Microsoft Copilot will have support for GPT-4 Turbo and gets closer to ChatGPT

Microsoft will soon update Copilot, Windows’ virtual assistant — and successor to Cortana. The assistant will have support for GPT-4 Turbo, which is an improved version of GPT-4, OpenAI’s large language model (LLM) present in ChatGPT. This LLM is most up-to-date, with a knowledge base trained by April 2023.

This new version of GPT technology was released by OpenAI last week. According to the company, Microsoft’s partner in the development of Copilot’s AI, which now also has that name on Bing, the cost of operating GPT-4 Turbo is twice as cheap in including prompts.

Confirmation of the update to GPT-4 Turbo in Copilot was made by Mikhail Parakhin, Microsoft’s director of announcements and web services at X/Twitter. He explains that there are some details missing to release the new version. Despite the lack of a profile picture and a verified symbol, it’s the account that posted the information is official — and other top Microsoft employees follow it.

With future support for GPT-4, the main improvement in Windows Microsoft Copilot will be the ability to receive up to 128,000 characters in prompts (the equivalent of 300 pages of text). The knowledge base trained until April 2023 doesn’t end up having much impact, as the assistant also uses the Bing search engine to bring more up-to-date information — and it’s still flawed.

However, it is likely that this upgrade will be prioritized for the enterprise version of AI. The ability to receive giant prompts is much more useful for professionals (such as someone who needs to summarize a Word report or Excel spreadsheet) than it is for the average user. ChatGPT’s own GPT-4 is only available for the paid version of the AI.

Microsoft launched Windows Copilot in September. The operating system’s virtual assistant brings the search features present in Bing and some extras, such as the function to open programs and adjust PC settings. In the experience of this writer, it looks more like a Bing integrated into Windows — and I know it’s still a preview, but it’s “too pre-previewed”.

For example, when asked to open Opera GX, it said that the program is not installed. And to open a program, it can be faster (in addition to leaving a shortcut on the desktop) to hit the Win Key button and type in the search bar.

However, Copilot can be a handy tool for those who have little knowledge of Windows and want to change their PC settings. For example, it can open the wallpaper customization menu. But when I asked to change the screen resolution, it just wrote a tutorial instead of opening the setting page.