Microsoft makes OpenAI's most powerful large-scale language model available for free on its Copilot platform GPT-4-Turbo, the most powerful artificial intelligence tool available today, was previously accessible only with a paid subscription It was previously only accessible with a paid subscription

This is a fine-tuned version of GPT-4, with a much larger context window and the ability to accept tens of thousands of words in a single chat before forgetting what was said first

OpenAI only offers GPT-35 to free users of ChatGPT, with access to more powerful models, image generation, and custom chatbots reserved for users paying $1999 per month

Microsoft has always been generous with the free version of Copilot, offering some limited access to GPT-4, image generation, and custom chatbots for free

This is something OpenAI cannot do, allowing tasks like converting a Word document to PowerPoint in seconds with minimal prompting

The longer a large language model exists, the more time developers have to fine-tune, optimize, and generally improve its speed, capability, and overall performance

GPT-4 was first released exactly one year ago, on Pi Day 2023 (also known as March 14) GPT-4 was a major breakthrough, and other players such as Google and Anthropic have only this year finally been able to match GPT-4's capabilities GPT-4-Turbo is still ahead of them in many metrics

One of Turbo's most notable new features is the newer knowledge cutoff; GPT-4 runs out in September 2021, while Turbo is up to date as of last April It is also multimodal, allowing images as well as audio as input

Microsoft previously offered GPT-4 as the default option for Copilot free users, and Turbo was reserved for Pro, but now the faster, more responsive, multimodal offering is available to all

This makes sense from a product standpoint, as Microsoft is trying to make Copilot an integral part of all its products and services, including Windows, 365, and Professional applications

This means that more casual Copilot users will have a better experience, be less hallucinated by chatbots, and be more up-to-date

This is valuable for companies betting on AI Customer trust is essential for getting users to actually use the AI tools they are putting into all their products

Microsoft executive Mikhail Palakin also confirmed the switch in an X post, saying that older models are also available on the toggle

Another potential reason to make GPT-4 Turbo available for free is the imminent arrival of the next generation of large-scale language models from OpenAI

Microsoft's Bing search engine has inadvertently indexed a web page on the OpenAI website promoting a model called GPT-45-Turbo

This may have been nothing more than a typo headline that mistakenly meant GPT-4-Turbo, but it is evidence that a new version is on the way [Personally, I think the next model is just as likely to be called GPT-45 as GPT-35, but with OpenAI anything is possible

It has been a year since GPT-4 was launched, and in that time we have seen the Google Gemini Ultra and the Anthropic Claude 3 Opus achieve GPT-4 capabilities Even French startup Mistral has a new model that rivals OpenAI's best, and this company did not exist in March 2023