Thread

Microsoft abandons personal AI chatbot race with Copilot reboot

157 points · 154 comments · sbulaev

TuringNYC · 1790353186 · focus · HN ↗
My blood pressure rises everytime i use Enterprise Copilot at work. It seems they truncate message history heavily (to save input token costs?) and Copilot forgets the last thing you told it in the chat. It is like a real-life version of Momento (<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0209144/" rel="nofollow">https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0209144/) mixed with Waiting for Gadot (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_Godot" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_Godot), pretending to be in league with Anthropic.
1. gregschlom · 1790353619 · focus · HN ↗
  Off-topic but I find it amusing that you managed to misspell both movie titles :)
  1. trash88 · 1790356364 · focus · HN ↗
    Similarly to categorize Beckett as a movie.
    pavlov · 1790357939 · focus · HN ↗
    Indeed they don’t move very much in Godot. More like a standie-sittie than a movie.
  2. TuringNYC · 1790370868 · focus · HN ↗
    Fair point, that happens when i'm trying to be on MS Teams for a conf call, while watching my claude code terminal and then browsing HN on another monitor :-/
    singingtoday · 1790389052 · focus · HN ↗
    Sounds like most of us. Are we destroying our brains attention centers? Or working out our context switching?
    sellmesoap · 1790463389 · focus · HN ↗
    Maybe one problem is the time between prompts, much like going to get a coffee when you start a big build, now it's filling time between prompts (plus the build), which can be any number of distracting rabbit holes (the internet is a big place) the split context feels exhausting to me.
    fennecbutt · 1790519707 · focus · HN ↗
    No, we're creating value for the shareholders.
2. light_triad · 1790358235 · focus · HN ↗
  You're right using Microsoft products is like mixing Momento with Waiting for Gadot :)
  I recently switched to New Outlook and it's full of weird subtle bugs. It takes them years to fix things and make them barely useable. Given their track record I'm not optimistic for Copilot given both the vision and the execution are questionable at best.
  1. RoadieRoller · 1790359510 · focus · HN ↗
    My employer installed the new Outlook in the background, and it was forcing me to switch to the new every time I use the old version.
    I had to edit Windows Registry to avoid getting prompted every time I open old outlook. I didn’t like the looks or the bugs in the new version.
3. Gareth321 · 1790359296 · focus · HN ↗
  It's so bad. I'm cool with paying for good products but it's offensively bad.
  1. automatic6131 · 1790360897 · focus · HN ↗
    I can tolerate Teams being a bit mid because the core functionality nearly always works. I can tolerate Outlook being meh because it's doing a lot (nothing I, a lowly IC really need though I can imagine the top hatted boss who does) and I think it does okay with the scope it's tackling.
    But the M365 copilot app is inexcusable for being as core to Microslop's strategy.
    hahahnono · 1790401067 · focus · HN ↗
    Lol, teams has had two multi-hour global outages this year.
4. browningstreet · 1790359600 · focus · HN ↗
  Doing research work with it that outputs any kind of artifact is.. really painful. It constantly crashes, has to regenerate.. and then the output is often very difficult to carry to other Microsoft products, like Sharepoint. I end up creating PDFs that I import.
  I'll go ahead and burn working hours on it because I'm getting paid, and people like the things I create.. but it's a very crippled and painful version of what you get with the frontier products and most OSS options.
  1. poly2it · 1790361211 · focus · HN ↗
    It boggles my mind that Microsoft can fail to deliver even bare minimum working software so consistently, with all the engineering talent they house. What are the product teams doing?
    TuringNYC · 1790370947 · focus · HN ↗
    I feel it is even worse than bare minimum -- it is so bad it infuriates the user. It is hard to get away from that reaction when one uses better alternatives in their personal life.
    nsbdhciebsbdhc · 1790399585 · focus · HN ↗
    Vibecoding.
    discordance · 1790408418 · focus · HN ↗
    incredible right? - not to mention the complete access they have to OpenAI's IP
    Droobfest · 1790417904 · focus · HN ↗
    It boggles my mind that it doesn't seem to effect their bottom line at all
  2. homeonthemtn · 1790385675 · focus · HN ↗
    Oh it's so bad. So so bad.
    If you prompted an AI to return answers "as though you habitually ate soap and crayons while mouth breathing" you'd still get a better response than copilot
    robotnikman · 1790386925 · focus · HN ↗
    Its so bad you would probably get better answers using a 2b parameter local model
    epihelix · 1790405823 · focus · HN ↗
    That used to be the case, but the current Enterprise version, with the poorly-named "GPT 5.6 think deeper" option, is very decent indeed. Can't tell if it's Sol, Terra or a mixture of the two, but it's certainly not Luna.
    (Stick with the default "Auto" and you probably get Phi-4 -- it's lobotomised AF.)
    I use Copilot a lot now. Unlimited, free, high-quality, enterprise-protected inference is not to be sniffed at. It also writes some of the nicest code I've ever seen from an LLM, that's almost entirely free of comments.
    rmaxdev · 1790408083 · focus · HN ↗
    My previous company used copilot enterprise
    My experience was great because I had premium license and only used thinking models
    Most colleagues didn’t have premium and used default/auto model
    People stick to their very first bad experience unfortunately
    Jenk · 1790414012 · focus · HN ↗
    Are you referring to GitHub Copilot? I believe this thread is referring to Windows Copilot, such as the AI feature embedded into every Office progam, which is not the same experience.
    epihelix · 1790432671 · focus · HN ↗
    No, good ol' bog-standard Enterprise M365 Copilot. The one with the worst chat interface in history. That one.
    I don't think many people are aware of just how much it can do; it's certainly not advertised, and very likely not intended.
    sterlind · 1790447937 · focus · HN ↗
    could you give some examples?
    epihelix · 1790486485 · focus · HN ↗
    Try sending this prompt to "GPT 5.6 Think Deeper" in the interface:
    Provide me with optimised python code to perform a prime number search. Test the code and report on performance. Benchmark different search solutions. Provide the code in a downloadable zip archive.
    A silly toy example, but it should help give a hint of what's possible.
5. automatic6131 · 1790360756 · focus · HN ↗
  It's such a broken POS. Code snippets, especially for html, frequently don't render, or if they do, they render as rendered html which will frequently be an empty box, and you have to manually (for each snippet box) switch to show code mode.
  Trillion dollar industry btw.
  1. otabdeveloper4 · 1790403360 · focus · HN ↗
    Don't worry about. Claude Code wrote 1 million lines of tests for this functionality, that's how you know your luddite eyes are lying to you.
6. OGWhales · 1790361134 · focus · HN ↗
  Huh... not my experience with the "premium" license. The interface isn't as nice and definitely less powerful than something like codex/claude code/whatever, but I don't seem to have any issues with truncation or things like that. I'm usually using 5.6 thinking (not clear which 5.6 model exactly) when I'm using copilot at work. It seems... fine? I always see people here always complaining that it's nerfed, truncates things, etc etc. The only difference I see is that interface isn't as nice nor as powerful, but I don't notice the answers being noticeably worse or anything like that. Occasionally it messes up code block formatting, but that's the only thing I can think of that annoys me.
  Now, the "copilots" integrated in certain Microsoft products can be really horrible. I assume those are some sort of custom models that are not very capable, most of them I consider effectively worthless. But the web chat interface where I can pick chatGPT 5.6 seems fine...
  1. TuringNYC · 1790371122 · focus · HN ↗
    Given you're comparing to codex/claude code you probably arent talking about MS Copilot (e.g. the thing inside MS Teams but also available standalone as MS Copilot 365). Try it out and be convinced :-)
    OGWhales · 1790380775 · focus · HN ↗
    I think I am! I use it in the browser instead of teams/the desktop app, but my understanding is that it should be the same thing. I do know most people don’t have the premium license for it at my company, not 100% sure what difference that makes but they say it’s better somehow and has access to better models, or at least did at one point.
    But yeah, comparing to codex/claude code was a bit silly since those can do way more. It’s closer to the chatGPT. I’m pretty sure 5.6 Luna, not sure exactly since it doesn’t specify Luna/Terra/Sol
    twobitshifter · 1790413253 · focus · HN ↗
    One difference is that the premium copilot has access to company files and those on your onedrive, whereas the non premium version requires you to upload files.
    saelthavron · 1790387575 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't think there is a misunderstanding. I don't recall ever having an issue with it either. Now I don't do anything extreme with it. Just questions, suggestions, or some basic task which are either Microsoft or basic business activity related. I haven't tried anything like coding, deep analysis, or anything complicated. It feels like it is for business tasks so I haven't really tried to push it to do anything outside of that.
7. AnonymousPlanet · 1790382639 · focus · HN ↗
  When people ask me why I don't have any Windows machine at home, I say "for health reasons". It really raises my blood pressure and at some point I realised it's not worth it risking my health over it. You could use the same to get away from Copilot.
  1. ehe78qhe · 1790454695 · focus · HN ↗
    I only have one Windows install left and I only have it to (1) play some games with Windows-only anti-cheat and (2) play my flight simulator, where the hardware is finnicky to get working on Linux. And honestly, (2) seems to be becoming less of a hassle every month, especially now you can throw agents at the driver issues.
  2. trueno · 1790495389 · focus · HN ↗
    i feel like i have to shower after using windows. a decade ago when i left the only OS id ever known and grew up on behind, i was scared my computing experience would pale in comparison. boy was i wrong, windows just kind of ... sucks.
    once i finally outgrew the tribalism that came with having used windows for the first couple decades of my life, i feel like i just have little to no reverence for that OS anymore that is made by a company that has been downright hostile to computing in general.
8. epihelix · 1790405196 · focus · HN ↗
  Also a Copilot Enterprise user.
  The interface is shockingly terrible, but with electron and a few hours with devtools, you can improve on it substantially.
  I hope this new release does not change too much.

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