Microsoft Delivers Major AI Copilot Revamp And Makes It Widely Available To All

The AI arms race is ever escalating, pushing machine learning models into the faces of everybody who ever looks at a screen, be it a PC monitor or a smartphone. Artificial intelligence, as it's been defined in modern times, has been with us for quite a while now, including deep integration into Windows. For instance, ChatGPT—often synonymous with AI to most folks—has been available for nearly two years. Microsoft added Bing Chat to its search engine a year ago today, and in the company's eyes, that's cause for celebration. 

First up, Microsoft has added some interesting features to Copilot's image generation tools. Rather than just create images from scratch based on user input, Copilot can also make edits to existing images that it creates. This uses Microsoft's Deucalion model, which rolled out with the updated version of Copilot. Microsoft's announcement doesn't mention Deucalion by name, but Copilot and Bing Head of Engineering Jordi Ribas made sure to note the milestone on X. Unfortunately, Copilot is not able to edit photos that users upload.


Copilot does give budding AI artists the ability to make changes to the tool's initial results, which should make refinements much easier. Above you can see our initial attempt at "man playing electric guitar with a 1958 Les Paul." Below, you can see our inline editing result, a low-poly version that changed a bit more of the original image than we'd expect. It's still early, but the images themselves look pretty great. Microsoft says this functionality is powered by DALL-E 3.


Microsoft says that more image editing features will be coming to Copilot Pro subscribers soon, including text-based edit requests and the ability to change aspect ratios on the fly. Many of these features will be available on a limited basis to free accounts using one of the 15 free daily "boosts" that give limited access to these compute-heavy features. The $20 monthly Copilot Pro subscription increases that to 100 boost operations per day. 


The entire Copilot user experience has been revamped as well. The UI is more sparse and widely-spaced, putting more emphasis on the chats themselves, with a chat history on the right side of the screen. You do need to be logged in to the Copilot website to ask more than a small handful of questions, but any Microsoft account will do, whether it's a personal account or tied to work or school. The UI brings the web interface more in line with the iOS and Android app. 


And finally, as a celebration of Microsoft's heavy AI investment, the company has unveiled its Super Bowl ad highlighting AI as part of our everyday lives. Whether it's creative endeavors like generating stylish images, generating logos for a new business, or problem-solving tasks with coding, math, or science, Microsoft says that Copilot can do it all. We say there's no better way to test Copilot's capabilities than to just head on over to Microsoft's Copilot website and give it a shot.