Microsoft Quietly Adds Four Custom GPTs to Copilot

Microsoft Copilot quietly developed a split personality today, with Microsoft adding four GPTs to the service that each addresses a specific use case.

“We’ve rolled out a few Copilot GPTs in Microsoft Copilot,” Microsoft corporate vice president Jordi Ribas tweeted. “They can help create designs, plan your next vacation, [help you] learn to cook a new recipe, or [help you] create a custom workout plan. GPTs leverage contextual instructions in the prompt and domain info as part of the grounding (RAG) data.”

The language of AI can be confusing, so let me try to explain this. Try being the operative word there.

Microsoft Copilot is itself a GPT, or Generative Pre-trained Transformer, a large language model (LLM) that provides a chat interface and is thus sometimes referred to as a chatbot. In its default configuration, Microsoft Copilot leverages the entire body of data on which it was trained, plus whatever reinforcement learning it’s picked up while interacting with humans. But it’s the vastness of its data set that causes so many AI hallucinations and mistakes. And so creating a custom GPT, or a custom chatbot, has emerged as a key way to make use case-specific AI solutions that use a subset of the full data set and can thus be more accurate and reliable.

Microsoft will soon provide Copilot Pro and Copilot for Microsoft 365 subscribers with a Copilot GPT Builder app so they can create their own custom GPTs. But today, Microsoft added four custom GPTs directly to Copilot, so anyone can use them. These are, in other words, custom chatbots based on Copilot that have been trained to help with specific tasks.

They are:

Designer. As expected, this GPT is the new front-end for Copilot’s image creation capabilities, what used to be called Bing Image Creator.

Vacation planner. This GPT can help you discover new locations, plan trip itineraries, and even help book your travel.

Cooking assistant. This GPT can help you find recipes, create meal plans, and get cooking tips and tricks.

Fitness trainer. This GPT can help you design exercise programs, and learn about nutrition, health, and wellness.

You could have accomplished any of these tasks using the base Microsoft Copilot, and still can. But by choosing one of these GPTs instead of Copilot, you will likely get better results.

Interesting stuff. And another casual expansion of Copilot’s capabilities. I feel like this update warranted more than a tweet. And that we will see tons of updates like this for the rest of the year.