Microsoft 365 on the Web, applications for tool-using AI (and people)

Microsoft has moved its core Microsoft 365 applications -- Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote -- to the Web, where reduced-capability versions are available for free.

The Altair 8800 kit (source): 

Microsoft 365 generates billions of dollars of revenue each year. Why offer a free version online?  Collaboration and competition with Google are possible answers, but my guess is that AI will use these Microsoft 365 applications to create and manipulate documents, spreadsheets, presentations, emails, and other information for users.

My first professional job was at IBM, where I programmed unit record machines by inserting wires into control panels. I've experienced four significant computing paradigm shifts since that time. First, I learned to keypunch instructions for stored-program computers into card decks that I handed to an operator who added my program to a queue waiting to be run on a mainframe computer -- batch processing. 

Some years later, I typed a short Fortran program at an experimental Quicktran terminal at IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, New York. Time-sharing was an obvious game-changing paradigm shift. 

The next one came when I picked up a copy of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics magazine at the Savon Drug Store in Venice, California, and read about the MITS Altair 8800 computer kit. Personal computers were another game changer -- I could now own my own tools, and I became a self-employed consultant a few years later. 

My fourth epiphany came at an Interop Conference in San Francisco when I typed a DIR command into a computer in Texas, and the output displayed as fast as if it were on my desktop. The Internet was revolutionary. 

An ironic image (Source). 

For my dissertation, I wrote and tested a conversational AI program for multivariate data analysis, and at that time, artificial neural nets were toys, so I was dismissive of today's AI until April, 2024, when I uploaded a photograph I had taken of a homeless man sleeping on a bus bench with a real estate ad, and Claude.ai recognized the irony in the image. I was instantly convinced that conversational neural-net AI was another paradigm-changer. 

Is AI's ability to use programs a fifth? Let me give a simple example in which I gave ChatGPT a task that required using Microsoft Excel. 

China is working on three satellite constellations for Internet access. Qianfan is one of those constellations, and I was interested in the sources of its funding. I could have done some Internet searches to gather data and entered it into an Excel spreadsheet to present it. Gathering the data would have required knowledge of the field and considerable time, and to summarize and present it, I would have had to know how to use Excel.

I began by asking ChatGPT to give me a percentage breakdown of the ownership of the Qianfan constellation, and it responded with values for the Shanghai Government (60%), National Government (25%), and private capital (15%). I asked if it had used Excel to produce that answer, and it said it was so simple that it had not bothered to use Excel.

Next, I repeated my request for the shares of Qiabfan investors, but told it to use Excel. It reported the same three results, but added confidence intervals, basis/interpretation comments, and key reported inputs on it's own.

Note that this is a truncated image to fit the page. The actual spreadsheet is here.

It also added a pie chart showing the three sources of investment, but shoehorning it into a spreadsheet left a large space between the title and the pie, and it used a very small font for the legend. The colors were also ugly, and the blue and green did not contrast.

The AI used Excel to add some meaningful content on its own initiative, but it had no sense of visual design. This information was relevant and could be included in a document, but manual graphic design would be required.

I'm tempted to add "AI using Microsoft 365 on the Web applications" to my epiphanie list -- batch processing, time-sharing, personal computers, and the Internet, but I will wait until I see more of these and other programs being used by AI before I decide whether or not to do so.