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Preventing phrases? Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff took to his private X account final evening to criticize Microsoft’s AI assistant Copilot as “disappointing,” saying “It just doesn’t work, and it doesn’t deliver any level of accuracy,” earlier than in the end concluding “Copilot is more like Clippy 2.0,” with a shrug emoji.
“Clippy” after all is the favored nickname for Microsoft’s Clippit digital on-screen Phrase and Workplace conversational assistant that debuted in 1996. Whereas now appeared upon with some ironic fondness for its cute expressions and enormous eyes, within the mid Nineties when it premiered, it was shortly discovered by many customers to be extra annoying than useful, popping up whereas they tried to do duties on their Microsoft software program and providing unhelpful strategies.
Copilot — a text-based chatbot assistant powered by Microsoft accomplice and funding OpenAI’s GPT fashions — was initially designed for Microsoft’s Workplace 365 and debuted in March 2023. It later expanded to incorporate an internet and cellular app model as nicely (and was the brand new identify given to Microsoft’s GPT-powered Bing Chat). It was lately redesigned and upgraded to incorporate many new options resembling imaginative and prescient (watching and reacting to a consumer’s display exercise) and humanlike conversational voice enter and output.
A loaded critique
Benioff’s critique is after all loaded and inherently biased, coming as he does from a rival software program firm — Salesforce’s signature buyer relationship administration (CRM) software program competes instantly with Microsoft Dynamics 365, as does the Salesforce-owned Slack with Microsoft Groups — and each firms have spent the 2 years since OpenAI’s debut of ChatGPT launching numerous new AI options, assistants, functions, and instruments.
But curiously, Benioff, an early government to embrace to the facility and potential of AI — no less than publicly — has currently been criticizing the gen AI period extra broadly.
On Sunday, Benioff posted on X that he thought “much of AI’s current potential is simply oversold,” and that “AI isn’t yet curing cancer or solving climate change as pundits claim,” but offered no proof of those claims.
It’s a curious and contradictory tone for him to strike given he additionally lately instructed Quick Firm he has “never been more excited about anything at Salesforce, maybe in my career,” as Agentforce, his firm’s new enterprise AI agent builder instrument.
Clearly, the founder is attempting to string a nuanced line of argument right here — saying AI has potential for companies however that Microsoft’s implementation of it doesn’t work nicely or present sufficient worth — however that presumably, Salesforce’s implementation is superior.
We’ll see if clients purchase it. For now, a few of the “pundits” he could also be railing towards resembling public relations skilled Ed Zitron have already seized on a few of Benioff’s AI essential remarks as proof the professional gen AI narrative extra typically is beginning to flip.
