Microsoft researchers adding AI to Excel

Microsoft’s spreadsheet program, Excel, is getting an upgrade! The clever people at Microsoft are adding AI technology to make it even better. This will help people make and keep their formulas in Excel more easily. It’s called FLAME and it’s a small language model created by Microsoft’s own software developers.

Big language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT are very popular right now. These models are made by training them on a lot of text so they can predict what to say based on what they’re asked. The issue with these big models is that they take a lot of resources to make and use.

Training them requires a lot of data and money, and using them also takes up a lot of computer power. For example, it took 248 super powerful computer graphics cards and 24 days to train a model called Incoder 6.7B on 159GB of computer code.

Lambda Labs has calculated that making GPT-3, a big language model with 175 billion parameters, costs around 4.6 million dollars using powerful computer chips called Tesla V100. FLAME, on the other hand, is much smaller with only 60 million parameters and was specifically made just for Excel formulas. The researchers didn’t say what FLAME stands for, but it’s probably short for “First LAnguage Model for Excel.”

 

Even though it’s small, FLAME does a better job than bigger language models made for completing computer code. This includes models like CodeT5, Codex-Cushman, and Codex-Davinci that have 220 million, 12 billion, and 175 billion parameters respectively.

FLAME was created to help people make and fix formulas in Excel, and to help with something called syntax reconstruction which involves taking out extra characters from formulas so the model can understand and put them back together better.

 

In the future, if FLAME is added to Excel, it could fix formulas like this:

=IF('Jan 17'!B2="", 'Feb 17'!B2="", 'Mar 17'!B2="", 'Apr 17'!B2="", yes)

And turn it into this, using its ability to make corrections:

=IF(AND('Jan 17'!B2="", 'Feb 17'!B2="", 'Mar 17'!B2="", 'Apr 17'!B2=""), "yes", "no")

Because FLAME needs much less training data than other big language models like Codex, Microsoft should find it more affordable to use when it’s ready.

For people who have to work with big spreadsheets that have a lot of formulas, FLAME looks like it could be really helpful.

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Google is hosting an event on February 8th which will focus on search and AI

Google has announced an upcoming live streaming event on YouTube called ‘Live from Paris,’ which will focus on “Search, Maps and beyond.”

The company wants to make it easier for users to discover and interact with information. During the earnings call yesterday, Pichai stated that Google’s plans for AI chat system, LaMDA, will be available in the coming weeks and months. Additionally, Google intends to bring these language models to businesses, developers and Alphabet’s internal operations. It is speculated that this event may give more details about its plans for a ChatGPT rival.

At Google’s I/O event, which is taking place on February 8th at 8:30 AM ET and will be livestreamed on YouTube, the company may show off its AI tools as a response to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

As Microsoft has invested in ChatGPT and plans to integrate it into its Bing search engine, Google is hoping to stay ahead of any criticism that it is lagging behind OpenAI in the natural language chatbot race. However, the event may instead focus solely on Search, Maps, Lens, Shopping and Translate — core products used by many people.

Metaverse Division Reports Q4 Operating Loss of $4.279B

Meta Reality Labs, the VR division of Facebook, reported a fourth-quarter operating loss of $4.279 billion and revenues of $727 million for the quarter.

This was the company’s largest loss yet for its metaverse division, but stock prices are going up in after-hours trading as the results were better than expected. The company launched the Meta Quest Pro, an enterprise high-end version of its headset, for $1,500 during the quarter.

Meta is investing in the metaverse, the universe of virtual worlds that are all interconnected. They raised the prices of their Meta Quest 2 VR headsets by $100 each and expect Reality Labs losses to continue into 2023. They are investing in the Meta Quest 3 family for consumers, the Meta Quest Pro for enterprises, and other long-term areas that aren’t being described yet. Those areas include new computing platforms, glasses and software.

Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta is shifting its focus to developing a software and social platform, while also taking a $4.2 billion restructuring charge related to the termination of some office-space leases, redesigns of datacenter projects, and severance for employees laid off in Q4. Another $1 billion in restructuring costs will come in 2023.

In Q4, Meta’s net income was $4.652 billion with revenue of $32.165 billion and 2.96 billion daily active users. This is a decrease in net income from the previous year of $10.285 billion and an increase in daily active users of 5%. Monthly active users were 3.74 billion on December 31, up 4%.

After the close of trading, Meta’s stock price rose 17.75% to $180.30 per share. Although the company did not meet its net income expectations, it surpassed analysts’ predictions for revenue and other key metrics. Specifically, revenues totaled $31.53 billion (versus the expected $30.86 billion), Facebook daily active users were 2 billion (compared to the anticipated 1.98 billion) and family of apps daily active users totaled 2.96 billion (in comparison to the forecasted 2.92 billion).

At the end of Q4, meta had 86,400 employees, 11,000 of whom were kept on payroll due to severance costs. These individuals will no longer be counted going forward. In a call, CFO Susan Li stated that the macroeconomic environment continues to cause uncertainty and instability in advertising demand.

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