Microsoft reportedly integrating non-OpenAI fashions into Microsoft 365 Copilot

Microsoft Corp. is working to scale back its reliance on OpenAI within the productiveness software program market, Reuters reported in the present day.

The hassle is claimed to deal with the tech big’s Microsoft 365 Copilot product. It’s a synthetic intelligence assistant that ships with the eponymous productiveness suite. Microsoft is reportedly working to combine customized and open-source synthetic intelligence fashions into the assistant, which is presently powered by expertise from OpenAI.

Microsoft 365 Copilot made its debut final March. It automates widespread duties within the productiveness suite’s flagship functions. The model of Copilot embedded in Phrase, for instance, can summarize prolonged paperwork and generate new ones, whereas the Excel model suggests methods to visualise information.

The assistant can also be constructed into among the instruments that directors use to handle their firms’ Microsoft 365 deployments. A type of instruments is Purview, which helps forestall staff from utilizing enterprise information in a certified method. The embedded model of Copilot supplies tips about how one can use the instrument and summarizes information leak alerts.

In response to in the present day’s report, Microsoft hopes that incorporating new AI fashions into Copilot might scale back the price of working the assistant. It’s believed the corporate might use any financial savings it achieves to decrease costs for purchasers. Enhancing Copilot’s response instances is one other precedence. 

One of many internally developed fashions that Microsoft might reportedly construct into Copilot is Phi-4. Launched earlier this month, it options 14 billion parameters, a fraction of the quantity in frontier LLMs. Which means the mannequin price considerably much less to run.

In a Microsoft analysis, Phi-4 outperformed an LLM with 5 instances as many parameters on a benchmark that in contrast AI fashions’ math prowess.

As we speak’s report didn’t specify which open-source fashions might discover their means into Copilot. Nevertheless, it’s possible that Meta Platforms Inc.’s Llama LLMs are among the many algorithms into account. The LLM sequence is without doubt one of the most superior within the open-source ecosystem and outperforms some proprietary frontier fashions throughout sure duties.

The most recent addition to the lineup, Llama 3.3, rolled out three weeks in the past. It supplies comparable output high quality as a previous-generation Llama mannequin with 405 billion parameters, however makes use of solely a fraction of the {hardware}. It additionally largely outperformed OpenAI’s GPT-4o throughout the benchmarks that Meta evaluated.

The productiveness software program market is just not the one space the place Microsoft has began decreasing its reliance on OpenAI. Earlier this 12 months, its GitHub unit’s GitHub Copilot coding assistant obtained assist for LLMs from Google LLC and Anthropic PBC. Nevertheless, Microsoft informed Reuters that “OpenAI continues as the corporate’s accomplice on frontier fashions.”

“We incorporate numerous fashions from OpenAI and Microsoft relying on the product and expertise,” a Microsoft spokesperson added. 

Picture: Microsoft