1+2=12
12+3=15
seems legit
this post was submitted on 16 May 2026
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So it's JavaScript. Noted...
Also, working upward, 3+2=5, "1"+5="15".
I wonder which "inspired" path it chose.
Shouldnt it be 123 then
A single digit is a char but two digits are a string and can be transformed into an integer
JavaScript logic
no 1 and 2 are strings 3 is an integer m'kay?
Storytime. I tried to use copilot to get some rather convoluted dataset analyzed in Excel. Not a huge task, but basically I wanted it to count me the occurrences of certain values, grouped by that value. Of course that’s easy with Pivot, and there’s probably also some formula for that, but it wasn’t very urgent, so I figured I’d see what Copilot could do. Now of course I didn’t want to use that =COPILOT() formula, but instead asked Copilot to create me a formula to correctly count how often each value occurs. So it created this multiple lines long formula, which from first glance seemed plausible (though way overcomplicated). I asked it to insert this into cell F13. „Of course“, it said — and then proceeded to do nothing. Confronted with this, it tried again, and failed. After some asking why it didn’t just go that, it told me that this is not possible in Excel in Mac. I’d have to use the web version of Excel. WTF? Why doesn’t the fully featured version do this? Well, of course: Microsoft doesn’t like Apple too much. So I tried copy pasting the formula and failed. Some syntax error cropped up. I asked Copilot about this, and it came back with a typical „oh sorry, my bad, here is the correct formula“ and the same formula again. Of course this failed. And since I didn’t want to debug this stupid thing (the error message of course also didn’t give any indication what exactly could be wrong), I just created a Pivot and got my result in seconds.
Now this is only one of many experiences I had when trying to really use that 365 Copilot for anything useful. Maybe I should write a book about it. And then ask Copilot to write a book about it and put this into the epilogue.
I remember my final task before getting laid off from Coinbase was to use Copilot to write unit tests for a 70k-line Kubernetes deployer written in golang. Without fail, it would regularly give me unit tests checking whether .onclick() was working for a given function...in a Kubernetes deployer. I tried to report that to management and they told me that I was using it wrong and fired me.
Wow. I wish your story was more surprising.
It boggles my mind that people trust Coinbase with their money.
Upvote for the username. Also better luck in your future endeavors.
Top comment from the last time this was posted pointed out how the image is cropped on the left. We are most definitely looking at rows 11-14 and there are numbers above that are not being shown.
I just want them to remove the god awful copilot button that showed up in the corner on top of cells in my spreadsheet with no way to move or hide it. It’s not even on the ribbon anymore where I can ignore it. Fuckin’ pricks.
It's a lot simpler than that. =COPILOT() can only see cells provided in the second parameter, and the user didn't provide one. It's just giving you what a typical answer to "compute the sum of the numbers above" is.
In other words, they may as well have given it "make up a number"
... though with all the hallucinations, it would probably return "elephant" intermittently
It pains me to defend an AI feature, but this whole tweet is disingenuous and stupid. The documentation for =COPILOT() says a few things which are relevant to understand what we're seeing here:
- You're not supposed to use it for math
- It only has access to the parts of the spreadsheet you pass it as the second argument
In this case the user has not provided copilot any cells to look at, so they're just asking what the typical answer on the Internet is for the request "sum the numbers above". And the sum of numbers above things are apparently often 15.
Keep in mind that if you allow a user to make this mistake, people will DEFINITELY make this mistake. A lot.
And if that's true, just imagine something any more compex, that could get lost amid the rest of the slop for a long time
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Dont you just tell the AI to make no mistakes
That is true for a lot of things, particularly every AI feature ever.
.... You aren't supposed to use it for math.... In excel? What is the point?
People do all sorts of weird non-math stuff in Excel. The stated use-case for this feature is stuff that operates on text. Say for example you fill column A with quotes from your customers about your product. Then you can tell Copilot to provide a summary of each row in column B, and whether the sentiment is positive or negative in column C. You could aggregate the results as well.
There are better tools for that sort of thing, but a lot of people really love their Excel hammer, and they see nails everywhere.
But haven't the makers of Excel said in the past that you shouldn't use Excel for non-math stuff because that's not what it's designed for? Now their putting in a "tool" that's useless for math stuff?
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If it's "not supposed to be used for math" then it should pop a modal that says "I don't do math".
Big part of the problem with AI features is that way too many people believe they are silver bullet for everything and they are marketed like that.
Computer savvy people know better ways of doing math and can figure out that context is needed.
Overwhelming majority of people, including bosses and managers, are too lazy and ignorant to care about the points you mention.
This is true for every field: people knowledgeable in that field know that there are better ways to do it then AI and easily spot the errors AI makes. AI only looks good in fields you are ignorant about.
if you're not supposed to use it for math, maybe it shouldn't produce numbers/formulas.
The issue isn't about what it can and can't do, it's that it is CONSTANTLY attempting to step in and "fix" my spreadsheet in bizarrely inane ways. Why won't it give me the "shut up and stay the fuck out of my way" option? There is no option to remove or silence copilot. That damn thing follows my cursor like a ring wraith after Frodo. It has already fucked up more than one of my spreadsheets without asking or being asked. If I hadn't been paying attention, I might not have caught the absolutely bat shit insane edits it was making to simple and correct functions I'd already entered. No, copilot you don't know what I'm doing. Clippy was less intrusive.
The reason they have Copilot act without you requesting it is so they can show their investors Copilot is being used.
Thumbs up the bad and the good, with about 10% thumbs down randomly. Poison their data set.
It obviously added "A+1+2+3" and got 15 after looking up the typical value of A.
And it was still wrong
Assuming you are right, according to ascii A is 65 so it should be 71...
Im honestly struggling to figure out how it got 15. Yes I know it's just a fancy text prediction engine. Yes it doesn't think, it just calculates what is the most likely string to follow the previous one. But seriously 1+2+3 equaling 15 makes no sense... Wait holy shit... I got it
2+3 = 5
1 = 1
Now instead of adding them, imagine they are strings and concatenate them together (str) "1"+(str) "5" = "15"
It didn't consider any of the numbers, because the user didn't provide the context argument to the function.
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If people stopped trying to make it something it's not and built it as a proper tool, this is one of the few things AI is good for. It can proccess data quite well, or could. Because of all that's being shoved in the hallucinations are getting worse, but I've been able to use it to proccess data sets with very specific instructions. Saved me hours of tedious work.
But a way to organize and proccess data faster isn't exciting for investors so
How is this easier than just typing in sum(a1:a3)??
The point is not just to make typing easy, it's also to lower the skill barrier
Whenever I’m feeling suicidal, I remind myself that I have never had to use Excel
It doesn’t always work, but it often works
Edit: although, I did have a brief affair with Lotus 123 and Lotus Notes, back in the day
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