As the AI race heats up, companies must keep their foot on the proverbial gas pedal to ensure they don't fall behind. Microsoft seems to be doing precisely that by announcing it will upgrade the AI model in its Copilot assistant to OpenAI's latest GPT-4 Turbo. It has also announced improvements to the Dall-E 3 image generator and several new features designed to improve Copilot's usefulness.
Microsoft announced the changes on its blog, the biggest being the upgrade to GPT-4 Turbo, the latest AI model available. OpenAI announced the Turbo version of its AI model several weeks ago. Hence, it's a surprise to see it added to Copilot so quickly, especially since it is free and GPT-4 Turbo costs money to use. It brings several notable improvements to the previous GPT-4 model, including expanded query sizes and another year's worth of data for context when replying to queries. The previous version was sealed off from new data in January 2022, with the Turbo version expanding that date to April 2023. Microsoft says this upgrade will let users tackle more complex tasks and will be added to Copilot in the coming weeks.
Microsoft says it will also be updating the built-in Dall-E 3 image engine in Copilot, allowing for more accurate translations of text-to-image requests and higher-quality images. Surprisingly, it says these features are available now in the latest version of Copilot, or you can also use them by visiting Bing.com/create to make whatever your imagination can cook up if you have a Microsoft account.
A new "code interpreter" feature is also being added for programmers. Microsoft says it will "enable you to perform complex tasks such as more accurate calculations, coding, data analysis, visualization, math, and more." The company's Bing Blog (this name will never not be funny to us) expands on this feature a bit, saying it will write code and then execute it in a sandbox environment, then use those results to improve its responses. The blog says you can also upload and download files to Copilot, which sounds like it could be pretty useful and result in some interesting responses.
Another notable new feature is that Copilot will get the capability to summarize videos that are watched in its Edge browser. However, according to the screenshot provided by Microsoft, it appears only to offer timestamps, which can be included in videos by the content creators. However, it could be helpful for a multi-hour livestream, which Microsoft has included as an example of its utility.
Also, for all the exam cheaters, it's adding the ability to rewrite website text. You can just copy and paste it into Copilot to get a new version of whatever it says, which could also be helpful for job applicants.
Finally, it's adding a feature called Deep Search to Bing, which is an optional way of using the tool. Microsoft says it should help when a specific search query is needed to achieve an anticipated result. Microsoft says Deep Search goes deeper into the web to provide more accurate and detailed results for certain queries and is a more comprehensive tool for elaborate search requests. There's a price to pay for this level of investigation, though, as it says these queries can take up to 30 seconds to complete.
