Microsoft has introduced ChatGPT technology to Word, Excel, and Outlook

With the launch of Microsoft 365, the company is bringing a powerful suite of cloud-based business software that includes generative artificial intelligence technologies like ChatGPT.

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The enterprise technology giant announced that some of its most popular business apps, such as Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, will now be able to take advantage of the new A.I. features dubbed Copilot.

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LLMs, or large language models, are a type of artificial intelligence software that underpins the Copilot technology. In recent years, researchers have developed LLMs that can understand and respond to text more efficiently.

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Artificial intelligence technologies are capturing the attention of the technology industry, as demonstrated by LLMs that can carry on extended conversations with people via chat interfaces and create images based on written prompts.

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“It is important that we understand today represents the next major milestone in how we interact with computing, as it will fundamentally change the way we work over the coming years and unlock a new wave of productivity growth," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a statement. “In order to enhance accessibility to technology through the most universal interface-natural language-we are providing people with more agency through our new copilot for work.”

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The company is pitching the Copilot features as being more powerful than just being "OpenAI's ChatGPT embedded into Microsoft 365," as the company stated in the announcement it made about the Copilot feature. As a result of the new Copilot in Word feature, people will be able to write a first draft to edit and iterate upon - thereby saving them countless hours spent on writing, sourcing, and editing.

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Microsoft acknowledges that current LLM technology can produce inaccurate responses, adding, "Sometimes Copilot will be right and other times usefully wrong." The company recently unveiled a new generative AI-powered Bing chat tool that sometimes produced inaccurate responses and sometimes even eerie dialogue.

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The Copilot tool was demonstrated during an online presentation by Microsoft executives on Thursday.

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For compelling visuals, family members can create celebration plans and PowerPoint slides spooled from a person's Microsoft OneDrive storage account. New tools will help business leaders create emails and send business proposals more easily, Microsoft said.

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The corporate vice president of Microsoft's modern work and business applications, Jared Spataro, said that Copilot is able to scan and take action based on all the data that is stored in the Microsoft Graph, which stores data like emails, files, meetings, chats, and calendar notes. Copilot's underlying large language model uses this data from Microsoft Graph in order to generate more specific and tailored responses tailored to the individual based on the underlying large language model.

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Microsoft did not specifically state when the new AI copilot features would debut or what the pricing would be, only that it plans to add Copilot to our entire suite of productivity apps, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, Viva, the Power Platform, and more in months to come.

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Copilot is being tested "with a small group of customers to get feedback and improve our models as we scale," but the company did not reveal who the customers were. Copilot is being tested by 20 customers, including eight Fortune 500 companies, according to a Microsoft spokesperson in an email.

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Jaime Teevann, a chief scientist and technical fellow at Microsoft said that Copilot has passed several privacy checks and has taken the appropriate steps to mitigate the risks if the software "gets things wrong, has biases, or is misused.”

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“There will be mistakes, but we’ll fix them as soon as possible,” Teevann said.

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The ChatGPT tool, released in November by Microsoft-backed AI firm OpenAI, is credited with sparking excitement over generative AI.

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Microsoft announced in January that it would invest multiyear and multibillion dollars in OpenAI, but did not specify how much it would invest.

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Earlier this year, Microsoft unveiled a new version of its Bing search engine that included a chatbot powered by OpenAI's GPT-4 language technology.

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This week, OpenAI released GPT-4, its fourth version of its text prediction software, to the public, promoting the technology as a significant improvement over its predecessor, GPT-3, which offers a much more creative and accurate response to text questions.