Microsoft-owned GitHub announced on Wednesday a free version of its popular Copilot code completion/AI pair programming tool, which will also now ship by default with Microsoft’s popular VS Code editor. Until now, most developers had to pay a monthly fee, starting at $10 per month, with only verified students, teachers, and open source maintainers getting […]
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Microsoft’s AI can now read your screen — or rather, the websites you’re browsing. On Thursday, the company began rolling out a limited, U.S.-only preview of Copilot Vision, a tool that can understand and respond to questions about sites you’re visiting using Microsoft Edge. Gated behind Copilot Labs, an opt-in program for experimental AI capabilities, […]
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Microsoft
Microsoft first unveiled a revamped, AI-powered version of its search engine, Bing, last year.
The new Bing, which promised to be "more powerful than ChatGPT," runs on Microsoft's own next-generation language model called "Prometheus." The proprietary technology was developed using elements of OpenAI's most advanced GPT models as part of Microsoft's partnership with the company.
Built into the revamped search engine is Microsoft's AI chatbot, Copilot, which can perform a number of tasks the old Bing never dreamed of, like suggesting recipes, writing poems, conducting image-based search queries, and making restaurant reservations. Copilot was formerly called Bing Chat.
Microsoft's Bing was launched in 2009, more than a decade after Google's launch — and though it's come a long way since then, Bing still holds a fraction of the market share compared to Google.
And though Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella once raved that Copilot would "fundamentally transform our relationship with technology," the AI assistant has struggled to live up to the hype, both inside and outside the company.
Here's a step-by-step walkthrough of how to access and use the new Bing with Copilot.
Go to Bing.com/new in your internet browser.
Note: You don't need to download Microsoft's web browser, Edge, but if you do, Copilot is integrated directly into the browser, with an icon in the top-right corner that lets you chat with the AI companion.
Bing/Microsoft
One option is to click "Try now" underneath the heading "Bing generative search," located directly below the general search bar on the Bing homepage.
Bing/Microsoft
Bing/Microsoft
You can also type in your own query, like "How to paint a bathroom," and, depending on the query you search, the results will offer helpful sections including relevant videos, instructions, and, in this case, a section on the side for the best paint to use on bathroom cabinets.
Bing/Microsoft
Another option is to click "Copilot" in the bar at the very top of the Bing homepage.
Bing/Microsoft
In the "Message Copilot" text field at the bottom of the page, you can type something you need help with, like, for example, "Write me a poem," or "plants that survive with minimal light." The chatbot will quickly give you a detailed response — for example, it offered 10 options for plants that don't need much light.
Copilot/Microsoft
Google got some disappointing news at a status conference Tuesday, where US District Judge Amit Mehta suggested that Google's AI products may be restricted as an appropriate remedy following the government's win in the search monopoly trial.
According to Law360, Mehta said that "the recent emergence of AI products that are intended to mimic the functionality of search engines" is rapidly shifting the search market. Because the judge is now weighing preventive measures to combat Google's anticompetitive behavior, the judge wants to hear much more about how each side views AI's role in Google's search empire during the remedies stage of litigation than he did during the search trial.
"AI and the integration of AI is only going to play a much larger role, it seems to me, in the remedy phase than it did in the liability phase," Mehta said. "Is that because of the remedies being requested? Perhaps. But is it also potentially because the market that we have all been discussing has shifted?"
© SOPA Images / Contributor | LightRocket
Over five months after publicly scrapping the first version of the Windows Recall feature for its first wave of Copilot+ PCs, Microsoft announced today that a newly rearchitected version of Recall is finally ready for public consumption.
For now, the preview will be limited to a tiny subset of PCs: Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite and Plus Copilot+ PCs enrolled in the Dev channel of the Windows Insider program (the build of Windows that includes Recall is 26120.2415). Intel and AMD Copilot+ PCs can’t access the Recall preview yet, and regular Windows 11 PCs won’t support the feature at all.
If you haven’t been following along, Recall is one of Microsoft’s many AI-driven Windows features exclusive to Copilot+ PCs, which come with a built-in neural processing unit (NPU) capable of running AI and machine learning workloads locally on your device rather than in the cloud. When enabled, Recall runs in the background constantly, taking screenshots of all your activity and saving both the screenshots and OCR’d text to a searchable database so that users can retrace their steps later.
© Jason Redmond/AFP via Getty Images
Microsft
You know when a colleague overshares at work? It's awkward at best.
Microsoft's Copilot has been doing an AI version of this behavior, which has unnerved corporate customers so much that some have delayed deploying the product, as Business Insider first reported last week.
Now, the software giant is trying to fix the problem. On Tuesday, Microsoft released new tools and a guide to help customers mitigate a Copilot security issue that inadvertently let employees access sensitive information, such as CEO emails and HR documents.
These updates are designed "to identify and mitigate oversharing and ongoing governance concerns," the company explained in a new blueprint for Microsoft's 365 productivity software suite.
"Many data governance challenges in the context of AI were not caused by AI's arrival," a Microsoft spokesperson told BI on Wednesday.
AI is simply the latest call to action for enterprises to take proactive management of their internal documents and other information, the spokesman added.
These decisions are controlled by each company's unique situation. Factors such as specific industry regulations and varying risk tolerance should inform these decisions, according to the Microsoft spokesperson. For instance, different employees should have access to different types of files, workspaces, and other resources.
"Microsoft is helping customers enhance their central governance of identities and permissions, to help organizations continuously update and manage these fundamental controls," the spokesman said.
Copilot's magic — its ability to create a 10-slide road-mapping presentation, or to summon up a list of your company's most profitable products — works by browsing and indexing all of your company's internal information, like the web crawlers used by search engines.
Historically, IT departments at some companies have set up lax permissions for who can access internal documents — selecting "allow all," say, for the company's HR software, rather than going through the trouble of selecting specific users.
That never created much of a problem, because there wasn't a tool that an average employee could use to identify and retrieve sensitive company documents — until Copilot.
As a result, some customers have deployed Copilot, only to discover that it can enable employees to read an executive's inbox or access sensitive HR documents.
"Now, when Joe Blow logs into an account and kicks off Copilot, they can see everything," said one Microsoft employee familiar with customer complaints. "All of a sudden Joe Blow can see the CEO's emails."
Are you a Microsoft employee or someone else with insight to share?
Contact Ashley Stewart via the encrypted messaging app Signal (+1-425-344-8242) or email ([email protected]). Use a nonwork device.
In the short-term, the most dangerous thing about AI language models may be their ability to emotionally manipulate humans if not carefully conditioned. The world saw its first taste of that potential danger in February 2023 with the launch of Bing Chat, now called Microsoft Copilot.
During its early testing period, the temperamental chatbot gave the world a preview of an "unhinged" version of OpenAI's GPT-4 prior to its official release. Sydney's sometimes uncensored and "emotional" nature (including use of emojis) arguably gave the world its first large-scale encounter with a truly manipulative AI system. The launch set off alarm bells in the AI alignment community and served as fuel for prominent warning letters about AI dangers.
On November 19 at 4 pm Eastern (1 pm Pacific), Ars Technica Senior AI Reporter Benj Edwards will host a livestream conversation on YouTube with independent AI researcher Simon Willison that will explore the impact and fallout of the 2023 fiasco. We're calling it "Bing Chat: Our First Encounter with Manipulative AI."
© Aurich Lawson | Getty Images
