Microsoft introduced the chatbot in February 2023 under the name "Bing Chat", as a built-in feature for Microsoft Bing and Microsoft Edge, and throughout 2023, at the Build 2023 conference, Microsoft announced its plans to integrate Copilot into Windows 11, allowing users to access it directly from the taskbar, and in January 2024, a dedicated Copilot key for Windows keyboards was announced.
In 2019, Microsoft entered into a partnership with OpenAI and began investing billions of dollars in the organization. OpenAI's systems ran on Microsoft's Azure-based supercomputing platform, and in September 2020, Microsoft announced that it had licensed "GPT-3" from OpenAI exclusively from the base model.
On January 23, 2023, Microsoft announced a multi-year $10 billion investment in OpenAI, after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, an AI chatbot based on GPT-3.5, which gained global attention after its release, and Google followed suit in February by announcing Bard (now Gemini), a chatbot similar to ChatGPT and Copilot, fearing that they would threaten Google's position as a source of information.
Copilot uses Microsoft's Prometheus model, built on OpenAI's GPT-4 large language model, which has been fine-tuned using supervised and reinforcement learning techniques. Copilot's conversational interface style is similar to ChatGPT's, and the chatbot can cite sources, create poems, generate songs, and use multiple languages and dialects.
Microsoft Copilot also operates on a freemium model, whereby free users can access most of the features, while priority access to newer features, including the creation of a custom chatbot, is provided to paid subscribers under the paid subscription service “Microsoft Copilot Pro.”