In February 2023, Microsoft first released BingChat, a generative artificial intelligence chat robot using OpenAI's ChatGPT model. Since then, the company has been adding new features and improvements to the chatbot, and a few weeks ago announced its new name - Copilot. On December 1, Microsoft revealed that Copilot is no longer considered a public preview and is instead marked as fully available.
Today, Microsoft announced a number of new features that are already available or in testing and will be available later in 2024. One of them is the addition of OpenAI’s latest large-scale language model, ChatGPT-4Turbo. Microsoft said:
Soon, Copilot will be able to generate replies using OpenAI’s latest model, GPT-4Turbo, allowing you to tackle more complex and longer tasks like writing code. The model is currently being tested with a select group of users and will be widely integrated into Copilot in the coming weeks.
DALL-E3, OpenAI’s next-generation artificial intelligence art creation model, is now also available in Copilot.
Microsoft Edge browser users will soon be able to select text from websites and have Copilot rewrite the text. Additionally, Copilot is developing a new method for analyzing images that combines GPT-4, Bing image search, and web search data.
Copilot will also add a new "CodeInterpreter" feature in the near future for users who want to create Python code to answer questions.
Microsoft added:
Copilot will write code to answer your complex natural language requests, run that code in a sandbox environment, and use the results to provide you with higher quality responses. You can also upload and download files to Copilot, so you can work with your own data and code along with Bing search results.
Microsoft's Bing search engine will soon add a new feature called "deep search." If a user is searching for answers to a complex topic on Bing, they can click on the in-depth search option. Using GPT-4, Bing will provide expanded search results.
Microsoft has published a separate blog post dedicated to the new Bing deep search options. The article states: Bing’s regular search already considers millions of web pages for each search, while deep search results are ten times more frequent than regular search results and are more informative and specific than the top results of regular searches.
This feature is currently being tested with a small number of users. Microsoft says it can take up to 30 seconds to come up with an answer using Deep Search.