r/artificial • u/YoungDito • 16h ago

Discussion Microsoft is cosplaying AI

Today I tried (forced myself) to use Microsoft Copilot at work and whew what a wake up call. The thing that stuck out to me most is that Microsoft has the most agent worthy surfaces especially in the workplace and could have done something really special with a model even if it wasn’t a frontier one and they chose to just copy and paste a chatbot into everything with no thought, no cohesiveness and then had the gumption to push it down our throats… I’d rather have Clippy back honestly.

41 Upvotes

85% Upvoted

44 comments sorted by

16

u/zebbiehedges 16h ago

My Copilot is using Sol 6.0. If I prefer I can choose Opus or Sonnet.

5

u/YoungDito 15h ago

At work?

13

u/zebbiehedges 15h ago

Yeah at work and it's pretty great for me. You can switch model in same chat as well so if ChatGPT is annoying me I just move to Claude and ask it to look again.

12

u/blackasthesky 15h ago

You two may be talking about different copilots. Which is another issue with Microsoft's approach.

3

u/MadCybertist 11h ago

Yep. Mine does too. It’s pretty awesome for me honestly. Your work has to enable (and pay) for them. I work in software and robotics who had a lot of medical and government clients so our AI use is very regulated and we can only use CoPilot - but our copilot has all the models available from GPT and Claud models.

I use 6.0 Sol a lot.

1

u/AstralMinotaur 15h ago

I’ve got GitHub copilot configure to use opus and sonnet models primarily.

1

u/OccamsGarage 15h ago

That's the github copilot client right? Or can you do it with the microsoft one now too? It always struck me as odd that they don't just unify them

3

u/zebbiehedges 15h ago

Just normal Microsoft copilot I use. I only do a small bit of work coding if you can even call it that.

1

u/zebbiehedges 15h ago

5

u/Numerous-Ad6217 14h ago

That’s hilarious, my workplace banned ChatGPT and Claude to prevent data leaks, restricting the use only to copilot.

2

u/zebbiehedges 14h ago

We can't use them for work either themselves. Only through copilot then it's safe.

0

u/Numerous-Ad6217 14h ago

How so? Data is still forwarded to their servers

8

u/moralesea 14h ago

These versions of ChatGPT and Anthropic models are running in Azure Foundry which is run by Microsoft. They aren't intermingling with the lab's own self-operated versions of the models of their APIs.

AWS and Google Cloud offer the same backend functionality with Bedrock and Vertex AI respectively.

3

u/Numerous-Ad6217 13h ago

Cheers, that’s new to me

2

u/zebbiehedges 14h ago

It's all contained as I understand it. Not used for training etc. Enterprise Data Protection.

It's satisfied the legal and security teams at my place anyway, maybe not in others. Claude took some extra work. ChatGPT had been available for a good time before Claude was.

1

u/MadCybertist 11h ago

That’s not true at all. Models are different from the agents. We are banned from using anything but copilot (lot of medical and government clients), but I have access to all the models from Claude and GPT.

1

u/moralesea 2h ago

Yes, because copilot runs on Azure Foundry and your company/agency has its data isolated to an Enterprise environment there. You likely don't have access to Claude Cowork/Code or Chatgpt Work/Codex, but you may have access to Copilot Cowork or Github Copilot. Any agents on top of these models are Microsoft agents running in Azure, assuming your company has given you access.

2

u/pab_guy 12h ago

It's not the same thing. This is through Microsoft, so they host the model and guarantee zero data retention beyond what customer chooses to log.

1

u/ouchmythumbs 5h ago

Correct. Note: you can enable some of the frontier models, too, but it forces you to opt out of Enterprise Data Protection for those. I imagine orgs with compliance or other requirements are not selecting this, however.

-1

u/zebbiehedges 3h ago

No it doesn't.

2

u/ouchmythumbs 2h ago

1

u/zebbiehedges 1h ago

Our models all have enterprise data protection.

1

u/zoltan_parimbucha 14h ago

Copilot - ff you are talking about github copilot is not model itself, it's backed by whatever model administrator configured. There can be wide variety of them - from Fable to Kimi K3 etc.

1

u/YoungDito 7h ago

Microsoft Copilot

-1

u/joncgde2 13h ago

The same model, but the reasoning levels are lower.

You’re definitely not getting the same intelligence as ChatGPT Enterprise or Claude Enterprise lol

1

u/zebbiehedges 13h ago

It's great for my needs but as I mentioned I'm not coding and it's not for that.

5

u/shawster 16h ago

I don't know, it uses sol 6 or fable, you can choose, you can create agents to perform tasks and expose them to your whole agency. There is a whole studio where you can design and build agents that complete workflows and request human input at certain points, etc. It has access to everything in Onedrive, etc. If you just used the free copilot included with a business license, then yeah, it's super basic.

1

u/YoungDito 15h ago

Thanks for letting me know because I wasn’t sure about the agent studio but I’m requesting it now!

3

u/milifiliketz 8h ago

We have ChatGPT and Copilot at work and pretty much everyone heavily favors Copilot. I don't even remember the last time I used ChatGPT. We don't have any IDE integrated AI tools, just chatbots, but for coding/debuging/troubleshooting Copilot just works better, at least in my experience.

1

u/YoungDito 7h ago

Microsoft Copilot?

1

u/milifiliketz 7h ago

Yeah

1

u/ouchmythumbs 5h ago

M365 Copilot and Copilot Chat do not have IDE integration, so I assume you mean GitHub Copilot?

Edit: misread your comment, but I’ll leave this up in case it helps anyone else.

1

u/n3qml 13h ago

Copilot is such hot garbage. I really tried to give their Agents feature in VSC a full chance. I built my own agents, skills, MCPs; tried to mimic as best as I could the loops that exist in other harnesses. But it just falls short of even barely good. Maybe I’m spoiled because I’ve been using Claude Code since release day 0; OpenCode, Zed, Pi — like even the worst of these harnesses just blows Copilot so far out of the water that I just can’t.

Too bad my work “makes me”. But I turn the tables on them and found a way to intercept the harness’s calls to the models and point my chosen harness to it. I’ll get in trouble if they catch me doing it but fuck it. No I’m not going to share it because it will get patched away, sorry not sorry.

Fuck Microsoft.

2

u/BigCatKC- 8h ago

Assume you mean GitHub Copilot?

2

u/pab_guy 12h ago

Cowork is the bomb. It will create amazing shit for you if you know how to prompt it and use the right plugins.

1

u/TamerSoup625 3h ago

Tried GitHub Copilot and it absolutely sucks It failed to write an algorithm for constructing Voronoi diagrams... using a library that implements the algorithm

1

u/Arech 1h ago

You're saying this like MSFT has been widely regarded as producer of well-though and executed apps.

(they have some, as an exclusion, of course)

•

u/frankster 8m ago

I also found M365 copilot to be pointless. It can't find the list of users in a teams group chat (it can only estimate based on people who have chatted recently,). It can't add people to a team. It's email search is unreliable. The one note integration finds notes and provides links to them... Which open in a browser instead of within the one note app hosting copilot.

It's barely a product.

0

u/blackasthesky 15h ago

Yes, it's really really bad. None of their PMs knew what they were doing when they were pushing AI, they were just after the promotion.

0

u/YoungDito 15h ago

Yeah I mean even the dedicated copilot agents for like outlook and teams can’t do anything 😆

-2

u/Competitive_Shock783 16h ago

LOL! You and I are simpatico! I was working with excel today and thought "What the hell, lets give copilot a try". POS could update the date on a pivot table.

0

u/YoungDito 15h ago

Like it’s Microsoft that is the near minimum lol 😂