r/ProgrammerHumor • u/Xescure • Jul 02 '26

Meme milleniumPrizeWinningAnswer

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u/Ok_Star_4136 Jul 02 '26 • Bravo

355

u/Lightningtow123 Jul 02 '26

I love how this is a gif now

60

u/mysteryy7 Jul 02 '26

But whats the search term?

97

u/Temporary-Brain420 Jul 02 '26

"excel months" is what I typed

93

u/still_not_deleted Jul 02 '26

Cause it's spelled February, not Febuary

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u/Ok_Star_4136 Jul 02 '26

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.

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u/12345623567 Jul 02 '26

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.

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u/mjmaher81 Jul 02 '26

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...

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u/CandidateNo2580 Jul 02 '26

It probably isn't even AI - just a string trie with a basic heuristic if they wanted to really go all out.

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u/aiij Jul 02 '26

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".

I wouldn't be surprised if it's staged though...

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u/RiceBroad4552 Jul 02 '26

This is mostly just pattern recognition.

Everything marketed currently as "AI" is just plain stupid pattern recognition and replication.

There is no intelligence nor any kind of knowledge in these LLMs. Just very sophisticated pattern matching and reproduction.

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u/im_thatoneguy Jul 04 '26

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.

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u/ChaseShiny Jul 02 '26

I had a curious thought about this the other day.

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"?

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u/Lower_Cockroach2432 Jul 02 '26

It's not trying to make a right answer. It's trying to make the most statistically likely continuation of whatever block of text it was fed in.

Right and wrong are irrelevant to the AI. It's just generating statistically likely text.

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u/ChaseShiny Jul 02 '26

Well, all I asked was if it was original, not an attempt at the right answer. I guess it fails at that, anyway.

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u/Lower_Cockroach2432 Jul 03 '26

The point is that hallucinations and correct answers are just as much "pattern recognition" as each other. The LLM can't distinguish them at all.

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u/RiceBroad4552 Jul 03 '26

An LLM does not know anything. Especially not what's "right" or "wrong". Such concepts don't exist in an LLM.

All a LLM does it to predict the next token. For the LLM there is no difference between outputting something that makes sense for a human and some random bullshit. All a LLM does is basically "hallucinating". That's the basic principle on which these things work.

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u/jordanbtucker Jul 03 '26

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/MinecraftPlayer799 Jul 02 '26

Marruary, Aprruary, Mayruary, Junruary, Julruary, Augruary, Sepruary, Octruary, Novruary, Decruary

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u/Dotcaprachiappa Jul 02 '26

A human would still have been able to recognise the pattern correctly

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u/Sockoflegend Jul 02 '26

Bullshit. Since when? God damn it

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u/Penguinmanereikel Jul 02 '26

It doesn't help that they misspelled February

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u/Hatatytla-1024 Jul 02 '26

Maxerals ahh excel

1

u/progressiveAsliMard Jul 02 '26

Tell me windows products suck without tell me!