Microsoft makes its Copilot AI free to use on the web, and will soon bring GPT-4 Turbo to users as well, so are there any catches and what is GPT-4 Turbo?

Microsoft has renamed its Bing Chat to Copilot, the name the company is unifying its AI services under, and while you previously needed to access CoPilot via a special interface in the Microsoft Edge browser, or via Windows 11, anyone can now type copilot.microsoft.com into a browser to use the service.

The catches, such as they are, are small: when visiting copilot.microsoft.com is that you need a Microsoft account to use the service, but these are free to obtain, and anyone with a Hotmail, web-based Outlook email address, or an email they log into their Windows computer with already has one. Microsoft also wants you to use the Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge browser to use the Copilot service. Testing this out on the Chrome browser, this worked just fine, and was the same experience as in Windows 11 or the Edge browser.

I noticed the website would load on my Mac’s Safari browser, and let me ask questions, it didn’t give any responses, but once I told Safari to tell the Copilot website it was really Microsoft Edge, something you can do in the hidden “Develop” menu, the Copilot service started answering my questions.

There’s also the GPT-4 Turbo upgrade coming to Microsoft Copilot. The free version of ChatGPT uses tech called GPT 3.5, which is the library of information that chatbot draws from, and which was originally limited to late 2021. It is said to have 175 billion parameters of information, while GPT-4 is said to have a trillion parameters, with GPT-4 able to be more accurate, handle text and image inputs, and operate more quickly, among other benefits.

There’s no specific timeframe yet, but Microsoft will update Copilot to use GPT-4 Turbo. Although Copilot and the paid version of ChatGPT can access the Internet for the latest information, GPT-4 Turbo has a cut-off date of April 2023, can receive the equivalent of 300 pages of text in a single prompt, or question to the chat bot, and is more capable.

Microsoft says it has a few kinks to work out before it adds GPT-4 Turbo to its Copilot, but our AI’s are getting ever smarter, whether you pay for them, or not!