Go on, bring on the FLAMEs
Sooner or later, everything ends up in Microsoft Excel.
The 37-year-old spreadsheet has been used to run Doom and Pac-Man, stop-motion animation, a turn-based role playing game, chess, and a neural network, among other things.
Excel’s latest trick comes courtesy of Microsoft’s own software developers: «FLAME: A small language model for spreadsheet formulas.»
It’s detailed in a preprint paper from Microsoft researchers Harshit Joshi, Abishai Ebenezer, José Cambronero, Sumit Gulwani, Aditya Kanade, Vu Le, Ivan Radiček, and Gust Verbruggen. The paper describes an assistive AI system called FLAME. It’s a small language model that can improve the creation and maintenance of Excel formulas.
Large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT are all the rage at the moment. These are statistical models trained on vast amounts of text that can predict a likely output based on a text prompt input.
