With the GPT-4 Turbo update, Microsoft enhances Copilot

Microsoft's CEO of Advertising and Web Services, Mikhail Parakhin, said that the company had upgraded its free version of Copilot to GPT-4 Turbo. He said, "Pro users can still select the older model if they'd like; there's a toggle." Microsoft also disclosed that starting on April 1, enterprise clients would be able to access its Copilot for Security platform.

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 quite some work, GPT4-Turbo replaced GPT-4 in the Copilot free tier. Pro users can still choose the older model, if prefer (there is a toggle).” The announcement comes without any fanfare; however, it is a significant upgrade that will impact regular users. Notably, Copilot Pro users could already access GPT-4 Turbo.

For starters, the knowledge cut-off of GPT-4-based Copilot was September 2021 but GPT-4 Turbo has a knowledge base up to April 2023. This will not be noticeable when searching for online topics as the AI chatbot is connected to the internet, however, for topics which cannot be readily found on the internet, the increased knowledge output is expected to result in more updated responses. Apart from the Balanced mode, the updated AI model's support 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 that it can fit the equivalent of more than 300 pages of text in a single prompt. This means that the latest AI model can look through a larger set of data to find contextual information about a prompt. Interestingly, the free tier of OpenAI's native chatbot ChatGPT is still running on GPT 3.5 AI model.