I don't think they are opposite. We still don't let AI run anything we do. That being said, things have changed. 4 months ago I wouldn't touch the M365 Copilot thing if you paid me to, now it's basically the only AI I use professionally. Cowork changed the way we work, and I've previously spoken about how I think Microsoft sort of won the AI enterprise "war" by selling the tools and not the mode. If you'd asked me a year ago I would've been very anti AI in general. I got proven wrong. I do think it's going to be interesting to see where the EU goes with things though. Currently you can't use all features of Cowork as an example, because they are illegal in the EU. So you can't let it run your browser session for you as an example. I wonder how long that will last.

I still doubt we will ever give an AI access to run code on our systems directly though. In isolation, sure, but other than that.

This is a side note, but my personal favorite part of Cowork is that I can roll out our compliance policy to every developer as a Microsoft Teams app (no, that makes no sense to me either). So when they try to install some package that isn't pre-approved their Cowork agent won't let them and will instead explain how they might get approval. If they then continue to reference it, Cowork will even alert us.

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wolvoleo 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Yes cowork is the first part of copilot 365 that's actually useful, to me too. It is however paid separately per token which means you need the expensive 30$ subscription and pay tokens on top of that.

If you just get cowork directly through claude you do get generous usage within their 20$ subscription.

I have to use it through Microsoft too because of their lobbying our company but I don't think they won any war. They're just reselling other people's stuff. The integration with office is alright but I don't really rely on that. In my personal life I avoid them.

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reconnecting 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

What you're telling me now is that in the short period of 4 months, an American corporation took an employee of a company the EU relies on for critical matters from "wouldn't touch it if you paid me" to outsourcing thinking.

Well, I'm speechless.

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Quothling 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Are you purposely twisting things to fit a certain narrative?

If you really want to go into it, I've previously talked about how we used AI tools provided to us by one of our major investors who do so for all the companies they are invested into. These were also Anthropic and OpenAI models. The main difference is that Cowork has access to files on a users one drive (and that we get a lot more control over what goes into it).

	▲	reconnecting 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		This is the funny part, because I have nothing to twist. You work in the extreme opposite setup to mine. VC vs bootstrapped. LLMs vs hand-coded. High margins vs open-source. If you ever look at our codebase, you will see that there are very few code dependencies, and of course bringing in another as large as LLMs is not in scope. If you wish, we can always continue our exchange by email (mine is in hn profile).

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alsetmusic 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> What you're telling me now is that in the short period of 4 months

Not OP, but I opened the link to the comment and it was six months. I get why you're skeptical, and I think it's fair to point out. But that's sort of glaring when I opened the link to contextualize your comment.