[zacksiri]

The problem described in this post has nothing to do with LLMs. It has everything to do with work culture and bureaucracy. Rules and laws that don't make sense remain because changing it requires time, energy and effort that most people in companies have either tried and failed or don't care enough to make a change.

This is one example of the "horseless carriage" AI solutions. I've begun questioning further that actually we're going into a generation where a lot of the things we are doing now are not even necessary.

I'll give you one more example. The whole "Office" stack of ["Word", "Excel", "Powerpoint"] can also go away. But we still use it because change is hard.

Answer me this question. In the near future if we could have LLMs that can traverse to massive amount of data why do we need to make excel sheets anymore? Will we as a society continue to make excel spreadsheets because we want the insights the sheet provides or do we make excel sheets to make excel sheets.

The current generation of LLM products I find are horseless carriages. Why would you need agents to make spreadsheets when you should just be able to ask the agent to give you answers you are looking for from the spreadsheet.

[mmmllm]

LLMs are not able to replace Excel in their current state. See this simple accounting test: https://accounting.penrose.com/ - errors compound over time. This is the case even with small datasets. For massive corporate datasets it's useless (try asking Gemini to summarise a Google Sheet).

Until there is a fix for this (not clear there ever will be), Excel will be necessary.

Word will probably become a different, more collaborative product. Notion-esque.

Powerpoint...I would love if it disappeared but ultimately if you have to present something, you need to have done the work.

[jonfw]

> Answer me this question. In the near future if we could have LLMs that can traverse to massive amount of data why do we need to make excel sheets anymore?

A couple of related questions- if airplanes can fly themselves with auto-pilot, why do we need steering yolks? If I have a dishwasher- why do I still keep sponges and dish soap next to my sink?

The technology is nowhere near being reliable enough that we can eschew traditional means of interacting with data. That doesn't prevent the technology from being massively useful.

[ModernMech]

> Why would you need agents to make spreadsheets when you should just be able to ask the agent to give you answers you are looking for from the spreadsheet.

Because it seems to be a fundamental property of LLMs that they just make things up all the time. It's better to make the LLM a natural interface to a formal query language which will return hard answers with fidelity from the database.

[pixl97]

>why do we need to make excel sheets anymore?

Think of them as an artifact of a snapshot of time. You can sign them and file them away, perform backups on them, and use that document the intent at that time.

Audits don't work so well on LLMs