Highlights:

  • Microsoft believes that adding new AI models to Copilot will lower the cost of running the assistant.
  • Phi-4 is supposedly one of the in-house models that Microsoft may incorporate into Copilot. It was unveiled earlier last month and has 14 billion parameters, which is a small portion of what frontier LLMs have.

Microsoft Corp. to cease dependence on OpenAI in the productivity software market.

The software giant’s Microsoft 365 Copilot tool is reportedly the focus of the endeavor. It is an AI assistant that comes with the productivity suite of the same name. The assistant is now powered by OpenAI technology, and Microsoft is apparently working to include proprietary and open-source artificial intelligence models into it.

Last March, Microsoft 365 Copilot launched. It automates routine operations in the main productivity suite programs. For instance, the Word version of Copilot can create new documents and summarize long ones, and the Excel version offers ideas for data visualization.

Some of the tools administrators use to oversee Microsoft 365 deployments at their organizations also include the assistant. Purview is one of those applications that helps stop employees from utilizing company data in ways that aren’t permitted. The integrated version of Copilot summarizes data breach notifications and offers instructions on how to utilize the program.

Microsoft believes that adding new AI models to Copilot will lower the cost of running the assistant. It is thought that the business may reduce pricing for clients with whatever savings it makes. Another top goal is to speed up Copilot’s response times.

Phi-4 is supposedly one of the in-house models that Microsoft may incorporate into Copilot. It was unveiled earlier last month and has 14 billion parameters, which is a small portion of what frontier LLMs have. This implies that the model’s operating costs were much lower.

According to a Microsoft assessment, Phi-4 fared better on a test that assessed the mathematical abilities of AI models than an LLM with five times as many parameters.

The open-source models that could be incorporated into Copilot were not specified in recent development. But it’s likely that one of the algorithms being considered is Llama LLMs from Meta Platforms Inc. Among the most advanced in the open-source environment, the LLM series exceeds several proprietary frontier models on specific tasks.

Three weeks ago, Llama 3.3, the newest model in the collection, was on sale. With 405 billion parameters, it offers output quality that is comparable to a previous-generation Llama model, but only requires a fraction of the technology. Additionally, it fared better than OpenAI’s GPT-4o on most of the benchmarks that Meta assessed.

Microsoft has begun to lessen its reliance on OpenAI in a number of areas, including the productivity software sector. Google LLC and Anthropic PBC provided support for LLMs to its GitHub unit’s GitHub Copilot coding assistant earlier this year. However, Microsoft reported that “OpenAI continues as the company’s partner on frontier models.”

“We incorporate various models from OpenAI and Microsoft depending on the product and experience,” a Microsoft spokesperson added.