This will either result in a lot of people being able to sleep more, or an absolute avalanche of crap is about to be released upon society.

A lot of the people I graduated with spent their 20s making powerpoint and excel. There would be people with a master's in engineering getting phone calls at 1am, with an instruction to change the fonts on slide 75, or to slightly modify some calculation. Most of the real decision making was, funnily enough, not based on these documents. But it still meant people were working 100 hour weeks.

I could see this resulting in the same work being done in a few minutes. But I could also see it resulting in the MDs asking for 10x the number of slide decks.

When the word processor was first invented, people didn't end up printing less because of how easy it was to edit and view documents live — they printed more because of how little friction there was (compared to a typewriter) between making a change and pressing print.

I think we're going to see the same thing with document creation. Could LLMs help make a small number of high quality documents? Yes, with some coaching and planning from the user. But instead people will use them to quickly create a crappy document, get feedback that it's crappy, and then immediately create an only slightly less crappy doc.

10x as much useless work, guaranteed. Remind me in ten years :)

The global economy has been down the rabbit hole and through the looking glass into the land of the red queen as far as I’ve known.

“Now here you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place” as she says.

I fully believe any slack this creates will get gobbled up in competition in a few years.

the way it edits powerpoints is by launching a command line environment, and then editing the OOXML directly using command line tools. this takes several minutes to do even simple changes.

to me it seems miraculous that it even "sort of" works, but also it's not a reliable product yet. OOXML is very complex and the formatting can get mangled.

On the other hand, if you use LaTeX/Beamer slides, LLMs can reliably make a lot of formatting tweaks etc. and it is an actual time saver. But only weird academics use Beamer.

I agree with Simon Willison that this feature is really about writing code in a container, using that capability to edit PPT presentations as if they were markup is an odd thing to make the primary selling point.

I guess it will decrease the need for custom software. If this is reliable, excel will be "enough" for longer.

Finance?