Microsoft Copilot is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by Microsoft AI, a division of Microsoft. Following these studies, discussion in the developer and cybersecurity communities has emphasized the trade-off between productivity and safety when using AI code assistants. While Copilot can accelerate coding and improve completeness, researchers note that AI-generated code may still contain subtle logic errors or insecure defaults.
Features
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- Copilot also became fully built-in to Edge as an opt-in experience and an upgraded user interface in Windows 11 was introduced, making Copilot more personal.
- The Codex model is additionally trained on gigabytes of source code in a dozen programming languages.
- During a Microsoft Surface hardware event on May 20, 2024, Microsoft officially announced the “Copilot+ PC” branding.
- The chatbot is able to cite sources, create poems, generate songs, and use numerous languages and dialects.
- A chatbot feature, at the time known as Bing Chat, had been developed by Microsoft and was released in Bing and Edge as part of this overhaul.
- Since Copilot’s release, there have been concerns with its security and educational impact, as well as licensing controversy surrounding the code it produces.
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On 6 February 2025, GitHub announced “agent mode”, which is a more autonomous mode of operation for the Copilot. The agent mode can connect to different LLMs, including GPT-4o, o1, o3-mini, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Gemini 2.0 Flash. This opaque architecture has fueled concerns over telemetry and data mining of individual keystrokes. It is also able to describe input code in English and translate code between programming languages. On June 29, 2021, GitHub announced GitHub Copilot for technical preview in the Visual Studio Code development environment.
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- Additionally, this tool can adjust text formatting, animation timing, and presentation style and length based on user prompts; Microsoft claims this will eliminate the need for users to make manual changes.
- Over the course of 2023, Microsoft began to unify the Copilot branding across its various chatbot products, cementing the “copilot” analogy.
- The company also states that Copilot is able to create PowerPoint presentations that summarize information from user-selected Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, or from user prompts.
- On January 4, 2024, a dedicated Copilot key was announced for Windows keyboards, superseding the menu key.
- The chat interface proved vulnerable to prompt injection attacks with the bot revealing its hidden initial prompts and rules, including its internal codename “Sydney”.
- Copilot will generate code derived from vast datasets that may include copyrighted or insecure examples.
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Chatbots
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- One ethical concern the public has vocalized is that GPT-4 and similar large language models may reinforce racial or gender bias.
- Following these studies, discussion in the developer and cybersecurity communities has emphasized the trade-off between productivity and safety when using AI code assistants.
- At any time, you can take over the task or check in on the progress of the action, including reviewing what actions have been taken.
- Individuals, including Tom Warren, have also voiced concerns for Copilot after witnessing the chatbot showcasing several instances of artificial hallucinations.
- The service was introduced in February 2023 under the name Bing Chat, as a built-in feature for Microsoft Bing and Microsoft Edge.
- With the nature of large language models relying on massive datasets scraped from public sources, this makes it difficult to ensure that the data used for training is fully accurate, unbiased, and ethically sourced.
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The authors caution, however, that the study is limited to a low-level C context with students rather than professional developers, and that different languages, tasks, or threat models may yield different outcomes. Warren also believes that large language models, as they develop further, could change how users work and collaborate. Rowan Curran, an analyst at Forrester, states that the integration of AI into productivity software may lead to improvements in user experience. Since Copilot’s release, there have been concerns with its security and educational impact, as well as licensing controversy surrounding the code it produces.
Experience The World For Less
Individuals, including Tom Warren, have also voiced concerns for Copilot after witnessing the chatbot showcasing several instances of artificial hallucinations. Copilot can be used to rewrite and generate text based on user prompts in Microsoft 365 services, including Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and PowerPoint. GitHub admits that a small proportion of the tool’s output may be copied verbatim, which has led to fears that the output code is insufficiently transformative to be classified as fair use and may infringe on the copyright of the original owner. In June 2022, the Software Freedom Conservancy announced it would end all uses of GitHub in its own projects, accusing Copilot of ignoring code licenses used in training data.
Service
According to Microsoft, this version of Copilot would provide priority access to newer models, including GPT-4 Turbo, during peak usage periods. The service was introduced in February 2023 under the name Bing Chat, as a built-in feature for Microsoft Bing and Microsoft Edge. Over the course of 2023, Microsoft began to unify the Copilot branding across its SlotMonkey various chatbot products, cementing the “copilot” analogy.
Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat
The chat interface proved vulnerable to prompt injection attacks with the bot revealing its hidden initial prompts and rules, including its internal codename “Sydney”. On January 23, 2023, Microsoft announced a multi-year US$10 billion investment in OpenAI. On February 6, Google announced Bard (later rebranded as Gemini), a ChatGPT-like chatbot service, fearing that ChatGPT could threaten Google’s place as a go-to source for information. Since then, OpenAI systems have run on an Azure-based supercomputing platform from Microsoft. On 17 May 2025, GitHub announced “coding agent”, which is a more autonomous mode of operation for the Copilot.