The free version of Microsoft Copilot AI Chatbot has been upgraded to GPT-4 Turbo

Microsoft Copilot has been quietly upgraded to a more advanced artificial intelligence (AI) model, a company executive revealed on Tuesday. With the upgrade, Copilot, the AI-powered chatbot, is now powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo model. Both the free tier and the Pro version now have access to the latest model, but only Copilot Pro users will have the option to revert to an older GPT-4 model. Notably, the tech giant also recently revealed the launch date of its Copilot for Security platform, confirming that it will be available globally from April 1st.

Mikhail Parakhin, CEO of Advertising and Web Services at Microsoft, shared a post on X (formerly known as Twitter) on March 12 and said: “After a lot of work, GPT4-Turbo has replaced GPT-4 in Copilot’s free tier. Pro users can still opt for the older model if they prefer (there’s a switch).” The announcement comes without fanfare, but it’s a significant upgrade that will affect regular users. It should be noted that Copilot Pro users now have access to GPT-4 Turbo.

For starters, the GPT-4 based Copilot’s knowledge cutoff was September 2021, but the GPT-4 Turbo has a knowledge base until April 2023. This won’t be noticeable when searching for online topics, as the AI ​​chatbot is related to the Internet, however, for topics that cannot be easily found on the Internet, the increased knowledge score is expected to result in more updated answers. In addition to the Balanced mode, support for the updated AI model has also been added to the Creative and Precise modes.

GPT-4 Turbo was introduced by OpenAI in November 2023. It comes with an increased context window of 128,000 tokens, as opposed to GPT-4’s 8,000 tokens. The AI ​​firm said it can fit the equivalent of more than 300 pages of text into a single prompt. This means that the latest AI model can sift through a larger set of data to find contextual information about a prompt. Interestingly, the free tier of OpenAI’s native chatbot ChatGPT still runs on the GPT 3.5 AI model.

Meanwhile, Microsoft also revealed the launch date of its Copilot for Security platform, which will be available to enterprise customers from April 1. Powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Microsoft’s security models, it comes with multilingual capabilities, offering support for 25 different languages.