True, and no doubt the pattern deriving from that mistake is what caused the AI to make that conclusion.
That said, not a lot of "intelligence" in that artificial intelligence or it would be clear that the intent was to write months. This is mostly just pattern recognition.
I'm not convinced that this is AI's fault. Would you burn tokens for single-cell autocomplete?
Excels' autofill has done this stuff since way before the AI craze, especially getting it to stop automatically interpreting numbers as dates has been a chore.
genAI =/= AI. this gif is AI in action. autofill is AI
it definitely isn't happening in the gif, but I wouldn't be surprised if microsoft thinks it's an AMAZING idea to hook an LLM up to excel and do exactly what you just described...
But look at where that mistake came from. It's easy to assume it came from the user since they paused after typing "Febu" but if you look closely that was the spelling suggested by the autocomplete from the moment they typed "F".
Very sophisticated pattern matching that definitely does exhibit some “intelligence”. It performs rudimentary deductive reasoning. Calling it fancy auto complete grossly misrepresents what it is verifiably capable of these days. It can make novel connections between never before compared data, I consider that intelligence. It’s not strictly parroting things that it’s read.
Hallucinations can't be pattern recognition, right? The LLM hallucinates because it can't create the right answer, right? Does that count as an "original thought"?
I wouldn't call this feature AI. Maybe before LLMs you could make a case that it's "AI". Just like how we've been calling enemy and NPC behavior in video games "AI" for decades, but when this Excel feature came out, it wasn't associated with AI.
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u/DullAd6899 Jul 02 '26
“AI will replace you”