LLMs lose context over a short session. They all have input limits. Very small input limits usually. Best it can probably do is suggest formulas for you based on your natural language, maybe some copy/paste. Which means it can beat a 9 year old, great news everyone! Or show a help article on pivot tables (which the help function already does!)
Excel is very simple to work with, hence its ubiquity. LLMs also get shit wrong about half the time, way more than half with difficult things ime. Meaning they cost experienced operators time, a few studies are showing this now with coding. And are expensive as fuck. And slow as fuck. And reduce capacity for learning. Meaning they actually cap what excel can achieve, as the user won’t grow at the same rate, renoving the one advantage excel actually has: the learning rate is phenomenal
The C-Suite which insisted on this integration is basically an subservient idiot themselves at this stage who doesn’t understand their product, their market fit, or their userbase. They should replace thenselves with an LLM
And it will fuck up around half of even the simple formulas. This is really bad, and the idiots in charge should feel bad. Excel basically runs the world and they are about to fuck it up
The problem with being a pragmatic LLM user is that you have on one side corporate America shoe-horning the tech in mediocre products none wants, and on the other side a large portion of the internet who loathe it but don’t use it and don’t even know what it does. Those conversations never go anywhere man. You’re talking to someone who thinks accuracy of 57% on SpreadsheetBench means the model gives wrong answers 42% of the time.
Hate to agree with Microsoft but yeah, Excel is probably a great place to introduce an LLM. It’s in that sweet spot between natural language and light programming, in an environment with math baked in so you don’t really care about the model’s accuracy or exact recall. All the data is here, and the model only has to manipulates cell numbers and writes formulas in this dumbed down language.
I’m sure you can get away with pretty small models too. It doesn’t need super human knowledge to implement 90% of common Excel use cases, and i suspect in real world scenarios the accuracy must be pretty interesting.
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LLMs can’t count. Can’t add. Can’t deal with actually large datasets
How is excel a good fit for vibe-coding?
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LLMs lose context over a short session. They all have input limits. Very small input limits usually. Best it can probably do is suggest formulas for you based on your natural language, maybe some copy/paste. Which means it can beat a 9 year old, great news everyone! Or show a help article on pivot tables (which the help function already does!)
Excel is very simple to work with, hence its ubiquity. LLMs also get shit wrong about half the time, way more than half with difficult things ime. Meaning they cost experienced operators time, a few studies are showing this now with coding. And are expensive as fuck. And slow as fuck. And reduce capacity for learning. Meaning they actually cap what excel can achieve, as the user won’t grow at the same rate, renoving the one advantage excel actually has: the learning rate is phenomenal
The C-Suite which insisted on this integration is basically an subservient idiot themselves at this stage who doesn’t understand their product, their market fit, or their userbase. They should replace thenselves with an LLM
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And it will fuck up around half of even the simple formulas. This is really bad, and the idiots in charge should feel bad. Excel basically runs the world and they are about to fuck it up
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Until it starts pulling data from nonexistent worksheets
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The problem with being a pragmatic LLM user is that you have on one side corporate America shoe-horning the tech in mediocre products none wants, and on the other side a large portion of the internet who loathe it but don’t use it and don’t even know what it does. Those conversations never go anywhere man. You’re talking to someone who thinks accuracy of 57% on SpreadsheetBench means the model gives wrong answers 42% of the time.
Hate to agree with Microsoft but yeah, Excel is probably a great place to introduce an LLM. It’s in that sweet spot between natural language and light programming, in an environment with math baked in so you don’t really care about the model’s accuracy or exact recall. All the data is here, and the model only has to manipulates cell numbers and writes formulas in this dumbed down language.
I’m sure you can get away with pretty small models too. It doesn’t need super human knowledge to implement 90% of common Excel use cases, and i suspect in real world scenarios the accuracy must be pretty interesting.
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.