Microsoft’s Copilot app for Windows 11 (and Windows 10) now supports GPT-5 powered smart mode. As some of you may have noticed, it started rolling out on August 7 and is now widely available in the US and other regions.
The compose box in Copilot uses Web Routing to automatically recognize new models. While the Copilot app is native and most of the UI uses WinUI (WinAppSDK) except for Page/Canvas functionality, the compose box uses routing functionality, which allows Copilot to automatically pull new models from Azure.
This means there’s no need to update the app to enable “smart” or GPT-5 mode. But how does it differ from OpenAI’s implementation? In testing, we found that Microsoft Copilot offers loose usage limits for free.
ChatGPT free accounts can send up to 10 tips to GPT-5 before switching to a less powerful model (GPT-5-mini). GPT-5 has built-in inference support, meaning it can automatically route queries to the "thinking" side of the model when it thinks inference is needed to answer your question.
ChatGPT's free account offers only one thought message per day. ChatGPT Plus, on the other hand, costs $20 per month and offers 16x sending limits of up to 160 messages every three hours. Its "Inference" feature is also 10x more limited, so you can choose between GPT-5 Thinking and GPT-5 (Automatic).
These tighter limits exist because OpenAI lacks the computing power needed to handle the powerful models required to handle millions of daily active users. But this may not be the case with Copilot as it offers higher rate limits.
It was difficult in testing to know when the daily usage limit for Copilot's GPT-5 Smart Mode had been exhausted. It also doesn't clearly state how many times a day "thinking" mode can be triggered. However, I noticed that Copilot would switch to "think" mode five times a day.
As for regular queries (non-thinking), it's unclear whether Copilot routes regular queries to GPT-5 or GPT-5-mini, but based on the quality of the conversations, it seems to be the former.
To test Copilot's responsiveness to GPT-5 thinking, I challenged it with 10 complex questions containing different case studies in Python. While it answered accurately every time, it was noted that it requested "GPT-5" thinking three times out of 10 attempts. I didn't see any usage limit exhaustion errors, but Copilot stopped requesting GPT-5 Thinking after five attempts in a day, but that's better than ChatGPT Free, which is limited to one Think message per day.
How to use GPT-5 with ChatGPT for free in Copilot?
You just open copilot.microsoft.com in any browser (Edge is better for quick access) or download the Copilot app from the Microsoft Store on your PC.
Smart mode appears automatically when you sign in to your Microsoft account.
If you don't see it, all you can do is wait.