this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2025
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Excel doesn't hallucinate.
Well, they’ve added copilot to it now right? So I reckon it probably does
Excel is fundamentally different to LLMs because it doesn't generate anything. It just calculates stuff in a table, every calculation is traceable and you can backtrack to the source of each input.
LLMs calculate the next most likely token based on what they were trained on and it's impossible to tell exactly where it got the info from. LLMs don't even know that themselves, you can ask for a source but 90% of the time they just generate a non-working link in return. It has to be that way or else LLMs could only reproduce tokens that were in their training set verbatim, like a giant database search engine.
The Excel function "flash fill" is an example of excel "guessing" the user intent and automatically creating output based on a few examples.
It is probably still "traceable", though.
It does now! Because what everybody needed was unreliable calculations in their math software!