. It does not have access to:

    Other data from the workbook

    So it's optional only in that it won't even look at the spreadsheet when returning the result. I suspect the next 20 years of AI research will be teaching it to say "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that" when appropriate.

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