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Microsoft Copilot is spreading through all the company’s products, but under the hood, it’s just a version of OpenAI’s GPT AI models. That means not all copilots are created equal. Depending on your subscription status and where you’re talking to Copilot, you might get a more capable AI model. Microsoft has announced a significant upgrade for business AI subscribers. These instances of Copilot will now run on the latest and greatest GPT-4 Turbo model.
There are several ways to pay for Copilot—in this case, it’s the $30 subscription for Copilot in Microsoft 365. That gives you unlimited access to Copilot in Windows, the Copilot app, Edge, on the web, and inside Microsoft 365 apps. With the subscription, you can carry on AI conversations as often and for as long as you want. This option should be more robust than the free tier of Copilot, which uses GPT-4 Turbo if you switch to Creative or Precise modes.
GPT-4 Turbo has been trained on web data up through April 2023, so its storehouse of word calculations is just a year out of date. It has a context window of 128,000 tokens, the largest of any OpenAI model. That matches the initial release of Google’s next-gen Gemini 1.5 Pro, but the search giant says it’s working on a version with a larger 1-million token window. Generally, the more tokens a model can process, the more accurate the output.
Microsoft says the web version of Copilot has access to the latest data from the web. It also reminds everyone that its commercial data protection policy means that Microsoft will not retain any prompt data. However, that probably won’t change the position of the US House of Representatives that no one working for the body should use Copilot.
Credit: Microsoft
Inside Microsoft apps, Copilot has access to personal data like your calendar, chats, documents, and more. According to Microsoft, this makes responses more personal and accurate. When using the enhanced version of Copilot, you can dump in as much as 300 pages of text per prompt. That makes the model much better for analyzing large documents, and you can continue asking questions about that block of text for as long as you want without starting a new conversation.
As part of this change, subscribers will also have better image-generating capabilities. Before the change, business users of Microsoft Designer were limited to just 15 images per day. With the upgrade to GPT-4 Turbo, Microsoft is also rolling out DALL-E 3. That will allow subscribers to make up to 100 images per day, and the wait times should be much lower.
Microsoft says the new GPT-4 Turbo model will be available on the web immediately, followed in the coming weeks by the mobile app, Windows, Edge, and Microsoft 365 apps.