As OpenAI experienced some unexpected turbulence over the weekend (if you haven't caught up on the saga that's left the tech world agog – click here), there’s one question everyone is asking: will Copilot fly in to steal ChatGPT’s crown?

Copilot from Microsoft is the product that the business world has been talking about for months. Now everyone can use it for free at copilot.microsoft.com.

If you’ve already mastered ChatGPT prompting at General Purpose AI – feat not! - your prompt engineering skills are safe. Copilot is also a front-end for GPT-4, which is the same technology that powers ChatGPT Plus under the hood.

Moreover, it’s free! Copilot allows you to use GPT-4 without the need for a ChatGPT Plus subscription. It even allows you to generate images using DALLE-3. (For the uninitiated, the free version of ChatGPT uses GPT-3.5. It tends to produce less polished output, making it a bit less useful on a day-to-day basis at work).

Copilot is cropping up elsewhere, too. Enterprise clients of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook might have noticed Copilot aids embedded within these applications, advancing Microsoft’s long-standing determination to assist with whatever you’re doing – whether you want that help or not.

Anyone who has updated a CV in Word will not have missed the “It Looks Like You’re Writing a Resumé” bubble, and those with long memories will not have forgotten Clippy. Copilot assistants bring such tools into 2023, facilitating the integration of GPT into routine tasks. Remember, adept prompting is still crucial for generating useful results.

Will Copilot assistants be more useful than Clippy? Time will tell. Nevertheless, the core version of Copilot is worth a test spin right now.