I’m amazed that it can’t figure out that it should just defer arithmetic to like, all the functions that Excel already has, rather than trying to LLM its way to the correct answer.
If you could ask it to do something in Excel that you don’t know how to do, and it did it using Excel functions and maybe explained it to you, that would be useful, but as it is now, that thing isn’t trustworthy at all.
They straight up tell you to not use it for math. It’s for analyzing a bunch of text you shoved into a spreadsheet, say for example customer testimonials or something. Making it work most of the time would actually be worse, because then people would be more inclined to use it instead of writing the formulas to do it right.
No AI truly knows what it’s doing. You can give it things to call out to, but you can’t know for sure if it will use them, and definitely can’t know it will pass it the right parameters.
How is looking at ascii values supposed to help when someone prompts it with “calculate the sum of the numbers above”? The whole point is that no matter what kind of prescreening you add to an LLM, people will write prompts which are missed by the screening.
There are no values from the spreadsheet in this case. “The numbers above” are just text to the LLM.
They could of course require that optional cell or cell range parameter after the prompt, but that would eliminate some use cases. “Generate some text”, one of the stated use cases in the help text, doesn’t reference any cells.
Also, numbers in Excel aren’t necessarily as clear cut as you make it seem. Excel famously thinks everything is a date, and how number-y must a number be before it isn’t okay?
Not to mention there are other things to do with numbers which don’t require arithmetic. What if someone wants to have Excel translate 34 to “thirty-four”? Or have Excel generate a poem 34 words long? Or whatever else nonsense people might try.
I’m amazed that it can’t figure out that it should just defer arithmetic to like, all the functions that Excel already has, rather than trying to LLM its way to the correct answer.
If you could ask it to do something in Excel that you don’t know how to do, and it did it using Excel functions and maybe explained it to you, that would be useful, but as it is now, that thing isn’t trustworthy at all.
They straight up tell you to not use it for math. It’s for analyzing a bunch of text you shoved into a spreadsheet, say for example customer testimonials or something. Making it work most of the time would actually be worse, because then people would be more inclined to use it instead of writing the formulas to do it right.
Shouldn’t excelAI know when it’s doing math?
No AI truly knows what it’s doing. You can give it things to call out to, but you can’t know for sure if it will use them, and definitely can’t know it will pass it the right parameters.
It can recognise the difference between text(>63) and numbers (<58). Even if it’s just a preprocessing screening.
How is looking at ascii values supposed to help when someone prompts it with “calculate the sum of the numbers above”? The whole point is that no matter what kind of prescreening you add to an LLM, people will write prompts which are missed by the screening.
Because you can check if values input from the spreadsheet are non-numeric.
There are no values from the spreadsheet in this case. “The numbers above” are just text to the LLM.
They could of course require that optional cell or cell range parameter after the prompt, but that would eliminate some use cases. “Generate some text”, one of the stated use cases in the help text, doesn’t reference any cells.
Also, numbers in Excel aren’t necessarily as clear cut as you make it seem. Excel famously thinks everything is a date, and how number-y must a number be before it isn’t okay?
Not to mention there are other things to do with numbers which don’t require arithmetic. What if someone wants to have Excel translate 34 to “thirty-four”? Or have Excel generate a poem 34 words long? Or whatever else nonsense people might try.
What hill are you trying to die on here? In the picture, the numbers input are clearly 1,2 and 3.
No. It is trivial to identify if the input is text or value. You don’t need an LMM to do that.
That’s only interpreting data entry. Date values are stored in cells as doubles.
Yes these are the use cases where an LLM would add some (questionable) value.
Lol more features for people abusing Excel and trying to treat it like a database