Timeline of Microsoft Copilot

This is a timeline of Bing Chat, a chatbot developed by Microsoft, which uses a large language model to generate responses to user input.

Full timeline

Year	Month and date	Event type	Details
2023	January 23		Microsoft and OpenAI announce the third phase of their partnership through a multiyear, multibillion dollar investment to accelerate AI breakthroughs and ensure these benefits are broadly shared with the world. Microsoft is expected to increase its investments in the development and deployment of specialized supercomputing systems to accelerate OpenAI’s independent AI research. Additionally, Microsoft would deploy OpenAI’s models across its consumer and enterprise products and introduce new categories of digital experiences built on OpenAI’s technology. As OpenAI’s exclusive cloud provider, Azure would power all OpenAI workloads across research, products, and API services.
2023	February 7		Microsoft initiates the release of a significant revamp to Microsoft Bing, which involves introducing a novel chatbot functionality powered by OpenAI's GPT-4.
2023	March 16		Microsoft's Chief Communications Officer, Frank X. Shaw, provides some starter prompts for communicators to use the new AI-powered Bing. Shaw highlights that Bing is in preview at the time and can assist in media interview prep, media coverage snapshots, social media post inspiration, and headline generation. Bing is capable of generating 10 interview questions in the voice of a specific person, provide quick snapshots of media coverage, brainstorming ideas for social media posts, and creating engaging headlines.
2023	April 1		Microsoft makes several improvements to Bing Chat, including adding image and video search, increasing the maximum number of chat turns per session to 20 and per day to 200, and enhancing local search results. Users can now find locations and businesses near them more easily. Microsoft also addresses issues and gaps in Bing Chat within the Edge Sidebar, such as bringing context enhancements to summarize larger pages and documents, supporting Bing Image Creator in Creative mode, and improving the loading speed of the sidebar.
2023	April 6		Microsoft introduces AI functionality to the beta version of the SwiftKey keyboard for Android through Bing Chat AI integration. Users can now access Bing Chat to generate text, engage in conversation, and use Microsoft's search engine directly from the keyboard. Additionally, the latest SwiftKey beta allows users to have sections of text rewritten by AI with different tones. The availability of these features for iOS users is not specified yet. The beta version of Microsoft SwiftKey can be downloaded from Google Play.
2023	April 10		An article suggests using BingChat as a tool to evaluate investors like Berkshire Hathaway co-chairman Charlie Munger, and enhance investment research. BingChat can provide immediate answers to various questions and save research time. By asking questions like "Explain Company X in terms of a Mental Model," users can gain insights into different aspects of a company's operations and performance. Additionally, maintaining a checklist of mental models can help assess companies effectively. According to the article, using BingChat and incorporating mental models can provide a competitive advantage in evaluating companies.
2023	April 21		Microsoft introduces several updates to Bing Chat, including the addition of LaTeX support for accurately displaying complex mathematical expressions. User feedback leads to improvements in reducing end-of-conversation triggers, ensuring conversations are not prematurely terminated. Bing Chat has also enhanced its news grounding, providing more informed answers to news-related queries. In addition to these updates, Microsoft has made bug fixes and technical improvements to improve the overall user experience.
2023	April 27		An article compares Bing Chat with ChatGPT. It describes one notable difference between the two chatbots, which is the technology they use. ChatGPT is powered by the GPT-3.5 LLM (Large Language Model), while Bing Chat utilizes the newer GPT-4 LLM. Microsoft claims that GPT-4 is more accurate and capable, offering creative replies, longer memory of conversations, and the ability to process visual queries. While Bing Chat integrates GPT-4 for free, ChatGPT requires a paid upgrade to access this feature. Both chatbots have limitations. Bing Chat has a daily conversation limit due to past incidents of unexpected responses after prolonged interactions. ChatGPT, on the other hand, does not impose such limits but has an hourly query limit. Additionally, ChatGPT is limited to information available until 2021 and cannot access the internet for fact-checking, whereas Bing Chat can retrieve information online. The article concludes that Bing Chat excels in accuracy and concise responses, while ChatGPT offers deeper and more expressive writing.
2023	May 4		Microsoft makes Bing GPT-4 chatbot available to everyone without the need for a waitlist. Users can access the preview version by signing in to Bing or Edge with their Microsoft account. The new version is powered by GPT-4 and includes smart features such as image and video results, persistent chat and history, and plug-in support. By this time, Microsoft is also reportedly working with OpenTable and WolframAlpha to enable their plug-ins for restaurant bookings and generating visualizations, respectively.
2023	May 6	Competition	An article compares ChatGPT to Bing Chat, announcing a list of new features that are comparable to what ChatGPT offers to its paid subscribers. The author concludes that ChatGPT Plus is not worth the money and OpenAI needs to rethink its approach to charging for ChatGPT.
2023	May 7	Growth	Bing Chat reportedly experiences rapid growth, surpassing the capacity of its servers to handle the increasing demand. As a result, some users encounter slow and laggy experiences. Mikhail Parakhin, the CEO of Microsoft Bing Search, acknowledges the issue on Twitter, apologizing for the latency and explaining that the company is struggling to add GPUs quickly enough to keep up with usage growth. At this time, the resource-intensive nature of AI solutions poses unique challenges that go beyond traditional web applications, even for a company like Microsoft with vast web management and cloud hosting capabilities.
2023	May 10	Competition	An article compares Open-source HuggingChat with Bing Chat and ChatGPT. It concludes that, at the time, HuggingChat falls short compared to ChatGPT and Bing Chat, with typos, limited data, and misunderstandings. HuggingChat's transparency remains its main advantage. The articleconcludes that ChatGPT is versatile but lacks real-time information, while Bing Chat is connected to the internet but has stricter restrictions.
2023	May 11		Microsoft introduces new features and enhancements to Bing Chat. The updates include the ability to save chats and resume them later, chat customization based on previous conversations, sharing chats on social platforms, improvements to the Image Builder tool, more visual answers with charts and tables, summarization of long content such as articles and web pages, and the integration of Edge actions to complete tasks.
2023	May 20	Update	Bing Chat increases its character limit from 2,000 to 4,000 characters, allowing for longer questions or queries to be posed to the bot. The higher character limit provides users with more flexibility and room to express their queries in Bing Chat.
2023	May 23		Microsoft announces the introduction of Windows Copilot, an AI "copilot" aimed to be integrated into Windows 11. This AI assistant, powered by Microsoft's Bing Chat, has its own dedicated side panel and provides personalized answers, assists with actions within Windows, and interacts with open apps contextually. The Copilot leverages plugins available for Bing Chat to improve productivity, facilitates collaboration, and support complex projects. The Windows Copilot is reported to be available as a preview for Windows 11 starting in June. Additionally, Microsoft reportedly creates an "AI Hub" in the Microsoft Store, featuring AI-driven apps and experiences, including AI-generated review summaries compiled from application reviews.
2023	May 30		Bing Chat introduces a new feature that includes anchor text hyperlinks within its answers. Previously, citations and answers were displayed in the footer of the response. Now Bing Chat generates actual HTML hyperlinks as part of its responses. The anchor text-based hyperlinks enhance the visual presentation of the answers. An example of this implementation was shared on Twitter, receiving positive feedback from users.
2023	June 5		Bing Chat introduces several enhancements, including the expansion of the maximum number of turns per conversation from 20 to 30, allowing for more extensive interactions between users and the chatbot. Furthermore, Bing Image Creator, a feature introduced in March, initially limited to Creative mode, becomes available in all chat modes, including Precise and Balanced modes. This expanded support enables users to generate customized images based on their requests within the chat. Additionally, travel-related queries within Bing Chat now yield more visual results, presenting users with relevant images and accompanying links for further information from Bing Travel.

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