GPT-4 is here — and Microsoft is embedding it everywhere
OpenAI released GPT-4 on March 14th. Microsoft has been building on it across Bing, Azure, and Office. Here's what the pace of change actually feels like from the outside.
GPT-4 launched on March 14th, 2023, and the gap between it and GPT-3.5 is significant enough that it warrants its own post.
I've been using it through ChatGPT Plus and the API for about a week now. The headline differences: it's substantially more accurate, handles longer and more complex prompts better, reasons through multi-step problems more reliably, and hallucinates noticeably less often. It still hallucinates. But you can feel the improvement.
Microsoft's GPT-4 moment
The more interesting story, though, is what Microsoft had been building on GPT-4 even before it launched publicly. The new Bing (which arrived in preview in February) is powered by GPT-4. Azure OpenAI Service has it. And Microsoft announced that GPT-4 is part of the technology stack powering their upcoming Microsoft 365 Copilot, which they previewed on March 16th, two days after the model dropped.
That timing is not a coincidence. Microsoft has a multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI and an exclusive licence to commercialise the models. They've been moving fast on this in a way that's easy to underestimate.
What Microsoft 365 Copilot is
The March preview showed GPT-4 embedded into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams: effectively the entire Microsoft 365 surface. The demos were genuinely impressive:
- Drafting a Word document from meeting notes
- Summarising an email thread and suggesting a reply
- Creating a PowerPoint presentation from a Word document
- Writing formulas in Excel from natural language descriptions
- Summarising what happened in a Teams meeting you missed
I want to be careful here: we saw demos, not the product. Demos are curated. The actual product will be more limited, buggy, and surprising in both directions. But the direction of travel is unambiguous.
The Bing experience
I've been using the new Bing since I got access to the preview. It's GPT-4 with internet access and citations. The citations matter. It's the thing that stops it being just another chatbot. You can see where its answers are coming from, and click through to verify.
It's not perfect. The responses are sometimes verbose. The integration with the search results page is awkward in places. But it's the first time I've used a search product and genuinely wondered whether it was changing my search habits, rather than just supplementing them.
The pace of change
What I'm trying to get my head around is the pace of all this. ChatGPT launched in November. GPT-4 launched in March. That's four months between two significantly different models. Microsoft has already shipped Bing on GPT-4 and announced M365 Copilot. We're in a period where the landscape is changing faster than most enterprises can process it.
I don't say this to hype it further. I say it because if you're waiting for things to "settle down" before forming a view, you may be waiting a long time.
What to actually do right now
- Get on ChatGPT Plus. It's $20/month. GPT-4 access alone is worth it.
- Start experimenting with Bing. The integration with search makes it more immediately useful than ChatGPT alone for many tasks.
- Watch the Microsoft 365 Copilot rollout closely. If you're in a Microsoft-heavy organisation, this is going to arrive in your environment and you should be ready to evaluate it intelligently.
We're in the middle of something significant. The responsible thing is to engage with it.
