Microsoft Copilot in Edge is NOW Powered by GPT-4 (and soon to be powered by GPT-4 turbo)

bykppowell

137 followers

1 year ago

I live in the Chrome browser.

But with the advent of GPT-4 and its integration into the Edge browser in the form of Microsoft Copilot, I have adopted the habit of keeping that browser open in a separate window.

While I have not been able to bring myself to post content generated by Copilot directly to my site, I have, thus far, successfully used Microsoft Copilot to create logos, conduct research, edit, and shake off writer's block. All good things.

And its free.

This morning, in the course of my daily check-in with Copilot (whilst drinking coffee) I noticed something that seemed new.

The Copilot tab reads "Bing Chat with GPT-4." [Microsoft introduced "Bing Chat" in February 2023 and officially rebranded Bing Chat as "Microsoft Copilot" in November 2023. This has clearly not been a clean break and you will continue to see Microsoft's AI chatbot associated with both names.]

Anyhow, I thought to myself, ""Bing Chat with GPT-4? That's new."

But I sometimes overlook things, so I thought I'd better double check some dates and also dig a bit deeper to understand what that really means.

First off, it is worth knowing that Microsoft and OpenAI (the developer of GPT-4 and its preceding iterations) have very close ties. OpenAI might have one of the oddest corporate structures out there having originated in 2015 as a non-profit and having retained, in part, its status as a non-profit while adding a for-profit subsidiary in 2019. Microsoft currently holds a nearly 50 percent stake in OpenAI's for-profit division and OpenAI tech is integrated throughout Microsoft programs.

With that in mind, now a bit of a timeline.

ChatGPT (originally built on GPT-3.5) was released to the public in November 2022.

In early 2023, Microsoft released the newly AI-enabled Bing search engine. While Microsoft was clear that this AI-enabled Bing was built on OpenAI’s GPT model (as well as with Microsoft's own proprietary Prometheus model which served to monitor the GPT model and integrate into Microsoft software), Microsoft did not initially reveal whether the underlying GPT model was -3.5 or -4.

When in March, OpenAI announced GPT-4, Microsoft revealed that Bing had been running on GPT-4 all along.

If you read the truly excellent New Yorker article by Charles Duhigg - published in December 2023 online as "The Inside Story of Microsoft’s Partnership with OpenAI" and in-print under the headline “The Optimists” - you will get that this somewhat obscure technology transfer reflects Microsoft's close partnership with OpenAI.

You will also come to understand that this measured but ongoing release of AI tech to the public is consistent with Microsoft's strategy of enlisting the public as a testing partner in its AI releases, which, as Duhigg writes, was a deliberate and successful "formula for both improving the technology and cultivating a skeptical pragmatism among users." (Smart marketing!)

Then, in November 2023, OpenAI announced its latest AI model, GPT-4 Turbo. While prior GPT versions (including GPT-4) were able to respond to user prompts with information that was current up to January 2022, GPT-4 Turbo includes knowledge of world events to April 2023. (GPT-4 Turbo is also able to include in excess of 300 pages of text in a single prompt.)

An aside, fellow Affiliate Marketers. The current-ness aspect of of GPT (or any large language model, for that matter) is really worth keeping in mind. If you are not mindful of this, you may be providing your audience with outdated and possibly irrelevant content. One thing I like about Copilot is that it identifies the sources from which it has derived the content in its responses, providing links that I can then check.

And that brings me to this morning and Copilot.

Having thought I was seeing something new, I checked out the Official Microsoft Blog.

In a December 5, 2023 post titles, "Celebrating the first year of Copilot with significant new innovations," Yusuf Medhi, Microsoft Executive Vice President and Consumer Chief Marketing Officer writes, "Two weeks ago, we took the significant step to bring together all of this under one brand and one experience that we call Microsoft Copilot .... As we set our sights on 2024, we’re committed to bringing more innovation and advanced capabilities to Copilot ...."

Medhi then goes on to list new features that Copilot has already begun testing. These include:

• The ability to generate responses using GPT-4 Turbo.
• The ability to create images using an updated DALL-E 3 model.
• The ability to select text and have Copilot rewrite it.
• Improved image understanding in image search.
• A code interpreter that enables "calculations, coding, data analysis, visualization, math and more."
• Improved ability to "deliver optimized search results for complex topics."

As of December 2023, OpenAI had not incorporated GPT-4 Turbo into ChatGPT, so Microsoft's move to incorporate GPT-4 Turbo in Copilot is not only worth noting it may, in fact, endow Copilot with more advanced capabilities than ChatGPT, at least for a while.

And remember Copilot is free.

To access Copilot open the Microsoft Edge browser. That's this guy.

You will see the Copilot icon in the upper righthand corner.

When you click on the icon a side panel will open that will look like this.

Click on "Open link in new tab" (see below) to view Copilot full screen.

To access DALL-E 3 go to bing.com/create or simply use Copilot.

Just one final thought.

These AI tools, these large language models, are built by consuming the massive amounts of information (or content) available on the Internet. That content is not just the source of the information they provide once they are trained. It is the basis of their training.

That includes good content, bad content, and maybe even in some future iteration our content.

If our future is to be one of responsible and helpful AI, we have a role in making it so, both as users and as creators.