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POLAND - 2024/10/02: In this photo illustration, a Microsoft Copilot logo is displayed on a ...
More smartphone with an AI logo in the background. (Photo Illustration by Omar Marques/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images) Around noon on April 4, Microsoft held a livestream called the 50th Anniversary Copilot event. Now to be clear, it’s not the 50th anniversary of Copilot.
We’ve only had these kinds of capabilities for about five years, and a lot of what people were showcasing is brand new. So there’s a confusing word choice in play. But Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded the company in 1975, so the people at Microsoft decided to set up this showcase that involves “introducing your AI companion,” which is Copilot.
Since Microsoft Copilot is new to so many, it made sense that Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman , who ran the event, would feature some real people and their stories. One panel appearing at the event included Chris Suh, who showed up with his dog Joonie, a Newfoundland, and a woman named Elvira, who learned to use Copilot to help maintain her home with her husband. Suh went over his story of trying to help his neighbor with her dog, and learn dog training methods, so that Joonie and the neighbor’s dog would get along.
“I wanted to make sure I showed up in the best way possible,” he said, noting that Copilot tends to package information well, assisting humans in finding the best ways to move forward with important tasks or projects. He mentioned how Copilot can help people develop the courage to learn in private things that they wouldn’t necessarily go take a class on, or try to do in public. “Tomorrow is never promised,” he said.
“You have today.” Elvira talked about how she wanted to address power issues with her husband’s train room in the house. Using Copilot, she was able to get that knowledge in a way that might not have been possible with traditional Google search.
“All the fears that I had were gone,” she said. “The road ahead is filled with wonder and discovery beyond imagination.” One point on Elvira’a story (and, really, Chris’s, too) is that new models are reinventing search.
For those of us who have been accustomed to clicking hyperlinks to try to find information on any subject, it’s staggering that models like ChatGPT or Copilot can return authoritative answers after scouring the whole web in a matter of seconds. Now, with inference, they can even think at test time, which makes them even more powerful as the providers of answers to human users. Later in the presentation, Suleyman held a conversation with Copilot, demonstrating the model’s capability (and apparent desire) to impress humans.
As the screen filled up with different shapes and patterns, including a proud peacock and some modern-looking stylized designs, the model adopted various conversational tones, including a conspiratorial whisper. This gives people who might not be familiar with current AI capabilities a look at how these models can assimilate into our world and relate to us in remarkable ways. One thing that I ended up taking away from the event was thinking about how this is going to broaden the audience for agentic AI.
Sometimes you have to take a step back, and realize that people who are in the know have been working with this technology for years. But other people who aren’t as close to technology may have very little experience interacting with it, and all of this could be incredibly new. Just a few weeks ago, we saw Google releasing Gemini on endpoint devices.
We know that pretty soon, all of us will have these models in our pockets. The Copilot demonstration is probably an important way station on the way to making this real for a greater number of people..
