Microsoft’s AI Boss Wants Copilot to Bring ‘Emotional Support’ to Windows and Office

We don’t save any of the material with Copilot Vision, so once you close the browser after your session, it all just disappears. It fully deletes. But I’m thinking about if and how to introduce it in the future, because a lot of people do want that experience. If you could just say, ‘What was that picture that I saw online the other day? What was that meme?’ I think we’ll have to look into it one day.

At the moment, though, the Copilot Vision tool is ephemeral. We’ll sort of have to experiment over time and see what makes sense on that front.

What about the privacy risks introduced when people share sensitive information with Copilot otherwise?

We store the logs that you generate as a result of your conversation, those in the most secure way, to the highest standard of Microsoft Security. And we do save those because obviously you do want conversation history.

You’re also introducing Think Deeper, which will let Copilot tackle more difficult problems. This is based on OpenAI’s o1 model, aka Strawberry, right?

It’s like Strawberry, yeah. There’s an OpenAI model that we’ve tuned up for our more consumer purposes, and we’ve got it to act in a way that is more consistent with our AI companion theme.

What are the differences?

OpenAI’s is much more focused on pure math and scientific problem-solving. And what we’ve tried to do is have it focus on side-by-side comparisons and sort of consumer analysis, stuff like that.

Or when you get stuck on a hard problem or you want to reason through something, then it can really lay out a side-by-side comparison, or do an analysis at scale.

Are people at Microsoft already using this new version of Copilot?

Yeah, everyone’s using it. We’ve just gone on general availability across the company a few days ago. So everybody is using it, giving tons and tons of feedback. Our feedback channels are absolutely slammed. It’s a lot of fun.

People are going to remember Clippy, Microsoft’s last AI helper for Windows. Do people there see parallels?

Ha, well I saw Bill Gates the other day, and he was like, you do realize you’ve misnamed this whole AI thing? It should be called Clippy. I was like, dude!

But I mean, it just shows you how mind-blowing people like Bill are. People who see, not just, you know, two years ahead, but 20 years.

Are the new features a step toward so-called AI agents, which do useful chores on a computer?

Yeah, absolutely. The first stage is AI processing the same information that you process—seeing what you see, hearing what you hear, consuming the text that you consume. The second phase is [AI having] a long term, persistent memory that creates a shared understanding over time. And the third stage is AI interacting with third parties by sending instructions and taking actions—to buy things, book things, plan a schedule. And we’ve got these two features in an experimental R&D mode that we’re working on.