Companies serious about equipping their employees with AI-powered conversation assistants have more reasons to look to Microsoft. Today the corporate announced a major upgrade to its Copilot AI assistant for Microsoft 365 – the cloud software subscription service offered with Office apps comparable to Word, Excel and PowerPoint in addition to Outlook and OneDrive storage.
“We’re sharing some exciting updates to our Copilot for Microsoft 365 users,” wrote Jordi Ribas, Microsoft Corporate Vice President CVP and Head of Engineering and Product for Copilot and Bing the social platform X. “Starting today, you get priority access to GPT-4 Turbo for faster, more comprehensive responses to each web and work data. We’re also removing chat restrictions and increasing the variety of file uploads.”
The move follows recent Microsoft ally OpenAI has decided to make its GPT 3.5 model freely available for unlimited use for users without signing up, likely pressuring Microsoft and other AI vendors and competitors to upgrade paid offerings like Copilot to justify their costs.
This also follows Microsoft's move to make its custom Copilot GPT Builder available to all Copilot Pro subscribers earlier this month, further expanding the features and offerings of its standout AI assistant.
New arrivals
As Ribas explained, the changes include, amongst other things, the indisputable fact that Copilot in 365 will now mechanically start sessions with GPT-4 Turbo because the default AI model within the backend, provided in fact by Microsoft's principal investment and partner OpenAI.
GPT-4 Turbo was first introduced by OpenAI in November at its first Dev Day developer conference in San Francisco offers a massively larger “context window” through which the user can enter longer prompts – 128,000 tokens in comparison with 32,768 on older GPT-4 models.
Ultimately, which means users of GPT-4 and now Copilot for 365 can enter much larger blocks of text or information into their prompts and the AI can respond, analyze and edit or work with them.
Furthermore a Blog post that Ribas linked to The company says Copilot 365 users can now send unlimited messages (previously: thus far 300 chats per day) and unlimited chats per conversation with the copilot assistant.
Commercial data protection
Microsoft's blog post also states that Copilot works with “Commercial data protection“Microsoft's system that uses its Entra ID (formerly generally known as Azure Active Directory) to anonymize and encrypt web traffic sent by 365 users outside of their organizations – on this case, anonymizing and encrypting their Copilot prompts and All other information that the user enters or is accessed with Copilot (depending on how much data is granted access, comparable to Outlook email or contact details) before being sent to Copilot and GPT 4 might be sent. Once a user closes the chat window or ends the session, Microsoft deletes the data shortly afterwards.
In fact, Microsoft appears to be encouraging users to trust Copilot with their sensitive company data, writing in its blog post: “Copilot can provide help to quickly scan your email for vital messages that you may prioritize and provide help to give attention to Prepare vital meetings by pulling information from across your organization.” Work and provide help to find one of the best path forward. The work context also advantages from enterprise-grade data protection, which also ensures that your data stays inside the Microsoft 365 service boundaries.”
The move is important for Microsoft as the corporate desires to reassure its customers that their data is secure when using its AI tools: something that has recently been a priority with governments all over the world, comparable to: US House of Representatives It was recently reported that it banned Copilot Assistant entirely since it was “deemed a risk to users by the Office of Cybersecurity as a result of the danger of sharing House data to non-House-approved cloud services,” comparable to: Axios reported last week.
Microsoft said in that report that Copilot “will meet the federal government's security and compliance requirements, which we plan to fulfill later this 12 months.”
In the European Union Microsoft offers Office 365 with or without its hated messaging app Teams bundled to Compliance with EU antitrust regulations. Back in October 2023, Microsoft announced in a blog post by Candice Ling, Senior Vice President of Microsoft Federal, that Copilot for Government Community Cloud (GCC) would launch in summer 2024.
Microsoft also hopes to bring justice to enterprise customers wary of ongoing copyright lawsuits against generative AI corporations, including OpenAI, by mentioning that Copilot for 365 users are covered Customer Copyright Obligationwhat means
Next up: Fast image generations increased from 15 to 100 per day
“Starting next month,” Microsoft writes within the blog post – probably in May – Copilot 365 users will even be given 100 “boosts” for fast image generation in its Designer AI image generator tool in Copilot (powered by OpenAI's DALL-E 3). ), from now 15 each day.
This “significantly reduces wait times for image creation and unlocks latest productivity,” explains Microsoft.
However, the designer tool itself was already at the middle of a large controversy within the USA by 404 Media because the responsible app for non-consensual explicit deepfake pornography and explicit images of musician Taylor Swift that circulated on social media and forums in January. The company reportedly “closed” the loophole that allowed these images to be created in violation of its existing terms of service.
Microsoft Copilot for 365 cost $30 per user per thirty days (annual commitment) and requires Microsoft 365 Business Standard, Business Premium, E3, E5 or Office 365 E3 or E5.
