7 ms·

Spreadsheets are all you need

1493 points by evanmays 3y ago

ivtest 2y ago
I've downloaded the sheet. If I click on Calculate Sheet it doesn't do anything. Is the Sheet working?
mckn1ght 3y ago
Brilliant idea/URL. It’s often true though. So many things I think “I could make an app for that” I wind up just using a spreadsheet for. At least it helps me explore the use cases more deeply for when I’d want to actually take it to the next level. I hung out with a friend while they solved Advent of Code challenges in Excel, that was a trip to watch.
- 77pt77 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - topherclay 3y ago
    omg you can't just ask someone if they are Japanese.
    - 77pt77 3y ago
      Work trope in Japan is that everything is done in excel. Even when it makes no sense. You even have artists doing painting in excel. https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2017/12/tatsuo-horiuchi-excel-artist/ https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2017/12/tatsuo-horiuchi-excel... And why exactly can't I ask that question?
      - extraduder_ire 3y ago
        I believe it's a reference to this 2004 movie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_Girls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_Girls The original quote being "Oh my god Karen, you can’t just ask people why they’re white."
    - meindnoch 3y ago
      Yes, you can.
    - culopatin 3y ago
      How else would you ask someone if they are?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- puppymaster 3y ago
  it's like all the current gaga over RAG and vector dbs when the real ones just use numpy to prototype
- ianand 3y ago
  > Brilliant idea/URL. Thanks! There's a truth to the name beyond just the play on the transformers paper. Definitely have thought about how many SaaS apps could be a spreadsheet and vice versa and often use them to create mini-apps (often via apps script).
- greensh 3y ago
  XKCD 2180, https://xkcd.com/2180/ https://xkcd.com/2180/
  - ianand 3y ago
    LOL that’s totally me. Thanks for posting.
- asabla 3y ago
  > I hung out with a friend while they solved Advent of Code challenges in Excel, that was a trip to watch. That sounds wild. Do you or your friend have anything to share about this?
  - throwaway2037 3y ago
    Related: Excel as ESports parody... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xubbVvKbUfY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xubbVvKbUfY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICp2-EUKQAI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICp2-EUKQAI
    - elbear 3y ago
      Well, the real thing exists as well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDGdPE_C9u8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDGdPE_C9u8
- pipes 3y ago
  One of my biggest weakness as a developer is that I can barely use excel. It's really embarrassing, especially since I've moved to a financial firm. Do you have any recommendations for becoming semi competent with it?
  - svara 3y ago
    Try to do something slightly complicated and have GPT4 explain how to do it efficiently in Excel! That's how I do it and it works great. I've gained a new appreciation for Excel.
  - darkr 3y ago
    Try stepping into a management role for a while, ideally one in which you have lots of dealings with less technical parts of a business. Even if it's not for you, at least you'll have gained some insights into that side of things, and more importantly - lots of real world exposure to spreadsheets!
  - ccppurcell 3y ago
    Just an idea but how would you advise someone learning programming/a new programming language? Probably you'd say: build something with it. So same goes for excel. Try to hook up a spreadsheet to some database, have it update automatically, have drop down lists that populate automatically from the database (e.g. have a "country" drop down and automatically populate a "region" drop down based on the choice of country) and so on. You need some BASIC and SQL for this but not much
    - IggleSniggle 3y ago
      Oh wow. Different poster same problem. Your comment made me realize that it's the "but I don't wanna!" attitude that I already know how to push through when it comes to language learning, just disguised differently. I'm still not sure that I wanna, tho...
      - DrDeadCrash 3y ago
        You gotta need it ...
- makeitdouble 3y ago
  I wonder at what point we stop calling them "spreadsheets" though. You mention Excel, and a bunch of us do it Google Sheets, but at this point it's not about sheets of data anymore and more about the interface and runtime, and we have full applications running in it. I remember a colleague running API tests inside his Excel sheet to more easily check for the different parameter combinations, but telling everyone he was still using Postman just to avoid discussing it.
  - thelittleone 3y ago
    I think it still becomes about the data. If using a sheet as an app particularly with sharepoint, data integrity and merging multiple users often becomes a problem. I run one for a financial services firm and often get "excel couldnt merge changes, want to save a copy or discard". We tested this out, 2 users make editing different sheets on a single excel workbook hosted on sharepoint and excel can't figure out how to merge. If someone is on VPN and connection drops this also often occurs.
    - DonHopkins 3y ago
      This is why for all its faults and limitations, Google Sheets is astronomically better than Excel for collaboration. There is one single source of truth, will full change history and undo-redo of the entire spreadsheet or individual elements, plus comments and chat.
  - wil421 3y ago
    You can feed postman a CSV to test parameters with. You can also do it on the CLI with Newman.
    - makeitdouble 3y ago
      Once you've decided to go with Excel it becomes pretty different from just feeding an array of values. You can autogenerate the combinations applying rules on what to avoid, fuzzy the values, get the result of an API transform it and feed it to another API etc. I'm not recommending any of this, but it can go as far as you want...
- ramses0 3y ago
  Check out "Google AppSheets". I've only scratched the surface while investigating other stuff but it's basically "drag-and-drop mobile GUI builder w/ sheets as a backend". If it were 2005 it would SLAY so much code. As it is, it seems really useful but the outcome seems a bit generic for modern tastes.
  - wycy 3y ago
    This seems quite hidden. Googling "google appsheets" results in "did you mean 'google sheets'?" and showing only results for google sheets unless you specifically then request AppSheets. It sounds cool, but I'd hate to rely on it since Google will probably shut it down.
    - iLoveOncall 3y ago
      Seems to be because the actual name is AppSheet and not "Google AppSheet" (even though it is mentioned in this way on their website in some places). Requesting just "AppSheet" gives the right result.
    - rqtwteye 3y ago
      I am not using them so it should be ok for now. Once I start using them it’s almost guaranteed that they will shut down that service.
  - greenie_beans 3y ago
    love appsheets, very powerful.
- yreg 3y ago
  Our company used to run completely on Google spreadsheets (a lot of it was written by the CEO). It worked, but at some point, it became a convoluted unmaintainable mess. First, we partially switched to Airtable, but soon abandoned it in favour of our own internal node/python tools. The company is now a lot larger and the tools are more robust/capable/clean now, but at the same time, they are much less flexible than the old spreadsheets.
  - throwaway2037 3y ago
    Why is this downvoted? Many Wall Street fixed income trading desks were the same before 2010. What you wrote is true for many different types of businesses. A huge amount of sales (customer management) tools are written in Excel/VBA. They work well. It is a great platform.
  - rqtwteye 3y ago
    “ they are much less flexible than the old spreadsheets.” I have seen that several times while I was a consultant. People run their stuff on spreadsheets. It’s a big mess but things get done . IT comes in and starts producing “professional” systems. Months of requirements gathering, then they deliver something. It’s not 100% right so people need to write tickets. IT may or may not make the changes. If they make a change it takes forever. People still need to do their job so they go back to spreadsheets.
- skipants 3y ago
  I'm confused... are you just commenting on the name of the website itself or the content? The content itself is about demonstrating how an LLM/Neural net works using a spreadsheet and is a play on the title "Attention is All You Need". It has nothing to do with using a spreadsheet for most of your use cases.
  - bunderbunder 3y ago
    And the author's comments on the difficulty of doing matrix multiplication in Excel suggest that he doesn't _actually_ believe that spreadsheets are all you need.
rokhayakebe 3y ago
Maybe purchase sayn.ai. Saayn.ai is unvailable.
- ianand 3y ago
  I'm a bonehead. I did buy saayn.ai but forgot to redirect it. Fixed now. Thanks for pointing it out.
  - KMnO4 3y ago
    I'm impressed by your investment into this. That's already a couple hundreds dollars (per year) on just the domains.
    - ianand 3y ago
      I try to look at it as motivation to stay committed. Like spreadsheets, domain names are a bit of an obsession for me. One of the other AI side projects I'm working on is a CustomGPT to help come up with domain names (https://niftynamer.com https://niftynamer.com) so I don't have to come-up-with-another-unwieldy-long-domain-name.again.
godzillabrennus 3y ago
Harper Reed said this at an 1871 event after Obama got his second term.
wsc981 3y ago
Awesome stuff. The introduction video on the page is very nice indeed to get a basic idea on the inner working of the Excel sheet.
matmulbro 3y ago
[flagged]
jrockway 3y ago
An AI company going for investment banks as customers, eh? Pretty smart idea!
snehesht 3y ago
Spreadsheet link https://github.com/ianand/spreadsheets-are-all-you-need/releases/tag/v0.6.0 https://github.com/ianand/spreadsheets-are-all-you-need/rele...
- brnt 3y ago
  I'm not a big Excel user, but I see errors that I get when I type in English function names while using a non-English version of Excel. Is it correct that functions (and thus this xlsb file) are not portable to other language versions of Excel?
  - c-linkage 3y ago
    It's been my experience that Excel spreadsheets are not transferable from one locale to another. Maybe there is a "culture-invariant" version of a spreadsheet but I haven't found it.
    - ianand 3y ago
      Oh man. Was not aware. That's a bummer. Have logged it as something to look into https://github.com/ianand/spreadsheets-are-all-you-need/issues/3 https://github.com/ianand/spreadsheets-are-all-you-need/issu... It's another reason to potentially port this thing to the browser one day... https://github.com/ianand/spreadsheets-are-all-you-need/issues/2 https://github.com/ianand/spreadsheets-are-all-you-need/issu...
      - brnt 3y ago
        Even the CSV export of Excel sets the separator based on locale, rendering them hard to use in international setting. I work at a European statistics office, and although there's SDMX, it's not under Save-as in Excel.
  - qsdf38100 3y ago
    They are portable, but the displayed function names are translated depending on the local. Same as comma vs dots.
intalentive 3y ago
Jeremy Howard has been using spreadsheets to teach NNs for years. Instructive and intuitive.
- ianand 3y ago
  Author here. Yes, Jeremy Howard and fast.ai was one of the inspirations for this! I'd actually be curious what he thinks of the project if he ever sees it.
  - jph00 3y ago
    He thinks it's really amazingly cool! :D I'm so happy to hear that I had some part to play in inspiring such a marvellous project.
    - ianand 3y ago
      Oh wow!! Thanks!!
      - Whiteshadow12 3y ago
        The beauty of HN is interactions like this.
        prakhartiwari0 3y ago
        Saw this for the first time, it's awesome, I love this place. I started coming here recently as a curious teenager :)
- hinkley 3y ago
  Reminds me of Standup Maths using colored spreadsheet cells to paint an image.
throwaway14356 3y ago
sentient spreadsheets, i don't think ill be able to sleep now.
- thomashop 3y ago
  sentient spreadsheets. i love it. can I use that as my next band name?
xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
Spreadsheet, tensor... same difference.
ianand 3y ago
Creator here. Thanks for posting this! Happy to answer questions or take suggestions and hope it helps folks better understand LLMs. Next video will be on embeddings and hopefully done soon-ish.
- okokwhatever 3y ago
  We need more people like you. Thank you.
- anhner 3y ago
  Thank you so much for doing these videos, I learned a lot today. You have a talent for teaching! If you don't mind me asking, what is your background?
  - ianand 3y ago
    Happy to help and thanks! Do let me know how the material could be better. Always looking to improve it. To answer your question: EECS Major in college; 20 years of engineering and product management experience. I have given a few technical talks at conferences and I do enjoy the process of explaining things though it takes a surprising amount of work. When I went to school ironically neural nets were the one thing they didn't cover in the intro to AI courses. I've basically learned modern AI from just filling my own curiosity over the years through online resources on nights and weekends. Learned a lot from Jeremy Howard's Fast.ai and Andrej Karpathy's stuff just like everyone else. I really wanted to know how every step of GPT worked, kind of like how you learn Computer Architecture in college: you learn how CPUs work in principle starting with circuits. Then I got a crazy idea the whole model could fit in a spreadsheet because well I just really like spreadsheets. Went down a 2-3 month rabbit hole in my non-existent sparetime to make it work.
    - anhner 3y ago
      The passion and curiosity you have for the topic are palpable in the videos. Thank you again for also sharing with us your exploration into this learning endeavor.
    - 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
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decafninja 3y ago
Classic scenario in legacy finance tech: the hotshot trader or investment banker shakes his fist furiously demanding to be given back his Excel spreadsheets and the entire tech department be fired.
- denimnerd42 3y ago
  regulators would like a word.
  - michaelcampbell 3y ago
    Not any more; they're overworked and underpaid and have little to no authority in our new reality.
brcmthrowaway 3y ago
Why can't a spreadsheet implement GPT-3 or GPT-4?
- stareatgoats 3y ago
  I find this visualization is useful for showcasing the difference between the different model generations: https://bbycroft.net/llm https://bbycroft.net/llm . The difference in scale is massive. It was discussed here some time ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38505211 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38505211
- itomato 3y ago
  This one is 1.2 GB in binary format and only handles 10 tokens.
MichaelZuo 3y ago
> Aside from the minuscule context length, it also lacks the instruction tuning and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) that turn a large language model into a chatbot. Is RLHF even strictly necessary?
- ianand 3y ago
  Strictly necessary? Maybe not. I wrote that before URIAL [1][2]. I actually haven't tried URIAL in GPT2 small but I need to give it a whirl. Might be too small a model to work? Even if URIAL works with GPT2 small, the really small context length in the Excel file as currently implemented will make it hard to leverage. I've considered a more flexible implementation to support a longer context length (e.g. using Macros to build the layout of the sheet) but have prioritized the teaching videos first. [1] https://allenai.github.io/re-align/index.html https://allenai.github.io/re-align/index.html [2] Summary https://twitter.com/intuitmachine/status/1732089266883141856 https://twitter.com/intuitmachine/status/1732089266883141856
  - warkdarrior 3y ago
    > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39700256 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39700256 Holy color use, Batman! Someone take the crayons away from that web designer.
- littlestymaar 3y ago
  By default it's just going to be a text completion model, you want an additional round of training to make it behave like a chatbot. I guess you could probably get away with just fine-tuning on chatbot discussions, but everybody uses RLHF so I guess it must be much more efficient for that.
cellinaabram 3y ago
[dead]
Prcmaker 3y ago
Cool, the modern equivalent of 1-800-i-really-enjoy-carpeting.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
russellbeattie 3y ago
Breakout inside Google Calendar, an LLM inside Excel... What's next, a VR environment using Slack?
jdhiievvcej 3y ago
[dead]
nxobject 3y ago
Now we wait for a GPU-accelerated Excel calculation engine to close the loop.
- tombert 3y ago
  I had a coworker who had the idea of having a system that automatically compiling xlsx files to Apache Spark, so that you could have the easy interface of Excel while having the processing power of Spark to crunch bigger data sets. He actually quit the company to build it; I should find out what came of that.
  - LtdJorge 3y ago
    Well, there are spreadsheet backends using Apache Arrow for storage. You could use something like pola.rs or Arrow DataFusion + Arrow Ballista for distributed processing of the dataset.
    - tombert 3y ago
      Wait really? Which spreadsheets? I want to play with this!
      - breckognize 3y ago
        rowzero.io
arh5451 3y ago
Super cool stuff!
keybits 3y ago
> What about Google Sheets? > This project actually started on Google Sheets but the full 124M model was too big and switched to Excel. I’m still exploring ways to make this work in Google Sheets but it is unlikely to fit into a single file as it can with Excel. I wonder if it would work in https://rowzero.io/home https://rowzero.io/home ?
- breckognize 3y ago
  Founder of Row Zero here. We can handle it. We can scale your workbook to more memory/cores if the defaults aren't enough.
macrolime 3y ago
Any way to try it without an Office 365 subscription?
- Alifatisk 3y ago
  I think Office for web is free
  - ianand 3y ago
    Sadly I do not believe it will work in office for web due to size limits. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/cloud-storage-partner-program/faq/file-sizes https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/cloud-storag... Interestingly it could fit within Powerpoint for the web's limits (my guess is that's intended for images). I have considered a pure browser implementation https://github.com/ianand/spreadsheets-are-all-you-need/issues/2 https://github.com/ianand/spreadsheets-are-all-you-need/issu...
emmelaich 3y ago
Related? I was copy'n'pasting a few chars from one column from to another in gsheets. Gsheets intuited that I wanted to do this multiple times and offered this formula: > =RIGHT(A7,LEN(A7) - (FIND(CHAR(160),SUBSTITUTE(A7," ",CHAR(160),2))))
- sebastiennight 3y ago
  Wait... this... outputs the right-hand part of a cell in column A that follows the second space character in the string? How is that related to anything? Was it, at least, the correct formula for your need?
  - emmelaich 3y ago
    I presume it was the AI/ML part watching me doing the manual stuff and automating it, which is cool. Yes it was correct. It gave me 43h0m from "08 Jan 43h0m". Obviously over a column. I was able to adjust that to give me time durations.
taco-hands 3y ago
This is a great project! Just forwarded to 7 people to help them work through LLMs. Kudos.
jhanoncomm 3y ago
Damn why didn’t I think of that! Well done. And I wonder if in memory spreadsheets are similar to (and as efficient as) Pytorch Tensors anyway!
ponector 3y ago
It is truly amazing! Funny thing is that excel can do such thing but cannot replace dates within the sheet. For example on Windows in Office 2021 if I want to replace text cell which has value 2023-10-10 with new value 2023-10-11 I have only two options as the result: 10/11/2023 or 45210.
enahs-sf 3y ago
worked with Ishan back in the day at Moovweb and he is truly a genius and had ideas way ahead of their time when it came to the web!
- ianand 3y ago
  Thanks for the kind words. DM or email to reconnect!
throw0101d 3y ago
Related to strange things running in spreadsheets, if you want to see how a 16-bit CPU works, Inkbox has created one in a spreadsheet: * https://github.com/InkboxSoftware/excelCPU https://github.com/InkboxSoftware/excelCPU * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rg7xvTJ8SU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rg7xvTJ8SU A twenty-four instruction assembly language is also provided.
- kitd 3y ago
  Reminds me of way back when I wrote a simple 8086 assembler in Lotus 123. It even worked for simple uses.
  - DonHopkins 3y ago
    Lotus 123 would have been more popular with programmers if it were named Lotus 012.
- dmux 3y ago
  It's since changed, but for a while the band [Portugal. The Man]'s website was just a Google Sheet! https://web.archive.org/web/20230831003431/https://www.portugaltheman.com/?frontpage=true https://web.archive.org/web/20230831003431/https://www.portu...
tombert 3y ago
I occasionally need to loan people money, and usually they need to pay me back in multiple payments, sometimes over several months. Being a proper geek, my first inclination was to build a web app to keep track of that and so the people I am loaning cash to can also view their balance, but I realized that would involve maintaining state and login creds and a bunch of other variables I haven’t even considered, and maintaining this app would become a second, unpaid job. Then I thought “I could just use a Google sheet and share it”, which is what I ended up doing. It’s easy to set permissions, I don’t have to worry about hosting, I can have it do any amount of arithmetic and light programming that I might need, as well as being automatic and reactive as I add information. It will be slower than something I would write in C obviously, but realistically for something involving budgeting the time savings will be on the order of milliseconds. I love spreadsheets. They provide a gateway to programming for non-programmers, and they provide a low-effort means of playing with data.
- ishtanbul 3y ago
  Its not an unpaid job. Presumably you are charging interest. You just dont have the scale of a bank to make money changing anything close to market rates.
  - tombert 3y ago
    These are family members and/or in-laws, I'm not charging interest to them, so if you count inflation it's actually costing me money. So it would absolutely be a second unpaid job, but I'll admit that I didn't specify why.
- LtdJorge 3y ago
  I think you told your experience based on the "spreadsheets are all you need" title. I don't know if you know this, but it's a play on the "Attention Is All You Need" 2017 paper by Google which introduces transformers, the building block of LLMs.
  - LtdJorge 3y ago
    Now I noticed it does say so at the bottom of the page...
thunfischtoast 3y ago
Jokes on you, my Excel regularily thinks that two cells are not equal, despite both of them having exactly the same value and type (also no trailing spaces or these things). Copy and pasting it around sometimes solves the problem, but it never is apparent to me why that happens.
- tombert 3y ago
  Shot in the dark, but could this be some kind of IEEE floating point rounding shenanigans? Never had that issue in excel specifically, but I’ve certainly had that issue in C when trying to compare two floats that should be equal.
- airstrike 3y ago
  another shot in the dark but it could be different data types. some numbers can get stored as text when you import them. you can try wrapping your operands in VALUE() or TEXT() formulas accordingly other than that, I agree with the other poster and the only issue I can think of is due to having a different number of digits after the decimal point causing some rounding error when comparing floats
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
krunck 3y ago
Doesn't work in LibreOffice. Doesn't work with web Excel(too big).
mrfakename 3y ago
Wow! Impressive. How did they manage to fit GPT-2 in a spreadsheet? A question for the author: will it be open sourced?
- bunderbunder 3y ago
  It's GPT-2 Small, which is only ~125 million parameters. That's big, but it's not out of reach for modern versions of Excel. The final spreadsheet is a 1.25GB file. There's a GitHub link on the page: https://github.com/ianand/spreadsheets-are-all-you-need https://github.com/ianand/spreadsheets-are-all-you-need
  - ianand 3y ago
    What @bunderbunder said. ^^^
low_tech_punk 3y ago
Spreadsheet is the grandfather dataframe
analog31 3y ago
Now instead of "it's just curve fitting" I can tell my friends "it's just a spreadsheet."
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
diracs_stache 3y ago
Turns out folks are solving PDEs in excel: https://sie.scholasticahq.com/article/4654-spreadsheet-implementation-of-numerical-and-analytical-solutions-to-some-classical-partial-differential-equations/attachment/13946.pdf https://sie.scholasticahq.com/article/4654-spreadsheet-imple... (i knew about FFTs and special functions , but this looks fun/interesting)
onemoresoop 3y ago
Tried the prompt "Mike is hungry and wants to eat some" and the predicted next token is "body". Is that how bad gpt-2 was?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
kirill5pol 3y ago
The OG deep learning Excel: https://www.deepexcel.net/ https://www.deepexcel.net/
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- dimatura 3y ago
  Haha, I'm one of the authors, although most of the credit goes to the other author (David Fouhey). Despite being in the form of a joke, this sheet is actually functional, for anyone wondering. Like the one in this post, it's inference only, but for a CNN instead of a transformer. I think someone actually made an excel CNN with backpropagation as well.
horrysith 3y ago
[dead]
wandynn 3y ago
The content on the web page is directly converted into Excel. I enter a Propmt and there is no return value.
Pokerface777 3y ago
Why wasn't that a link to a .xls file from the spreadsheet sharing network (/s)? (in other news, SQL is all you need, sometimes.)
wslh 3y ago
Could we summarize that spreadsheets are one of the best practical representations (UX/UI wise) and integration tech for databases? From the technological architecture point of view, don't we should separate Spreadsheets = UX/UI + DAG (directed acyclic graph) + Database + Integrations ?

1493 points by evanmays 3y ago

I've downloaded the sheet. If I click on Calculate Sheet it doesn't do anything. Is the Sheet working?

Brilliant idea/URL. It’s often true though. So many things I think “I could make an app for that” I wind up just using a spreadsheet for. At least it helps me explore the use cases more deeply for when I’d want to actually take it to the next level. I hung out with a friend while they solved Advent of Code challenges in Excel, that was a trip to watch.

77pt77 3y ago
[flagged]
- topherclay 3y ago
  omg you can't just ask someone if they are Japanese.
  - 77pt77 3y ago
    Work trope in Japan is that everything is done in excel. Even when it makes no sense. You even have artists doing painting in excel. https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2017/12/tatsuo-horiuchi-excel-artist/ https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2017/12/tatsuo-horiuchi-excel... And why exactly can't I ask that question?
    - extraduder_ire 3y ago
      I believe it's a reference to this 2004 movie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_Girls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_Girls The original quote being "Oh my god Karen, you can’t just ask people why they’re white."
  - meindnoch 3y ago
    Yes, you can.
  - culopatin 3y ago
    How else would you ask someone if they are?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
puppymaster 3y ago
it's like all the current gaga over RAG and vector dbs when the real ones just use numpy to prototype
ianand 3y ago
> Brilliant idea/URL. Thanks! There's a truth to the name beyond just the play on the transformers paper. Definitely have thought about how many SaaS apps could be a spreadsheet and vice versa and often use them to create mini-apps (often via apps script).
greensh 3y ago
XKCD 2180, https://xkcd.com/2180/ https://xkcd.com/2180/
- ianand 3y ago
  LOL that’s totally me. Thanks for posting.
asabla 3y ago
> I hung out with a friend while they solved Advent of Code challenges in Excel, that was a trip to watch. That sounds wild. Do you or your friend have anything to share about this?
- throwaway2037 3y ago
  Related: Excel as ESports parody... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xubbVvKbUfY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xubbVvKbUfY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICp2-EUKQAI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICp2-EUKQAI
  - elbear 3y ago
    Well, the real thing exists as well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDGdPE_C9u8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDGdPE_C9u8
pipes 3y ago
One of my biggest weakness as a developer is that I can barely use excel. It's really embarrassing, especially since I've moved to a financial firm. Do you have any recommendations for becoming semi competent with it?
- svara 3y ago
  Try to do something slightly complicated and have GPT4 explain how to do it efficiently in Excel! That's how I do it and it works great. I've gained a new appreciation for Excel.
- darkr 3y ago
  Try stepping into a management role for a while, ideally one in which you have lots of dealings with less technical parts of a business. Even if it's not for you, at least you'll have gained some insights into that side of things, and more importantly - lots of real world exposure to spreadsheets!
- ccppurcell 3y ago
  Just an idea but how would you advise someone learning programming/a new programming language? Probably you'd say: build something with it. So same goes for excel. Try to hook up a spreadsheet to some database, have it update automatically, have drop down lists that populate automatically from the database (e.g. have a "country" drop down and automatically populate a "region" drop down based on the choice of country) and so on. You need some BASIC and SQL for this but not much
  - IggleSniggle 3y ago
    Oh wow. Different poster same problem. Your comment made me realize that it's the "but I don't wanna!" attitude that I already know how to push through when it comes to language learning, just disguised differently. I'm still not sure that I wanna, tho...
    - DrDeadCrash 3y ago
      You gotta need it ...
makeitdouble 3y ago
I wonder at what point we stop calling them "spreadsheets" though. You mention Excel, and a bunch of us do it Google Sheets, but at this point it's not about sheets of data anymore and more about the interface and runtime, and we have full applications running in it. I remember a colleague running API tests inside his Excel sheet to more easily check for the different parameter combinations, but telling everyone he was still using Postman just to avoid discussing it.
- thelittleone 3y ago
  I think it still becomes about the data. If using a sheet as an app particularly with sharepoint, data integrity and merging multiple users often becomes a problem. I run one for a financial services firm and often get "excel couldnt merge changes, want to save a copy or discard". We tested this out, 2 users make editing different sheets on a single excel workbook hosted on sharepoint and excel can't figure out how to merge. If someone is on VPN and connection drops this also often occurs.
  - DonHopkins 3y ago
    This is why for all its faults and limitations, Google Sheets is astronomically better than Excel for collaboration. There is one single source of truth, will full change history and undo-redo of the entire spreadsheet or individual elements, plus comments and chat.
- wil421 3y ago
  You can feed postman a CSV to test parameters with. You can also do it on the CLI with Newman.
  - makeitdouble 3y ago
    Once you've decided to go with Excel it becomes pretty different from just feeding an array of values. You can autogenerate the combinations applying rules on what to avoid, fuzzy the values, get the result of an API transform it and feed it to another API etc. I'm not recommending any of this, but it can go as far as you want...
ramses0 3y ago
Check out "Google AppSheets". I've only scratched the surface while investigating other stuff but it's basically "drag-and-drop mobile GUI builder w/ sheets as a backend". If it were 2005 it would SLAY so much code. As it is, it seems really useful but the outcome seems a bit generic for modern tastes.
- wycy 3y ago
  This seems quite hidden. Googling "google appsheets" results in "did you mean 'google sheets'?" and showing only results for google sheets unless you specifically then request AppSheets. It sounds cool, but I'd hate to rely on it since Google will probably shut it down.
  - iLoveOncall 3y ago
    Seems to be because the actual name is AppSheet and not "Google AppSheet" (even though it is mentioned in this way on their website in some places). Requesting just "AppSheet" gives the right result.
  - rqtwteye 3y ago
    I am not using them so it should be ok for now. Once I start using them it’s almost guaranteed that they will shut down that service.
- greenie_beans 3y ago
  love appsheets, very powerful.
yreg 3y ago
Our company used to run completely on Google spreadsheets (a lot of it was written by the CEO). It worked, but at some point, it became a convoluted unmaintainable mess. First, we partially switched to Airtable, but soon abandoned it in favour of our own internal node/python tools. The company is now a lot larger and the tools are more robust/capable/clean now, but at the same time, they are much less flexible than the old spreadsheets.
- throwaway2037 3y ago
  Why is this downvoted? Many Wall Street fixed income trading desks were the same before 2010. What you wrote is true for many different types of businesses. A huge amount of sales (customer management) tools are written in Excel/VBA. They work well. It is a great platform.
- rqtwteye 3y ago
  “ they are much less flexible than the old spreadsheets.” I have seen that several times while I was a consultant. People run their stuff on spreadsheets. It’s a big mess but things get done . IT comes in and starts producing “professional” systems. Months of requirements gathering, then they deliver something. It’s not 100% right so people need to write tickets. IT may or may not make the changes. If they make a change it takes forever. People still need to do their job so they go back to spreadsheets.
skipants 3y ago
I'm confused... are you just commenting on the name of the website itself or the content? The content itself is about demonstrating how an LLM/Neural net works using a spreadsheet and is a play on the title "Attention is All You Need". It has nothing to do with using a spreadsheet for most of your use cases.
- bunderbunder 3y ago
  And the author's comments on the difficulty of doing matrix multiplication in Excel suggest that he doesn't _actually_ believe that spreadsheets are all you need.

rokhayakebe 3y ago

Maybe purchase sayn.ai. Saayn.ai is unvailable.

ianand 3y ago
I'm a bonehead. I did buy saayn.ai but forgot to redirect it. Fixed now. Thanks for pointing it out.
- KMnO4 3y ago
  I'm impressed by your investment into this. That's already a couple hundreds dollars (per year) on just the domains.
  - ianand 3y ago
    I try to look at it as motivation to stay committed. Like spreadsheets, domain names are a bit of an obsession for me. One of the other AI side projects I'm working on is a CustomGPT to help come up with domain names (https://niftynamer.com https://niftynamer.com) so I don't have to come-up-with-another-unwieldy-long-domain-name.again.

godzillabrennus 3y ago

Harper Reed said this at an 1871 event after Obama got his second term.

wsc981 3y ago

Awesome stuff. The introduction video on the page is very nice indeed to get a basic idea on the inner working of the Excel sheet.

matmulbro 3y ago

[flagged]

jrockway 3y ago

An AI company going for investment banks as customers, eh? Pretty smart idea!

snehesht 3y ago

Spreadsheet link https://github.com/ianand/spreadsheets-are-all-you-need/releases/tag/v0.6.0 https://github.com/ianand/spreadsheets-are-all-you-need/rele...

brnt 3y ago
I'm not a big Excel user, but I see errors that I get when I type in English function names while using a non-English version of Excel. Is it correct that functions (and thus this xlsb file) are not portable to other language versions of Excel?
- c-linkage 3y ago
  It's been my experience that Excel spreadsheets are not transferable from one locale to another. Maybe there is a "culture-invariant" version of a spreadsheet but I haven't found it.
  - ianand 3y ago
    Oh man. Was not aware. That's a bummer. Have logged it as something to look into https://github.com/ianand/spreadsheets-are-all-you-need/issues/3 https://github.com/ianand/spreadsheets-are-all-you-need/issu... It's another reason to potentially port this thing to the browser one day... https://github.com/ianand/spreadsheets-are-all-you-need/issues/2 https://github.com/ianand/spreadsheets-are-all-you-need/issu...
    - brnt 3y ago
      Even the CSV export of Excel sets the separator based on locale, rendering them hard to use in international setting. I work at a European statistics office, and although there's SDMX, it's not under Save-as in Excel.
- qsdf38100 3y ago
  They are portable, but the displayed function names are translated depending on the local. Same as comma vs dots.

intalentive 3y ago

Jeremy Howard has been using spreadsheets to teach NNs for years. Instructive and intuitive.

ianand 3y ago
Author here. Yes, Jeremy Howard and fast.ai was one of the inspirations for this! I'd actually be curious what he thinks of the project if he ever sees it.
- jph00 3y ago
  He thinks it's really amazingly cool! :D I'm so happy to hear that I had some part to play in inspiring such a marvellous project.
  - ianand 3y ago
    Oh wow!! Thanks!!
    - Whiteshadow12 3y ago
      The beauty of HN is interactions like this.
      - prakhartiwari0 3y ago
        Saw this for the first time, it's awesome, I love this place. I started coming here recently as a curious teenager :)
hinkley 3y ago
Reminds me of Standup Maths using colored spreadsheet cells to paint an image.

throwaway14356 3y ago

sentient spreadsheets, i don't think ill be able to sleep now.

thomashop 3y ago
sentient spreadsheets. i love it. can I use that as my next band name?

xyzzy_plugh 3y ago

Spreadsheet, tensor... same difference.

ianand 3y ago

Creator here. Thanks for posting this! Happy to answer questions or take suggestions and hope it helps folks better understand LLMs. Next video will be on embeddings and hopefully done soon-ish.

okokwhatever 3y ago
We need more people like you. Thank you.
anhner 3y ago
Thank you so much for doing these videos, I learned a lot today. You have a talent for teaching! If you don't mind me asking, what is your background?
- ianand 3y ago
  Happy to help and thanks! Do let me know how the material could be better. Always looking to improve it. To answer your question: EECS Major in college; 20 years of engineering and product management experience. I have given a few technical talks at conferences and I do enjoy the process of explaining things though it takes a surprising amount of work. When I went to school ironically neural nets were the one thing they didn't cover in the intro to AI courses. I've basically learned modern AI from just filling my own curiosity over the years through online resources on nights and weekends. Learned a lot from Jeremy Howard's Fast.ai and Andrej Karpathy's stuff just like everyone else. I really wanted to know how every step of GPT worked, kind of like how you learn Computer Architecture in college: you learn how CPUs work in principle starting with circuits. Then I got a crazy idea the whole model could fit in a spreadsheet because well I just really like spreadsheets. Went down a 2-3 month rabbit hole in my non-existent sparetime to make it work.
  - anhner 3y ago
    The passion and curiosity you have for the topic are palpable in the videos. Thank you again for also sharing with us your exploration into this learning endeavor.
  - 3y ago

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decafninja 3y ago

Classic scenario in legacy finance tech: the hotshot trader or investment banker shakes his fist furiously demanding to be given back his Excel spreadsheets and the entire tech department be fired.

denimnerd42 3y ago
regulators would like a word.
- michaelcampbell 3y ago
  Not any more; they're overworked and underpaid and have little to no authority in our new reality.

brcmthrowaway 3y ago

Why can't a spreadsheet implement GPT-3 or GPT-4?

stareatgoats 3y ago
I find this visualization is useful for showcasing the difference between the different model generations: https://bbycroft.net/llm https://bbycroft.net/llm . The difference in scale is massive. It was discussed here some time ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38505211 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38505211
itomato 3y ago
This one is 1.2 GB in binary format and only handles 10 tokens.

MichaelZuo 3y ago

> Aside from the minuscule context length, it also lacks the instruction tuning and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) that turn a large language model into a chatbot. Is RLHF even strictly necessary?

ianand 3y ago
Strictly necessary? Maybe not. I wrote that before URIAL [1][2]. I actually haven't tried URIAL in GPT2 small but I need to give it a whirl. Might be too small a model to work? Even if URIAL works with GPT2 small, the really small context length in the Excel file as currently implemented will make it hard to leverage. I've considered a more flexible implementation to support a longer context length (e.g. using Macros to build the layout of the sheet) but have prioritized the teaching videos first. [1] https://allenai.github.io/re-align/index.html https://allenai.github.io/re-align/index.html [2] Summary https://twitter.com/intuitmachine/status/1732089266883141856 https://twitter.com/intuitmachine/status/1732089266883141856
- warkdarrior 3y ago
  > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39700256 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39700256 Holy color use, Batman! Someone take the crayons away from that web designer.
littlestymaar 3y ago
By default it's just going to be a text completion model, you want an additional round of training to make it behave like a chatbot. I guess you could probably get away with just fine-tuning on chatbot discussions, but everybody uses RLHF so I guess it must be much more efficient for that.

cellinaabram 3y ago

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Prcmaker 3y ago

Cool, the modern equivalent of 1-800-i-really-enjoy-carpeting.

deleted 3y ago

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russellbeattie 3y ago

Breakout inside Google Calendar, an LLM inside Excel... What's next, a VR environment using Slack?

jdhiievvcej 3y ago

[dead]

nxobject 3y ago

Now we wait for a GPU-accelerated Excel calculation engine to close the loop.

tombert 3y ago
I had a coworker who had the idea of having a system that automatically compiling xlsx files to Apache Spark, so that you could have the easy interface of Excel while having the processing power of Spark to crunch bigger data sets. He actually quit the company to build it; I should find out what came of that.
- LtdJorge 3y ago
  Well, there are spreadsheet backends using Apache Arrow for storage. You could use something like pola.rs or Arrow DataFusion + Arrow Ballista for distributed processing of the dataset.
  - tombert 3y ago
    Wait really? Which spreadsheets? I want to play with this!
    - breckognize 3y ago
      rowzero.io

arh5451 3y ago

Super cool stuff!

keybits 3y ago

> What about Google Sheets? > This project actually started on Google Sheets but the full 124M model was too big and switched to Excel. I’m still exploring ways to make this work in Google Sheets but it is unlikely to fit into a single file as it can with Excel. I wonder if it would work in https://rowzero.io/home https://rowzero.io/home ?

breckognize 3y ago
Founder of Row Zero here. We can handle it. We can scale your workbook to more memory/cores if the defaults aren't enough.

macrolime 3y ago

Any way to try it without an Office 365 subscription?

Alifatisk 3y ago
I think Office for web is free
- ianand 3y ago
  Sadly I do not believe it will work in office for web due to size limits. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/cloud-storage-partner-program/faq/file-sizes https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/cloud-storag... Interestingly it could fit within Powerpoint for the web's limits (my guess is that's intended for images). I have considered a pure browser implementation https://github.com/ianand/spreadsheets-are-all-you-need/issues/2 https://github.com/ianand/spreadsheets-are-all-you-need/issu...

emmelaich 3y ago

Related? I was copy'n'pasting a few chars from one column from to another in gsheets. Gsheets intuited that I wanted to do this multiple times and offered this formula: > =RIGHT(A7,LEN(A7) - (FIND(CHAR(160),SUBSTITUTE(A7," ",CHAR(160),2))))

sebastiennight 3y ago
Wait... this... outputs the right-hand part of a cell in column A that follows the second space character in the string? How is that related to anything? Was it, at least, the correct formula for your need?
- emmelaich 3y ago
  I presume it was the AI/ML part watching me doing the manual stuff and automating it, which is cool. Yes it was correct. It gave me 43h0m from "08 Jan 43h0m". Obviously over a column. I was able to adjust that to give me time durations.

taco-hands 3y ago

This is a great project! Just forwarded to 7 people to help them work through LLMs. Kudos.

jhanoncomm 3y ago

Damn why didn’t I think of that! Well done. And I wonder if in memory spreadsheets are similar to (and as efficient as) Pytorch Tensors anyway!

ponector 3y ago

It is truly amazing! Funny thing is that excel can do such thing but cannot replace dates within the sheet. For example on Windows in Office 2021 if I want to replace text cell which has value 2023-10-10 with new value 2023-10-11 I have only two options as the result: 10/11/2023 or 45210.

enahs-sf 3y ago

worked with Ishan back in the day at Moovweb and he is truly a genius and had ideas way ahead of their time when it came to the web!

ianand 3y ago
Thanks for the kind words. DM or email to reconnect!

throw0101d 3y ago

Related to strange things running in spreadsheets, if you want to see how a 16-bit CPU works, Inkbox has created one in a spreadsheet: * https://github.com/InkboxSoftware/excelCPU https://github.com/InkboxSoftware/excelCPU * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rg7xvTJ8SU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rg7xvTJ8SU A twenty-four instruction assembly language is also provided.

kitd 3y ago
Reminds me of way back when I wrote a simple 8086 assembler in Lotus 123. It even worked for simple uses.
- DonHopkins 3y ago
  Lotus 123 would have been more popular with programmers if it were named Lotus 012.
dmux 3y ago
It's since changed, but for a while the band [Portugal. The Man]'s website was just a Google Sheet! https://web.archive.org/web/20230831003431/https://www.portugaltheman.com/?frontpage=true https://web.archive.org/web/20230831003431/https://www.portu...

tombert 3y ago

I occasionally need to loan people money, and usually they need to pay me back in multiple payments, sometimes over several months. Being a proper geek, my first inclination was to build a web app to keep track of that and so the people I am loaning cash to can also view their balance, but I realized that would involve maintaining state and login creds and a bunch of other variables I haven’t even considered, and maintaining this app would become a second, unpaid job. Then I thought “I could just use a Google sheet and share it”, which is what I ended up doing. It’s easy to set permissions, I don’t have to worry about hosting, I can have it do any amount of arithmetic and light programming that I might need, as well as being automatic and reactive as I add information. It will be slower than something I would write in C obviously, but realistically for something involving budgeting the time savings will be on the order of milliseconds. I love spreadsheets. They provide a gateway to programming for non-programmers, and they provide a low-effort means of playing with data.

ishtanbul 3y ago
Its not an unpaid job. Presumably you are charging interest. You just dont have the scale of a bank to make money changing anything close to market rates.
- tombert 3y ago
  These are family members and/or in-laws, I'm not charging interest to them, so if you count inflation it's actually costing me money. So it would absolutely be a second unpaid job, but I'll admit that I didn't specify why.
LtdJorge 3y ago
I think you told your experience based on the "spreadsheets are all you need" title. I don't know if you know this, but it's a play on the "Attention Is All You Need" 2017 paper by Google which introduces transformers, the building block of LLMs.
- LtdJorge 3y ago
  Now I noticed it does say so at the bottom of the page...

thunfischtoast 3y ago

Jokes on you, my Excel regularily thinks that two cells are not equal, despite both of them having exactly the same value and type (also no trailing spaces or these things). Copy and pasting it around sometimes solves the problem, but it never is apparent to me why that happens.

tombert 3y ago
Shot in the dark, but could this be some kind of IEEE floating point rounding shenanigans? Never had that issue in excel specifically, but I’ve certainly had that issue in C when trying to compare two floats that should be equal.
airstrike 3y ago
another shot in the dark but it could be different data types. some numbers can get stored as text when you import them. you can try wrapping your operands in VALUE() or TEXT() formulas accordingly other than that, I agree with the other poster and the only issue I can think of is due to having a different number of digits after the decimal point causing some rounding error when comparing floats

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krunck 3y ago

Doesn't work in LibreOffice. Doesn't work with web Excel(too big).

mrfakename 3y ago

Wow! Impressive. How did they manage to fit GPT-2 in a spreadsheet? A question for the author: will it be open sourced?

bunderbunder 3y ago
It's GPT-2 Small, which is only ~125 million parameters. That's big, but it's not out of reach for modern versions of Excel. The final spreadsheet is a 1.25GB file. There's a GitHub link on the page: https://github.com/ianand/spreadsheets-are-all-you-need https://github.com/ianand/spreadsheets-are-all-you-need
- ianand 3y ago
  What @bunderbunder said. ^^^

low_tech_punk 3y ago

Spreadsheet is the grandfather dataframe

analog31 3y ago

Now instead of "it's just curve fitting" I can tell my friends "it's just a spreadsheet."

deleted 3y ago
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diracs_stache 3y ago

Turns out folks are solving PDEs in excel: https://sie.scholasticahq.com/article/4654-spreadsheet-implementation-of-numerical-and-analytical-solutions-to-some-classical-partial-differential-equations/attachment/13946.pdf https://sie.scholasticahq.com/article/4654-spreadsheet-imple... (i knew about FFTs and special functions , but this looks fun/interesting)

onemoresoop 3y ago

Tried the prompt "Mike is hungry and wants to eat some" and the predicted next token is "body". Is that how bad gpt-2 was?

deleted 3y ago
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kirill5pol 3y ago

The OG deep learning Excel: https://www.deepexcel.net/ https://www.deepexcel.net/

deleted 3y ago
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dimatura 3y ago
Haha, I'm one of the authors, although most of the credit goes to the other author (David Fouhey). Despite being in the form of a joke, this sheet is actually functional, for anyone wondering. Like the one in this post, it's inference only, but for a CNN instead of a transformer. I think someone actually made an excel CNN with backpropagation as well.

horrysith 3y ago

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wandynn 3y ago

The content on the web page is directly converted into Excel. I enter a Propmt and there is no return value.

Pokerface777 3y ago

Why wasn't that a link to a .xls file from the spreadsheet sharing network (/s)? (in other news, SQL is all you need, sometimes.)

wslh 3y ago

Could we summarize that spreadsheets are one of the best practical representations (UX/UI wise) and integration tech for databases? From the technological architecture point of view, don't we should separate Spreadsheets = UX/UI + DAG (directed acyclic graph) + Database + Integrations ?