For general medical coverage, it was better for my Mom and now it seems better for me. Some things are not covered with traditional Medicare e.g. dental and vision.
Dental and vision aren't covered by private medical insurance either, and private dental insurance typically has max annual payouts low enough (like $1k/1.5k) to make it basically a scam unless you know you'll actually get use out of it.
> iPhone (and smartphones in general) are a mature product, so of course it'll be iterative.
That's the kind of thing people say when they are out of ideas. The reality is that the mobile phone market was already a mature market, with Nokia as the leader, even before the iPhone was released. Then Steve Jobs showed the world how to innovate.
Plus his degree is in mechanical engineering. I wonder how he climbed up the ranks of hardware engineering with a degree in mechanical engineering. Quite amazing.
People skills are primarily learned through observation, interaction, and modeling the behavior of others who have already have cultivated social skills. You know, from being around and interacting with people. It's not like studying a certain discipline, such a mathematics, forbids you from ever cultivating these abilities.
Mech E. on the other hand, is perhaps the broadest engineering discipline in terms of foundational principles, application variety, and transferable skills. So shouldn't be all that surprising when it comes to hardware engineering.
Think about a junior coworker you offloaded some of your tasks to. It turns out the coworker frequently makes mistakes. At some point you are going to say it is easier to just do this myself. Especially if a single mistake can cost you your life!
This looks bad for Microsoft. They added a Copilot button to all their products but it doesn't do much more than open a chat side panel.
I recently tried Claude Cowork for PowerPoint and I was stunned by the content as well as design quality of the deck it produced. That's a threat for Microsoft because now you don't need the editing tools of PowerPoint, AI replaces it, so all you need is the presentation mode of PowerPoint.
Copilot for Excel is useless. Ask it what is in cell A1 and it can't answer. I am looking forward to trying ChatGPT for Excel.
Claude for excel is already amazing. Fully capable of doing junior work. Formatting is great. Can refactor large multi-tab spreadsheets. It just burns tokens. If OpenAI is going to subsidize this on the monthly enterprise plans for a while then it's a game changer.
Claude for Excel (I work in finance) was one of the absolutely critical reasons we added Anthropic enterprise licenses. But they've turned out to be quite expensive ($100/day for heavy users). We'll see what OpenAI's quotas are.
From my experience, LLM performance in these areas is being massively oversold. I have repeatedly tried using Claude to modify a range of models typical of investment banking / private equity / sellside research contexts, and the results have been generally disastrous. On multiple occasions, the xlsx would no longer open.
Just my experience, it’s not a solution but rather a productivity tool. I mostly use it for tasks I can do myself but it would probably take 20-30min to dial in - now Claude can do it in 2-3min. (E.g. in a data table - add a new column that checks column a if the data is a, do x, if the data is b, do y, if the data is c, do z - then combine that with the word after the hyphen in column b —- or another example —- create a new sheet that is the same format as sheet one but show calculates the difference between column a and b bot for sheets 1-12 in a summary)
I don’t get good results when I just have Claude build things on its own - but for these types of specific productivity tasks I can save a couple of hours here and there.
I work with large files a lot, running claude code on it is not token intense at all. Probably because it does a lot with scripts. But its a bit more raw, but i think in the end more powerful. Have to pick a good excel library and language. I do node, maybe python can work as well
Work in a firm similar to yours and we have been going to though the motions of figuring ways for the bullpen to make use of these tools and would love to hear your thoughts if you would be willing to share!
I run the Excel team at Microsoft. The experience you're describing sounds like it's from the earlier versions of Copilot in Excel that were genuinely limited.
Today, Excel Copilot takes a model-forward approach where we give the models full access to Excel's capabilities. We give customers the choice of the latest models from both OpenAI and Anthropic, and we encourage the models to iteratively explore the spreadsheet before taking action. It builds a full understanding of the semantics and structure of the spreadsheet, find issues in it, and ultimately gives you much better results.
Copilot can write formulas, build PivotTables, create charts, build multi-tab models, do multi-step analysis. The models are quite proficient at it, and they do a great job. We have an auto-mode which is the default where we pick the model for you, but you can also select specific models if you have a preference. I often see people switch between models to get the benefit of diverse perspectives, similar to how a diverse team approaches problems differently.
If you tried it a few months ago and walked away, it's worth another look.
Does Copilot behave differently in Excel depending on whether you got the premium subscription instead of what is included with Business?
Many people I've talked to about Copilot don't realize that the dedicated "Premium" Copilot is a completely different experience than the "Basic/Lobotomized" Copilot that comes with a standard Business subscription.
It's like you're running a freemium model where no one was actually responsible for implementing the upsell, or making sure the free version is useful and compelling. E.g. a Copilot pane in Outlook that says it can't access your emails, doesn't explain how, and doesn't mention an upgrade path that will allow it to.
"If you tried it a few months ago and walked away, it's worth another look."
You shouldn't have shoved trash down people's throats a few months ago then?
> You shouldn't have shoved trash down people's throats a few months ago then?
:s/You/MS
While I agree the widespread "race to market" with crap probably does and should hurt the success of these "AI-enabled apps," that particular area probably was not this individuals decision.
It was this person's decision to mention their senior role at MS then dump marketing drivel into our heads. It's not his hand but he still eats with it.
I've had a really good time with the new Copilot in Excel. I like the model selector and tend to use Opus 4.6.
Q for you Brian, I have the Microsoft 365 Premium individual plan ($200/yr). I got 50% off the premium plan as well when Microsoft was offering discounts.
I've noticed when I use Claude or GPT through the Copilot model selector I don't see any costs for my api usage anywhere. Does Microsoft eat that for now?
Thanks for clarifying this. I was genuinely frustrated with copilot due to the lack of features.
If it's possible please push your large business clients to update office. I work for a multinational pharma company and the copilot feature in excel deployed there is next to useless
There is a significant difference in experience between Copilot Basic for a M365 user whose IT admins have blocked integration capabilities with Sharepoint content vs Copilot Premium for a M365 user whose IT admins have allowed integration capabilities with Sharepoint content.
PowerPoint is the poster child for the class of applications that AI totally obsoletes:
* A large application whose outputs are independent of the all (people still print slides; when presenting nobody knows or cares what app was used)
* Complicated and requires users to learn lots of skills unrelated to the work they’re doing (compare to Excel, where the model and calculations require and reflect domain knowledge about the data)
* Practically zero value add in document / info management (compare to word where large documents benefit from structure and organization)
We’re pretty close to presentations just being image files without layers and objects and smartart and all that.
AI will come for all productivity tools, but PowerPoint will be the canary that gets snuffed first, and soon.
I recall reading comments like this when PowerPoint was invented as it would kill all graphic design jobs. The absolute reverse happened. It created an entirely new industry. There is no AI today, or in the near future, that can combine human emotive story telling with impactful design, animated flow and interactivity. Yes it can create flattened boring 'documents' with no passion or depth. I for one would never want to be asked to stand in front of an audience and actually have to present a deck created by Copilot or Claude. Feast your eyes on this PowerPoint creation made by very talented real human designers and ask yourself the question "How long before AI can do this?" https://www.brightcarbon.com/portfolio/intersystems-partners...
Wait, how does PowerPoint do emotive storytelling in a way that a human driving an AI tool could not?
It sounds like you’re confusing my argument that AI can replace PowerPoint tools like gradient, layers, fonts, etc, with an argument I did not make that AI will take humans out of the equation.
Chatgpt for Excel is still an office add-in running in the same sandbox though. strongpigeon described the exact bottleneck upthread, process boundary crossings, context.sync() roundtrips that take seconds on web. That's a platform limitation, not a model limitation.
Swapping AI behind the add-in doesn't fix the fundamental constraint that third-party add-ins can't deeply integrate with Excel's runtime the way a native feature can. If copilot is bad despite having more access to excel internals(I don't like how Copilot is designed or implemented tho), an add-in with less access is likely not be better.
Would love for you to try both copilot and ChatGPT for Excel. Agreed on the limitations - but in our experience, ChatGPT for Excel does really well on complex sheets.
Maybe but not drastically so. My guess is that most of the slowness comes from the tool calls round tripping+processing on Anthropic/OpenAI’s servers rather than the app latency.
That’s without talking about the poor UI and security story of COM add-ins and the inability to run on Excel for iOS.
Aren't they providing a wrapper for the work of another company? IE msft isn't actually doing any foundational work thus they can't meaningfully move product capability, just wait for the model to improve and integrate it?
I am still surprised that outside of open source AI models, Microsoft is just routing to external models, to a degree its kind of smart because they don't have to have all the skin in the game for the infrastructure, plus they sell some of the hosting anyway, but man. Why does Microsoft not have a frontier model yet? Would have been a great time any time in the last few years to introduce a real Cortana AI model.
They explicitly said they were ceding the frontier model game to others, and that they were content saying a few months behind the state of the art. In the long run, this is an interesting freeloader play that a few people are making. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/04/microsoft-ai-chief-sees-bene...
I will say this in the most charitable terms I can. Microsoft simply does not have it in their culture to compete with something like this. Their prime days are over. They are slowly becoming IBM.
They were completely correct to not compete in foundation models. They would have no chance. I mean, they can't even make a decent app or harness to use the other models!
> They added a Copilot button to all their products but it doesn't do much more than open a chat side panel.
I was hyped when I heard about Copilot. "I can tell it to make pivot tables now!" When I tried to use it I was shocked how underbaked it was. Below even my worst expectations. This really was someone shoving ChatGPT into Excel with almost zero additional effort. Copilot can't DO anything useful.
stride.microsoft.com -> this is a virtual machine instance with developer tools that allow for same sort of work Claude cowork does. Copilot in excel has to access the excel document through excel provided APIs and can’t completely redo the document like cowork does everytime running developer scripts to generate it because the document instance is open. The model of work is entirely different.
I've had the same experience. Copilot for Excel can't even parse basic cell references. Meanwhile Claude handles document formatting in one pass. The catch is it works externally, not inside the app, but at least it works.
The MCP ecosystem is what makes this interesting. Claude isn't just a chat panel bolted onto existing software, it's building integrations that actually manipulate the files. Microsoft had the distribution advantage but they're losing on capability.
I would consider myself an M365 power user and I was not aware of this. It is not well promoted--and after all the Copilot crap, I would be annoyed even if it was.
Regardless, I just tried to log in with my work MS account, and I can't do so.
Maybe a dumb question, but why does Microsoft care? They should have good apps and if OpenAI or Claude wants to create plugins, great. That's what they're there for and Microsoft invested a lot of effort to make the new add-ins much more powerful and intuitive for this very reason. It's really nice experience compared to VBA.
It obv makes Excel much more valuable and they can gatekeep by requiring the subscription for addins.
Microsoft spent a lot of effort to develop a really powerful editing interface. If you can replace that interface with a text input box, then their applications moat becomes a lot shallower.
We have many people in my wider team (Finance) that are AI skeptics purely because of their experience with Copilot. Like they don't know what AI is actually capable of when outside of the shackles of Copilot.
> I recently tried Claude Cowork for PowerPoint and I was stunned by the content as well as design quality of the deck it produced. That's a threat for Microsoft because now you don't need the editing tools of PowerPoint, AI replaces it, so all you need is the presentation mode of PowerPoint.
Actually, someone here posted a Claude Code skill recently that generates a presentation as a self-contained HTML5 file, so all you need is a browser.
Powerpoint will continue to persist because other people need to be able to edit your slide deck without understanding your HTML.
My employer blocks office plugins, so I can't try Claude for PowerPoint, but sometimes I get Claude to generate Python scripts, which produce PowerPoint slides via python-pptx. This also benefits from being able to easily read and generate figures from raw data.
I don't really like the way Claude tends to format slides (too much marketing speak and flowcharts), but it has good ideas often enough that it's still worth it to me. So I treat this as a starting point and replace the bad parts.
It's not self-contained, it requires PowerPoint to be indfled. Which is not an issue on corporate machines of course, but maybe you want to do a presentation for a general/broader audience.
That's besides the point though. With a self-contained HTML, you don't need to go to a special website, you don't need an account or sign-in, heck you don't even need the Internet, and it works pretty much on every device that supports HTML5.
a solution in search of a problem. everyone can open a powerpoint in google docs, hotmail, libreoffice etc.
now the person receiving the file has a DIFFERENT experience than they are used to with every other presentation. different hotkeys, different troubleshooting.
you must never have actually done this. it doesn't work the way you think it does. unless it's self contained (like a pp), you can't expect network access to actually deliver when you need it most.
you could do that for the past 20 years. i've always hated slides as a medium for anything, but i've been proven wrong tine and again that people love their pp.
Because it was drag and drop interface. This existed for HTML but because web pages got too complicated, so did the WYSIWYGs. By just being a program to show slides, the editing experience was manageable for anyone. But if you can hust type what you want to happen into claude, editng experience doesnt matter as much/at all
These days there's an even easier way to learn to write a compiler. Just ask Claude to write a simple compiler. Here's a simple C compiler (under 1500 lines) written by Claude: https://github.com/Rajeev-K/c-compiler It can compile and run C programs for sorting and searching. The code is very readable and very easy to understand.
For those of us that learn better by taking something and tinkering with it this is definitely the better approach.
Ive never been a good book learner but I love taking apart and tinkering with something to learn. A small toy compiler is way better than any book and its not like the LLM didnt absorb the book anyways during training.
Exactly! Writing a compiler is not rocket science if you know assembly language. You can pick up the gist in an hour or two by looking at a simple toy compiler.
Because an actual compiler would be tens of thousands of lines and most of it is going to be perf optimization. If you want to get the big picture first, read a simple working compiler that has all the key parts, such as a lexer, abstract syntax tree, parser, code generator and so on.
I did not and will not run this on my computer but it looks like while loops are totally broken; note how poor the test coverage is. This is just my quick skimming of the code. Maybe it works perfectly and I am dumber than a computer.
Regardless, it is incredibly reckless to ask Claude to generate assembly if you don't understand assembly, and it's irresponsible to recommend this as advice for newbies. They will not be able to scan the source code for red flags like us pros. Nor will they think "this C compiler is totally untrustworthy, I should test it on a VM."
Are you concerned that the compiler might generate code that takes over your computer? If so the provided Dockerfile runs the generated code in a container.
Regarding test coverage, this is a toy compiler. Don't use it to compile production code! Regarding while loops and such, again, this is a simple compiler intended only to compile sort and search functions written in C.
No, the problem is much more basic than "taking over your computer," it looks like the compiler generates incorrect assembly. Upon visual inspection I found a huge class of infinite loops, but I am sure there are subtle bugs that can corrupt running user/OS processes... including Docker, potentially. Containerization does not protect you from sloppy native code.
> Don't use it to compile production code!
This is an understatement. A more useful warning would be "don't use it to compile any code with a while loop." Seriously, this compiler looks terrible. Worse than useless.
If you really want AI to make a toy compiler just to help you learn, use Python or Javascript as a compilation target, so that the LLM's dumb bugs are mostly contained, and much easier to understand. Learn assembly programming separately.
You have not provided any evidence that can be refuted, only vague assertions.
The compiler is indeed useless for any purpose other than learning how compilers work. It has all the key pieces such as a lexer, abstract syntax tree, parser, code generator, and it is easy to understand.
If the general approach taken by the compiler is wrong then I would agree it is useless even for learning. But you are not making that claim, only claiming to have found some bugs.
The thing that is obviously and indisputably wrong, terrible for learners, is the test cases. They are woefully insufficient, and will not find those infinite loops I discovered upon reading the code. The poor test coverage means you should assume I am correct about the LLM being wrong! It is rude and insulting to demand I provide evidence that some lazy vibe-coded junk is in fact bad software. You should be demanding evidence that the project's README is accurate. The repo provides none.
The code quality is of course unacceptably terrible but there is no point in reviewing 1500 lines of LLM output. A starting point: learners will get nothing out of this without better comments. I understand what's going on since this is all Compilers 101. But considering it's a) stingily commented and b) incorrect, this project is 100% useless for learners. It's indefensible AI slop.
Sorry I disagree. I have written compilers by hand and this compiler generated by Claude is pretty good for learning.
I am only asking you to backup your own assertions. If you can't then I would have to assume that you are denigrating AI because you are threatened by it.
You claimed bugs, and when asked for evidence of said bugs, you said it is rude to ask for evidence, and I should simply "assume" you are right. Okay. I think people can make up their own minds as to what that means.
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