Microsoft Excel could be next to get an AI boost

Date:
Mon, 06 Feb 2023 11:41:40 +0000

Description:
With ChatGPT rolling out to some Microsoft software, the company is now designing its own AI assistants.

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A new paper has suggested Microsoft Excel could be the next product in its toolbox to get an AI assist, but it wont be ChatGPT.

The paper, co-authored by eight of the company's researchers, stresses the significance of spreadsheet software , which is used by billions of users, with Microsoft Excel is among the most popular if not the most popular.

A new piece of AI, dubbed FLAME, is expected to be substantially more efficient and cost-effective compared with other solutions that are already available, and its also designed with Excel-specific tasks in mind giving it more of an edge over multipurpose AI. FLAME AI in Excel

The paper describes FLAME as a T5-based model trained on Excel formulas; but because its a small language model, its set to be cheaper to train, making it more affordable for end users. Read more

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The researchers compare FLAME to Codex-Davinci, Codex-Cushman, and CodeT5, which use 175B, 12B, and 220M parameters respectively to train their language models, but claim it can outperform these larger models in 6 out of 10 settings. FLAME uses just 60M parameters.

The primary intention is to get FLAME to help Excel users with formulas, offering up autocomplete suggestions and even to repair malformed formulas.

Theres no word on when (or even if) this piece of kit will become generally available in Microsoft Excel, however given the companys recent announcement confirming a considerable investment in OpenAI, its likely that artificial intelligence will weave its way into a whole lot more Microsoft products
soon.

The company has already introduced some ChatGPT capabilities to Viva Sales , amid rumors that its set to embed the GPT-3.5 large language model into a number of its other products. These are the best online collaboration tools



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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/news/microsoft-excel-could-be-next-to-get-an-ai-boos t


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