Yes. I once interviewed a developer who’s previous job was maintaining the .NET application that used an Excel sheet as the brain for decisions about where to drill for oil on the sea floor. No one understood what was in the Excel sheet. It was built by a geologist who was long gone. The engineering team understood the inputs and outputs. That’s all they needed to know.
Years ago when I worked for an engineering consulting company we had to work with a similarly complex, opaque Excel spreadsheet from General Electric modeling the operation of a nuclear power plant in exacting detail.
Same deal there -- the original author was a genius and was the only person who knew how it was set up or how it worked.
I think you’re misunderstanding me. This might be something somewhat useful, I don’t know, and I’m not judging it based on that.
What I’m saying is that if you really believed we were 2, maybe 3 years tops from AGI or the singularity or whatever you would spend 0 effort serving what already seems to be a domain that is already served by 3rd parties that are already using your models! An excel wrapper for an LLM isn’t exactly cutting edge AI research.
They’re desperate to find something that someone will pay a meaningful amount of money for that even remotely justifies their valuation and continued investment.
Yes. I once interviewed a developer who’s previous job was maintaining the .NET application that used an Excel sheet as the brain for decisions about where to drill for oil on the sea floor. No one understood what was in the Excel sheet. It was built by a geologist who was long gone. The engineering team understood the inputs and outputs. That’s all they needed to know.
Years ago when I worked for an engineering consulting company we had to work with a similarly complex, opaque Excel spreadsheet from General Electric modeling the operation of a nuclear power plant in exacting detail.
Same deal there -- the original author was a genius and was the only person who knew how it was set up or how it worked.
I think you’re misunderstanding me. This might be something somewhat useful, I don’t know, and I’m not judging it based on that.
What I’m saying is that if you really believed we were 2, maybe 3 years tops from AGI or the singularity or whatever you would spend 0 effort serving what already seems to be a domain that is already served by 3rd parties that are already using your models! An excel wrapper for an LLM isn’t exactly cutting edge AI research.
They’re desperate to find something that someone will pay a meaningful amount of money for that even remotely justifies their valuation and continued investment.
I spotted a custom dialog in an Excel spreadsheet in a medical context the other day, I was horrified.
Sic
This. I work in Pharma. Excel and faxes.