Microsoft Brings GPT-4 Turbo to Free Version of Copilot

Microsoft confirmed today that non-paying Copilot will now use the GPT-4 Turbo LLM instead of the older GPT-4. This was previously an option only for paying customers of Copilot Pro or Copilot for Microsoft 365.

“After quite some work, GPT-4 Turbo replaced GPT-4 in the Copilot free tier,” Microsoft’s Mikhail Parakhin tweeted. “Pro users can still choose the older model, if [they] prefer (there is a toggle).”

OpenAI describes GPT-4 Turbo as a major advance from a performance perspective, one that is more accurate, trained on more recent data, and can handle larger prompts, including image-based prompts. But it’s also less expensive to run than GPT-4, which may help explain the change.

According to Parakin, the hardest thing about moving to GPT-4 Turbo was ensuring that the experience didn’t degrade across the various use cases. He also confirmed that GPT-4 Turbo is used across the Creative and Precise conversation styles, while Balanced uses it only in certain cases, often for “the inner monologue.