Microsoft Upgrades Free Copilot to GPT-4 Turbo

Microsoft has been working hard to attract hundreds of millions of customers to try its new AI assistant Copilot over the past year, and this is no secret. Microsoft has added Copilot to its Bing search engine, Edge browser, and even Windows 11, and it is free to use. The company also offers a "Pro" version for $20 per month, which uses OpenAI's latest "turbo" AI model, allowing access to more recent data and handling larger text prompts. Now, Microsoft allows users of the free version of Copilot to use the "turbo" model, which will undoubtedly attract more people to use Copilot instead of paying for the professional version.

Microsoft announced on X that it will add GPT-4 Turbo to the free version of Copilot, which raises the question, "Are there any limitations?" However, it appears that there are no limitations; this is just a free upgrade that may attract more people to try Copilot. The company still offers the same GPT-4 Turbo model to professional customers, which may be frustrating for them as they have to pay a large fee every month to use it. According to Cnet, GPT-4 Turbo is trained with data up to April 2023, while data collection for GPT-4 ended in September 2021. This allows the new model to provide updated results in queries.

GPT-4 Turbo can also handle longer text prompts. It can accept up to 128,000 tokens, which are the components of words, in each query. Its predecessor, GPT-4, could only handle about 8,000 tokens, so theoretically, you can give it a huge prompt to improve the accuracy of its results. To use GPT-4 Turbo, select the "Creative" or "Precise" mode instead of the default "Balanced" mode.

Copilot "Art"

Sometimes AI artworks can be a bit quirky. When asked to create an image of a lion riding a hippo through a canyon, GPT-4 Turbo produced this result. It added a bald eagle to the photo for some reason, but it looks reasonable.

Microsoft's decision to upgrade users to previously paid tiers is indeed an unexpected move. While this may anger existing customers, Cnet believes that their anger may be short-lived as GPT-4 Turbo 4.5 may be on the horizon. The developers of these GPT models, OpenAI, apparently mistakenly released a blog post announcing the next-generation model. This new model, Turbo 4.5, is described as faster and more accurate than GPT-4 Turbo, but the blog post was eventually deleted. It would make sense for Microsoft to announce the free availability of Turbo after the arrival of version 4.5, so perhaps version 4.5 will be announced soon.