Microsoft’s new Copilot AI will be inside Minecraft, and other Xbox, PC games

Microsoft launched its big AI push earlier this year as part of its Bing search engine, integrating a ChatGPT-like interface directly into its search results. Now less than a year later, it’s dropping the Bing Chat branding and moving to Copilot, the new name for the chat interface you might have used in Bing, Microsoft Edge, and Windows 11. While it’s still in early access, Microsoft said that 365 Copilot will cost $30 per user per month for E3, E5, Business Standard and Business Premium Customers when it becomes broadly available. In March, Microsoft brought its artificial intelligence-powered Bing into the Edge browser, calling it a “copilot” for the web.

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The Bing Chat rebranding comes just days after OpenAI revealed 100 million people are using ChatGPT on a weekly basis. Despite a close partnership worth billions, Microsoft and OpenAI continue to compete for the same customers seeking out AI assistants, and Microsoft is clearly trying to position Copilot as the option for consumers and businesses. The enterprise AI market is expected to reach $88 billion by 2030, according to Verified Market Research. Given the rapid growth, it’s not at all surprising that companies are being bullish in the space.

Earlier this year, it was reported that the company was struggling to make money with its Github Copilot iteration, the coding assistant marketed specifically to software developers. Despite its popularity early on, the tool was extremely expensive to run and wasn’t making back what the company was spending on it. Several months later, Github’s CEO Thomas Dohmke told Semafor that the company was actually “happy about the growing positive margins the product has” but was decidedly mum on the details. Microsoft has made a rather large emphasis on privacy at this event as well, claiming that data used via these new AI PCs will remain on-device, and won’t be uploaded to the cloud or used to train language models without consent. We’ll believe that one when we see it, but Microsoft has been criticized heavily across the board for its lackadaisical approach to privacy in Windows 10 and beyond, so it will be interesting to see how this news is received by gamers. When Microsoft announced Bing Chat earlier this year, the company described the chatbot as an “AI-powered copilot for the web,” and since then we’ve seen the company use the Copilot branding for a number of AI efforts after GitHub originally used the Copilot name last year.

• If the current trend holds, Copilot Vision may not work on some of the web’s top news sites.
• Of course, “Balanced,” as the name indicates, seeks to split the difference and provide both equal parts creativity and precision/factual responses for users.
• However, the “Creative” mode can be more effective for those seeking not specific facts but help with, as the name indicates, creative, open-ended projects such as fictional worldbuilding, writing, and designing.
• At the same time, it also has a later knowledge cutoff (so it knows more recent stuff).
• For those doing research for school or work, the “Precise” and “Balanced” modes are probably a better bet.

Medhi says that GPT-4’s integration will allow users to “tackle more complex and longer tasks” and get better responses to their queries and needs via the virtual assistant. Yusuf Medhi, Microsoft’s EVP and consumer chief marketing officer, said in a blog published Tuesday that the company had “begun testing” the integrations, and that the new features would be rolling out soon (the announcement says this will happen at some point “in the coming weeks”). At the time of the Bing Chat launch earlier this year, Microsoft held an internal Q&A for employees to get answers about its AI search push.

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But I think we all know, fundamentally, that things will change immensely in the coming years. Many of the best upcoming Xbox games and best upcoming PC games will doubtless change too. Microsoft Copilot will be embedded directly in video games, starting with Minecraft. Players will be able to use natural language to ask questions like “How do I craft a sword?” and the Copilot will search your chests and inventories for the necessary materials, or guide you to them if you don’t have them. It will also explain how to craft the item, and so on, eliminating the need to alt tab and read a website for Minecraft guides like ours (RIP Windows Central). Bing will no longer be the main entry point for Microsoft’s AI ambitions with Copilot anymore, and it’s not clear if the push for AI search was ever successful for the software maker.

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The fact that Ribas said it was “a fine-tuned model” makes me think it is a version of GPT-4 that has been further tweaked by Microsoft engineers for their purposes. Bing Chat itself was powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4, the model underlying ChatGPT Plus/Team/Enterprise, so it stands to reason that GPT-4 and GPT-4 Turbo/V continue to power Copilot. Join leaders from Block, GSK, and SAP for an exclusive look at how autonomous agents are reshaping enterprise workflows – from real-time decision-making to end-to-end automation. We have a full Microsoft AI and Surface Live Blog here, since it’s not being streamed online. Microsoft will debut new Arm PCs and Surfaces that should beat Intel-based Ultrabooks on both power and battery life, albeit at the cost of some app compatibility in some cases (looking at you, Adobe).

In  addition, Microsoft has been demonstrating new AI features for Microsoft Copilot, which is the firm’s answer to Google’s Gemini AI search and ChatGPT’s assistive apps. Business users will sign into Copilot with an Entra ID, while consumers will need a Microsoft Account to access the free Copilot service. Microsoft Copilot is currently officially supported only in Microsoft Edge or Chrome, and on Windows or macOS. Microsoft is now pitching Copilot as the free version of its AI chatbot, with Copilot for Microsoft 365 (which used to be Microsoft 365 Copilot) as the paid option. The free version of Copilot will still be accessible in Bing and Windows, but it will also have its own dedicated domain over at copilot.microsoft.com — much like ChatGPT. If the current trend holds, Copilot Vision may not work on some of the web’s top news sites.

As a result, it should be able to take on longer prompts from users and deliver better, more informed insights to them. With Google and Microsoft both pushing hard on taking data from publishers and injecting it directly into experiences, a question mark has been growing over the future of the web in general. If it’s no longer commercially viable to publish content, getting information into AI models will increasingly defer to social media platforms instead, making acquiring accurate information potentially increasingly difficult.

And that was coming after more local deepfake scandals in at least one U.S. high school. Microsoft Copilot, with its growing arsenal of tools and integrations, costs enterprise customers $30 a month, so it can hopefully outperform its digital cousin in that respect. At the very least, enterprise users will be getting better bang for their buck, which is never a bad thing.

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But Microsoft said it’s committed to “taking feedback” to allay publishers’ concerns. Note that Copilot Labs requires a subscription to Microsoft’s Copilot Pro plan, which costs $20 per month. Explore the future of AI on August 5 in San Francisco—join Block, GSK, and SAP at Autonomous Workforces to discover how enterprises are scaling multi-agent systems with real-world results. Documentation for Deucalion is pretty scarce right now from what I’ve seen, but Mikhail Parakhin, Microsoft’s CEO of Advertising and Web Services, posted on X last week that the company was testing it and that it was named after the son of Prometheus in Greek mythology. Microsoft Copilot, the company’s AI-fueled workflow companion, is getting an upgrade.

GPT-4 Turbo was announced at OpenAI’s first Dev Day (right before the company temporarily devolved into anarchy as a result of CEO Sam Altman’s short-lived ouster) and was broadly considered one of the more exciting developments at the conference. The new and improved large language model offers a couple of basic improvements over the original GPT-4. First, it has a larger “context window” (128K, in this case), meaning it’s able to retain a greater range of information. At the same time, it also has a later knowledge cutoff (so it knows more recent stuff).