Microsoft Copilot AI Chatbot’s Free Version Has Been Upgraded to GPT-4 Turbo

Microsoft Copilot has been silently upgraded to a more advanced artificial intelligence (AI) model, revealed a company executive 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 can now access the latest model, however, only Copilot Pro users will have the option to revert to older GPT-4 model. Notably, the tech giant also recently revealed the launch date for its Copilot for Security platform, confirming that it will become available globally starting April 1.

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.

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