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Vacations are supposed to be a time of peace, rejuvenation, and relief from work. But in the ruthless world of Big Tech, there is no time to rest when a hyped new product arrives.
While we were busy decorating the halls, baking cookies, and arguing with relatives, Microsoft had some dirty work planned. The tech giant has quietly released its new AI assistant app Copilot on Android and iOS, hoping no one notices amidst all the seasonal distractions.
On the surface, Copilot looks a lot like Microsoft’s Bing Chat app, which debuted to much fanfare last year. Chat naturally with the app, ask questions, draft emails, search the web, and more. Standard AI assistant stuff in 2024.
But under the hood, Copilot utilizes some of the most advanced AI. He also talks about GPT-3.5 and, in certain modes, the newly enhanced GPT-4. This is not your grandpa’s chatbot. Using tools like DALL-E 3, Copilot can understand context, track complex conversations, and generate surreal text and images.
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Accessing GPT-4 typically costs a significant amount of money. For us average jocks, that’s $20 a month. But Microsoft is allowing people to chat with one of the most powerful AI systems out there, all for the low price of zero dollars.
This is a big deal. Copilot gives anyone with a mobile phone access to her AI assistant, which has features on par with highly touted apps like ChatGPT. And Microsoft has slipped into our stockings without most of us even realizing it.
Some might see this quiet launch as Microsoft trying to avoid hype, but the company probably just wanted to get Copilot out there without much fanfare. The holiday season seemed like the perfect time to launch something new and speak for itself.
But don’t get me wrong. Microsoft knows exactly what they’re doing here. While we were roasting chestnuts, the company was running one of its largest AI projects ever, putting advanced generative models into the hands of millions of people.
What remains to be seen is whether the public will react in the same way when they realize how powerful the co-pilot is. Or will the holiday timing allow Microsoft to normalize this level of AI without causing a backlash?
For now, Copilot is not yet a ChatGPT killer. You can’t chat conversationally through voice chat like in OpenAI’s latest trending app. But by sneakily slipping it into the app store when no one was looking, Microsoft ensured it would be in the AI ​​assistant race well into 2024 and beyond. AI winter just got more interesting.
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