The little-known predecessor to Copilot: Bing Chat

The little-known predecessor to Copilot: Bing Chat is profiled by BTW Media because published evidence links it to internet infrastructure, governance, operational dependencies, or market visibility.

• Copilot’s predecessor, Bing Chat, is Microsoft’s AI chatbot experience based on OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT (version 4) large language model (LLM) that provides similar responses to how humans answer questions.
• In March 2024, Microsoft replaced GPT-4 with GPT-4 Turbo in the free version of Copilot.

Bing Chat, the predecessor of Copilot, is an AI chatbot experience from Microsoft based on the popular ChatGPT (version 4) Large Language Model (LLM) from OpenAI, offering similar responses to how humans answer questions. Although ChatGPT plays a key role in the platform, Microsoft has also created a technology known as Prometheus that allows the chatbot to connect with the Bing search engine to generate safer, faster, and more accurate answers to simple and complex questions about virtually any topic and current events.

Also read: Bing Chat Chrome Extension

Also read: OpenAI’s ChatGPT gets Bing web search and DALL-E 3 image generation

What is Bing Chat?

In February 2023, Microsoft unveiled a new version of its search engine Bing, to compete with ChatGPT. At the time, its standout feature was an AI chatbot powered by more advanced technology than ChatGPT, OpenAI’s GPT-4.

At the time of launch, the AI chatbot was called Bing Chat. However, during Microsoft Ignite in November 2023, Microsoft decided to rebrand its chatbot and call it Copilot instead.

Copilot can answer questions and get detailed, human-like responses with footnotes that link back to the sources. Since the chatbot is connected to the internet, it can provide up-to-date information.

The chatbot can help with creative tasks, such as writing a poem, essay, or song. It can solve complex math or coding tasks, and even generate images from text by using Image Creator from Microsoft Designer.

What was the initial controversy around Microsoft’s Bing AI chatbot?

Selected users were given early access to the chatbot and were not shy about sharing their experiences. Many of these users tested the chatbot’s capabilities and exposed its varied flaws.

From revealing its confidential codename used internally by developers, to declaring its love to a New York Times writer and asking him to leave his wife, the chatbot was acting out of hand.

Consequently, Microsoft reeled in the chatbot with a new session limit, changing chat sessions from unlimited to a five-question limit, and a 50-chat turn daily limit. Microsoft later expanded that limit to six chat turns per session and 60 total chats per day, but this was still less than the original experience users got.

What is Copilot’s latest update?

In December 2023, Microsoft announced that Copilot would be getting several new features, the most significant being the ability to generate responses using GPT-4 Turbo, OpenAI’s latest model at the time.

Also: Microsoft quietly upgraded Copilot’s free version to GPT-4 Turbo. Here’s why it matters

In March 2024, Microsoft replaced GPT-4 with GPT-4 Turbo in the free version of Copilot. GPT-4 Turbo was anticipated to take the chatbot’s abilities to new limits, with knowledge of world events up to December 2023 and a 128K context window, four times larger than that of GPT-4.

At Microsoft Build, the company’s annual developer conference, the company revealed that GPT-4o is coming to Copilot on Copilot+ PCs. Even though this release doesn’t impact most Copilot users, it is a major upgrade because GPT-4o is OpenAI’s latest multimodal LLM.

At Build, the company also announced Team Copilot, meant to act as an assistant for entire teams, with features including Group Collaborator, Meeting Facilitator, and Project Manager, all of which will be available in preview later in 2024.