Where have you seen it being useful from a programming perspective? Personally I don't find it that helpful on a day to day basis. I.e. if I'm actually struggling with something, then it's because there isn't an 'accepted' way of making the thing work, so AI can't just figure it out by having access to lots of previous analogous issues.
In a slightly different vein, I have seen it being misapplied completely at quite large companies. Eg running neural networks on individual non-networked devices to try and predict failure/maintenance times. This was at a FTSE100.
But it's good for the sales engineers I suppose. 'So why should we buy this new model? The older one's still working fine'
Where have you found Github copilot to be useful Laz? Genuine question I am not being facetious.
A lot of the stuff in Github copilot has existed in Visual Studio for years. What IDEs do you predominantly use?
Seeing as so much of my work is trying to get two systems to play together who aren't really designed to play together these kinds of tools are never useful for me. Although I appreciate they make the majority of textbook style programming exercises seem trivial but google did that anyway....so....shrug
Laz I'm fairly convinced your obsession with 'deep' technology has something to do with your porn fascination but I don't want to go to far into the swamps of your subconscious.
Also presumably for your front end stuff AI helping you complete layouts etc but if you've got some kind of irritating javascript based problem AI will not be very helpful if you're trying to do something non-standard in a library that hasn't been set up to do that.
I'm just pointing to an example of something where AI will not help you in your front end work. I'm not saying it can't be useful
Do I wish it didn't exist? Only in the sense that it does represent a massive change as someone mentions above. And I can choose to either get on board or get run over.
Ultimately it is helpful. There have been a couple of times I have set out an impasse to AI and asked for it to recommend solutions and, to be fair, it recommended ideas that neither party had considered. I've just got to make sure it doesn't make me lazy.
Similarly, I can set out a scenario and ask for it to outline any risks I had not included, which helps me get over any lingering doubt that I have left anything out.
I've not tried any of the "Legal" AI but apparently the A&O stuff is half decent.
The median view of most AI developers and experts seems to be that it has roughly 20% chance of killing us all.
So tbh we really should be thinking about how to slow it down. Insert some control rods into the reactor asap.
Would I rather it didn’t exist at all? It’s a futile question tbh. Current systems are fine, so I’m not opposed to where we are. And I don’t think there’s anything I, or probably anyone, can do about it. But tbh I would rather we don’t advance them too fast. Maybe not at all tbh.
My view is that developing AGI is categorically different to all other forms of technical progress, which I’ve always wholeheartedly supported.
At some point we create something agentic with more intelligence than us and unless we get lucky that is going to end badly.
Where have you seen it being useful from a programming perspective? Personally I don't find it that helpful on a day to day basis. I.e. if I'm actually struggling with something, then it's because there isn't an 'accepted' way of making the thing work, so AI can't just figure it out by having access to lots of previous analogous issues.
It's very much in it's infancy, but practical day to day applications (for me) could be things like rewriting code in a different language to achieve a more efficient outcome (as I don't code, myself), quickly summarising information for a report, quick research pieces, brainstorming, etc. It will also help automate many processes around deployment of software.
The company I work for are doing a lot around trained AI bots/assistants for M365, especially Teams, so think similar functionality to the aforementioned Copilot in GitHub, but for Teams. But tailored toward specific industries and their respective datasets.
Yes deployment of software is always annoying...is it really doing any deductive reasoning for the deployment though or is it more that you are packaging a repeatable process and environment to deploy to?
Eg is it not effectively a batch script that runs in an environment and then prepares it for deployment?
A lot of what IDEs do in terms of helping you with deployment processes is taking work out of the terminal in terms of commands and putting it in buttons....we were doing it anyway before it was just a different process and for many things you still have to do it all in the terminal anyway....eg I hate all the github stuff they have now (except github projects i love github projects and use it for my own programming things and games and stuff). I still do basically all git work in git bash as I find it less buggy.
Your company sounds like it is doing some great stuff. I would be interested to see how the work towards cleaning people's datasets and transforming them goes.
It must be quite hard work trying to find 'standardized' and accepted formats for data in some industries....just because so many similar companies do things in such different ways and even within the same company different teams do stuff differently so setting up bespoke ETL tools seems always inevitable.
Your company sounds like it is doing some great stuff. I would be interested to see how the work towards cleaning people's datasets and transforming them goes.
A lot of our AI focus is within the legal sector, at present.
is it really doing any deductive reasoning for the deployment though or is it more that you are packaging a repeatable process and environment to deploy to?
I gather it will do, making the deployment more tailored to the environment it's being deployed to, eventually. Things like incorporating GDPR requirements, or industry-specific considerations into the process, best practices around data security where AI is being incorporated, and so on & on.
For the legal sector I guess it's less spreadsheets and databases and more reams and reams of documentation so you have hit and miss OCR stuff that then and PDF readers like...EEty? I seem to remember that's a library I have used in the past...Syncfusion has a nice PDF tool though....if you are working with a lot of Microsoft stuff (sounds like you are). Syncfusion is a very good tool I have found in the past.
Things like incorporating GDPR requirements, or industry-specific considerations into the process
Well yeah this is where I don't really know what I'm talking about. I've been forced to do those internal GDPR exams a million times and I always pass them but I still find a lot of GDPR stuff confusing sometimes in practical scenarios. That doesn't really sound like an application of AI though it sounds like you'd just tailor the software to the industry....but it's getting hard to define what 'actually' is AI anyway so...I'll stop rambling
At this stage I think it's fair to say there's not as much deductive reasoning as there will be in future applications, certainly in what we are using it for. It's still quite prescriptive in nature, but it's only just at the beginning of evolving, really and the pace of change is phenomenal. SharePoint Premium is going to be my particular area of interest.
I always found Sharepoint doesn't really know what it wants to be but happy to be corrected. How do you see it that your clients, lawyers, use sharepoint in an ideal world? I am used to working with engineers so there are many systems a bit more geared towards their workflows for making and changing CAD documentation etc....I don't know what the equivalent is for lawyers.
I actually did the 'programming in C#' courses and exams for the 'Sharepoint Developer' certification that Microsoft used to have....although they've scrapped them now (I wasn't working towards Sharepoint developer I was working towards applications developer certification). Now I just use the C# stuff mostly for Unity games projects and .NET Core stuff which is my go to framework for consultancy.
Ha, it can be many things to many people, but it's rarely used to it's full potential. Rarely even close. That's a big focus of what I do. Maximising ROI from M365 (especially SharePoint).
The thing is now, Teams is the hot new thing (just passed 320m global users) and every single 'Team' created comes with it's own SharePoint site as default (that's the document sharing/storage engine for Teams, along with OneDrive). So SharePoint is still going to play a crucial role going forward. SharePoint Premium is basically SharePoint Online with AI capabilities around content understanding, processing, and compliance, using content AI.
I'm currently using SP for a wide variety of applications. One such, a single, very large, public sector org (who are frequently in the news) to have their 7000 page Intranet on. But also document management, and governance, workflow, wider integration into Teams and M365. Lots of integration with PowerApps and PowerAutomate too (if those ring a bell!).
BTW for myself I am very much a Keep It Simple Stupid type of person. Eg for little consultancy projects or web apps or games I don't mess about with Jira etc or the Teams project management stuff I just use Github Projects and rely on git commit messages for a lot of my documentation and to find things within a developing project.
I find a lot of these tools Microsoft keeps introducing often get used and learned by people who then create little apps and empires that only they really understand and use (I think this is particularly bad with power apps - irritating little internet vandals running around building little power apps everywhere when they're not necessary).
But integrating all these things is often what keeps us employed so there we go.
Do lawyers have much use for sharepoint though? In my experience Engineers really don't. They like stuff like Vault and Windchill. I have written quite a few little customized pages and migration scripts for Windchill in the past.
I'd guess it'd be more beneficial for the admin side of the legal profession. Some law firms use it as a DMS but there are better DMS solutions if that's the sole requirement. But content AI in SP is enabling analysis and interaction that wasn't previously possible, i.e. document processing, annotation, content assembly, content query, accelerators, knowledge extraction, etc.
Again, early days for a lot of this stuff, but the rate of advancement is rapid. Even daily.
I can see how Microsoft could come out of nowhere with a lot of things that would just totally dominate a lot of companies' workflows if SharePoint gets some genuinely powerful features added so you might be hooking yourself to a winning horse.
Most companies will already have SharePoint installed anyway via their 365 subscriptions but it's probably underused or just used a lot by very few people and then ignored by many others. If it gets really souped up the migration is easy because it's already there.
It's a no-brainer for most companies. Instead of fannying around with custom built software from some startup that barely works with their in-house document management system and requires loads of fiddly and time consuming customisation.
Do they still make those little web part things for SharePoint? I never really understood why the HTML5 CSS and JavaScript and C# exams were part of the 'sharepoint developer' specialization that Microsoft had...there just always seemed to be faster ways of doing things inside SharePoint than writing custom code.
Is that how your company is adding AI widgets to SharePoint? Web parts?
Sort of similar business model to how Boyum make little add ons for SAP?
In SharePoint on-prem, yes. In SharePoint Online, mostly no.
No custom code in SharePoint Online, you can only develop via the CSOM, really. You can add still custom script to pages, with script editor web parts, but nothing custom in the back-end. It's much more SAAS in M365.
Is your company making like little external web apps alongside of sharepoint and then sharing AD credentials between them so they can do some kind of document or data analysis?
I guess that's how a company like what yours sounds like would have to work if they're going to make their own tools that they can then start to offer other customers?
I'm just wondering how you are plumbing together your bespoke AI stuff on top of sharepoint.
They can be Azure-based apps, yes. Or custom solutions that have to be packaged and deployed as apps/or indeed chatbots within M365, that you can add to Teams or SharePoint itself (via the App store), or PowerApps.
If you go into Teams and 'add an app' you can see the vast number already available, covering almost every bit of functionality or requirement going. Some will be custom, some Microsoft, lots 3rd party.
Hmmm, interesting I never saw this before....as I said I am more familiar with programming for engineers and a lot of their tooling is outside of the microsoft ecosystem because it's quite specialist. Like, not many day to day computer users need to build giant parametric CAD assemblies that can be animated and have working physics etc!
This is nice that they have kind of created an app store for Teams apps. I will be releasing a Unity game on the app store and play store soon and I'm also involved with a friend in something that he is making that is a bit more intense (literally getting a japanese publisher to build a sega genesis cartridge! (his idea not mine...also he's paying for it)).
Seems it's all javascript and C# as well for these Teams apps so I am fine. Now I just need to think of some little Teams apps to shill....
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Nope, it's the next industrial revolution.
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TDSB you work in software right?
Where have you seen it being useful from a programming perspective? Personally I don't find it that helpful on a day to day basis. I.e. if I'm actually struggling with something, then it's because there isn't an 'accepted' way of making the thing work, so AI can't just figure it out by having access to lots of previous analogous issues.
In a slightly different vein, I have seen it being misapplied completely at quite large companies. Eg running neural networks on individual non-networked devices to try and predict failure/maintenance times. This was at a FTSE100.
But it's good for the sales engineers I suppose. 'So why should we buy this new model? The older one's still working fine'
'This one has AI'
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No. Too curious which skills and traits will become valuable because of it.
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Do you have children Unwalt?
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No. I see it as a massive personal money-making opportunity
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Github copilot is amazing
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Evening Sir Woke. What's your take on a Eurovision-semi?
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Where have you found Github copilot to be useful Laz? Genuine question I am not being facetious.
A lot of the stuff in Github copilot has existed in Visual Studio for years. What IDEs do you predominantly use?
Seeing as so much of my work is trying to get two systems to play together who aren't really designed to play together these kinds of tools are never useful for me. Although I appreciate they make the majority of textbook style programming exercises seem trivial but google did that anyway....so....shrug
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I use it a lot for front end stuff. Less for the deep stuff m88 and I do mean deep
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Laz I'm fairly convinced your obsession with 'deep' technology has something to do with your porn fascination but I don't want to go to far into the swamps of your subconscious.
I'm worried I would never be the same again.
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Also presumably for your front end stuff AI helping you complete layouts etc but if you've got some kind of irritating javascript based problem AI will not be very helpful if you're trying to do something non-standard in a library that hasn't been set up to do that.
I'm just pointing to an example of something where AI will not help you in your front end work. I'm not saying it can't be useful
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Yes PS, I do.
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I think it is badly abused in academia and this will have a terrible impact on the quality of our future professionals
I think it will finally kill off a lot of creative lines of work
I hope it can be used to make huge leaps in scientific discovery
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Do I wish it didn't exist? Only in the sense that it does represent a massive change as someone mentions above. And I can choose to either get on board or get run over.
Ultimately it is helpful. There have been a couple of times I have set out an impasse to AI and asked for it to recommend solutions and, to be fair, it recommended ideas that neither party had considered. I've just got to make sure it doesn't make me lazy.
Similarly, I can set out a scenario and ask for it to outline any risks I had not included, which helps me get over any lingering doubt that I have left anything out.
I've not tried any of the "Legal" AI but apparently the A&O stuff is half decent.
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The median view of most AI developers and experts seems to be that it has roughly 20% chance of killing us all.
So tbh we really should be thinking about how to slow it down. Insert some control rods into the reactor asap.
Would I rather it didn’t exist at all? It’s a futile question tbh. Current systems are fine, so I’m not opposed to where we are. And I don’t think there’s anything I, or probably anyone, can do about it. But tbh I would rather we don’t advance them too fast. Maybe not at all tbh.
My view is that developing AGI is categorically different to all other forms of technical progress, which I’ve always wholeheartedly supported.
At some point we create something agentic with more intelligence than us and unless we get lucky that is going to end badly.
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16
It's very much in it's infancy, but practical day to day applications (for me) could be things like rewriting code in a different language to achieve a more efficient outcome (as I don't code, myself), quickly summarising information for a report, quick research pieces, brainstorming, etc. It will also help automate many processes around deployment of software.
The company I work for are doing a lot around trained AI bots/assistants for M365, especially Teams, so think similar functionality to the aforementioned Copilot in GitHub, but for Teams. But tailored toward specific industries and their respective datasets.
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Yes deployment of software is always annoying...is it really doing any deductive reasoning for the deployment though or is it more that you are packaging a repeatable process and environment to deploy to?
Eg is it not effectively a batch script that runs in an environment and then prepares it for deployment?
A lot of what IDEs do in terms of helping you with deployment processes is taking work out of the terminal in terms of commands and putting it in buttons....we were doing it anyway before it was just a different process and for many things you still have to do it all in the terminal anyway....eg I hate all the github stuff they have now (except github projects i love github projects and use it for my own programming things and games and stuff). I still do basically all git work in git bash as I find it less buggy.
Your company sounds like it is doing some great stuff. I would be interested to see how the work towards cleaning people's datasets and transforming them goes.
It must be quite hard work trying to find 'standardized' and accepted formats for data in some industries....just because so many similar companies do things in such different ways and even within the same company different teams do stuff differently so setting up bespoke ETL tools seems always inevitable.
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what kind of bed wetting idiot would “rather AI didn’t exist”
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A lot of our AI focus is within the legal sector, at present.
I gather it will do, making the deployment more tailored to the environment it's being deployed to, eventually. Things like incorporating GDPR requirements, or industry-specific considerations into the process, best practices around data security where AI is being incorporated, and so on & on.
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For the legal sector I guess it's less spreadsheets and databases and more reams and reams of documentation so you have hit and miss OCR stuff that then and PDF readers like...EEty? I seem to remember that's a library I have used in the past...Syncfusion has a nice PDF tool though....if you are working with a lot of Microsoft stuff (sounds like you are). Syncfusion is a very good tool I have found in the past.
Well yeah this is where I don't really know what I'm talking about. I've been forced to do those internal GDPR exams a million times and I always pass them but I still find a lot of GDPR stuff confusing sometimes in practical scenarios. That doesn't really sound like an application of AI though it sounds like you'd just tailor the software to the industry....but it's getting hard to define what 'actually' is AI anyway so...I'll stop rambling
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At this stage I think it's fair to say there's not as much deductive reasoning as there will be in future applications, certainly in what we are using it for. It's still quite prescriptive in nature, but it's only just at the beginning of evolving, really and the pace of change is phenomenal. SharePoint Premium is going to be my particular area of interest.
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Never even heard of Sharepoint premium....
I always found Sharepoint doesn't really know what it wants to be but happy to be corrected. How do you see it that your clients, lawyers, use sharepoint in an ideal world? I am used to working with engineers so there are many systems a bit more geared towards their workflows for making and changing CAD documentation etc....I don't know what the equivalent is for lawyers.
I actually did the 'programming in C#' courses and exams for the 'Sharepoint Developer' certification that Microsoft used to have....although they've scrapped them now (I wasn't working towards Sharepoint developer I was working towards applications developer certification). Now I just use the C# stuff mostly for Unity games projects and .NET Core stuff which is my go to framework for consultancy.
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Ha, it can be many things to many people, but it's rarely used to it's full potential. Rarely even close. That's a big focus of what I do. Maximising ROI from M365 (especially SharePoint).
The thing is now, Teams is the hot new thing (just passed 320m global users) and every single 'Team' created comes with it's own SharePoint site as default (that's the document sharing/storage engine for Teams, along with OneDrive). So SharePoint is still going to play a crucial role going forward. SharePoint Premium is basically SharePoint Online with AI capabilities around content understanding, processing, and compliance, using content AI.
I'm currently using SP for a wide variety of applications. One such, a single, very large, public sector org (who are frequently in the news) to have their 7000 page Intranet on. But also document management, and governance, workflow, wider integration into Teams and M365. Lots of integration with PowerApps and PowerAutomate too (if those ring a bell!).
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BTW for myself I am very much a Keep It Simple Stupid type of person. Eg for little consultancy projects or web apps or games I don't mess about with Jira etc or the Teams project management stuff I just use Github Projects and rely on git commit messages for a lot of my documentation and to find things within a developing project.
I find a lot of these tools Microsoft keeps introducing often get used and learned by people who then create little apps and empires that only they really understand and use (I think this is particularly bad with power apps - irritating little internet vandals running around building little power apps everywhere when they're not necessary).
But integrating all these things is often what keeps us employed so there we go.
Do lawyers have much use for sharepoint though? In my experience Engineers really don't. They like stuff like Vault and Windchill. I have written quite a few little customized pages and migration scripts for Windchill in the past.
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I'd guess it'd be more beneficial for the admin side of the legal profession. Some law firms use it as a DMS but there are better DMS solutions if that's the sole requirement. But content AI in SP is enabling analysis and interaction that wasn't previously possible, i.e. document processing, annotation, content assembly, content query, accelerators, knowledge extraction, etc.
Again, early days for a lot of this stuff, but the rate of advancement is rapid. Even daily.
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It’s not the intelligence that’s artificial
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I can see how Microsoft could come out of nowhere with a lot of things that would just totally dominate a lot of companies' workflows if SharePoint gets some genuinely powerful features added so you might be hooking yourself to a winning horse.
Most companies will already have SharePoint installed anyway via their 365 subscriptions but it's probably underused or just used a lot by very few people and then ignored by many others. If it gets really souped up the migration is easy because it's already there.
It's a no-brainer for most companies. Instead of fannying around with custom built software from some startup that barely works with their in-house document management system and requires loads of fiddly and time consuming customisation.
Do they still make those little web part things for SharePoint? I never really understood why the HTML5 CSS and JavaScript and C# exams were part of the 'sharepoint developer' specialization that Microsoft had...there just always seemed to be faster ways of doing things inside SharePoint than writing custom code.
Is that how your company is adding AI widgets to SharePoint? Web parts?
Sort of similar business model to how Boyum make little add ons for SAP?
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In SharePoint on-prem, yes. In SharePoint Online, mostly no.
No custom code in SharePoint Online, you can only develop via the CSOM, really. You can add still custom script to pages, with script editor web parts, but nothing custom in the back-end. It's much more SAAS in M365.
We do widgets, bots, all sorts really.
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What are 'widgets' in this context TDSB?
Is your company making like little external web apps alongside of sharepoint and then sharing AD credentials between them so they can do some kind of document or data analysis?
I guess that's how a company like what yours sounds like would have to work if they're going to make their own tools that they can then start to offer other customers?
I'm just wondering how you are plumbing together your bespoke AI stuff on top of sharepoint.
I don't really know much about bots tbh
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No because without it we wouldn't have this
https://youtu.be/yuoFsi2iIi0?si=QmsVBrg_nRZRWIqX
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They can be Azure-based apps, yes. Or custom solutions that have to be packaged and deployed as apps/or indeed chatbots within M365, that you can add to Teams or SharePoint itself (via the App store), or PowerApps.
If you go into Teams and 'add an app' you can see the vast number already available, covering almost every bit of functionality or requirement going. Some will be custom, some Microsoft, lots 3rd party.
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Hmmm, interesting I never saw this before....as I said I am more familiar with programming for engineers and a lot of their tooling is outside of the microsoft ecosystem because it's quite specialist. Like, not many day to day computer users need to build giant parametric CAD assemblies that can be animated and have working physics etc!
This is nice that they have kind of created an app store for Teams apps. I will be releasing a Unity game on the app store and play store soon and I'm also involved with a friend in something that he is making that is a bit more intense (literally getting a japanese publisher to build a sega genesis cartridge! (his idea not mine...also he's paying for it)).
Seems it's all javascript and C# as well for these Teams apps so I am fine. Now I just need to think of some little Teams apps to shill....
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