Microsoft 365 Copilot: Elevating your productivity

November 2, 2023

Microsoft has launched its 365 Copilot and the subscriptions are now available. But what actually is this “Copilot”? and what does it do? Let’s get right into it to find out more.

Emergence of AI

From Deep Blue, the infamous system that beat chess master Gary Kasparov, to ChatGPT, an LLM that can write you movies in minutes, AI (Artificial Intelligence) has continued to impress us for decades.

In the pursuit of that very AI, companies like Google, Amazon, OpenAI, Microsoft, and IBM are all challenging and competing with each other. The innovation through such competition has also emerged in a more dialectical fashion. But lately, there’s a massive buzz around Microsoft’s newly embedded Copilot AI.

Microsoft 365 Copilot

What is Microsoft really building?

Microsoft is launching Microsoft 365 Copilot, an AI assistant integrated into Microsoft’s tools, to race ahead.

It is foreseeable that copilot will forever change and transform our view toward AI and erroneously boring jobs. Such that humans will no longer have to endure endless tiring work like analyzing and reading long PDFs.

What exactly is Microsoft Copilot?

Microsoft has developed an AI assistant called Copilot which will assist you with routine business inquiries. Copilot integrates your company’s data with Large Language Models. OpenAI’s ChatGPT is linked to Copilot. One of the LLMs underlying Copilot is GPT-4.

But what exactly is LLM? How do they work?

The term “Large Language Model,” or LLM for short, describes a class of artificial intelligence models intended to comprehend and produce human language.

Because they are based on deep learning methods, LLMs excel at producing and comprehending natural language. These AI models are a subset that concentrates on producing and analyzing text-based data.

While the history of LLM is relatively recent, starting in 2013, Google introduced Word2Vec, a model that learned word embeddings, which was a precursor to more advanced language models. The overall development can be traced back to academics like Noam Chomsky, Geoffrey Hinton, Youshua Bengio, etc who pioneered in the field of linguistic and generative grammar.

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But Why Is Microsoft using ChatGPT?

Microsoft invested one billion dollars in the emerging start-up OpenAI back in 2019. And further extended its partnership by investing another 10 billion dollars. Since then both of these giants have sought to do numerous collaborations. OpenAI’s technologies are now integrated into various Microsoft services like Azure, Bing, and now finally Copilot.

What can we do with Copilot?

Copilot can analyze data in Microsoft Apps and perform tasks such as searching for patterns in specific data sets, analyzing data, creating new sheets and graphs, and even offering an Excel explanation of its workings and illustrating its findings.

Microsoft 365 Copilot: Price and Availability

As it is exclusively intended for enterprise users, Microsft 365 Copilot will cost 30$ a month. But it will be free for students who are provided with valid school IDs & addresses.

also watch Microsoft 365 Copilot demo