Let’s talk about Microsoft co-pilot
The Super Bowl just recently happened between, I think, Taylor Swift and Usher, or something like that. And during the Super Bowl, the part that everybody watches – the commercials – there was an ad for Microsoft co-pilot. Now, if you’ve been deep in the AI space for the last year and a half, you’ve probably already heard of co-pilot. You’ve played with co-pilot. It used to be Bing chat. But for a lot of people, this commercial was their first introduction, their first time ever hearing about Microsoft co-pilot.
So, I thought it would be fun to do a quick breakdown of the Super Bowl commercial, test some of the prompts that they actually showed on the screen during the ad. And then, after we’ve done that, I want to give you even more details around what co-pilot is actually capable of because, well, this commercial just kind of scratches the surface.
The commercial starts out with a bunch of people saying that other people are telling them they can’t do stuff. “I’ll never be able to open my own business or get a degree.” “You’ll never make your own movie or build something.” They say, “I’m too old to learn something new, too young to change the world.” But I say, watch me. And then it goes into showing off what co-pilot can do.
The first prompt we see them do is “generate storyboard images for the dragon scene in my screenplay.” Let’s see what happens when we give it that exact prompt. It starts to generate an image and it generates what I guess I would sort of describe as a picture of a storyboard, not necessarily a storyboard itself. Here’s another image it generated, and here’s the third. It’s just interesting because it’s not really creating a storyboard; it’s sort of cutting off the edges of the storyboard. And here’s the fourth one. And if we go back to their YouTube video, here’s what it generated for them. So, even in their image, you could see it sort of cut off the storyboard. This is the reality versus what they gave in the commercial. This being AI, you can enter this exact same prompt 100 different times and get a hundred different outcomes that all look completely different. I’m sure with some variation of wording and enough tries, you could probably get prompts that look as colorful and well laid out as a storyboard.
Now, the next prompt they give it is “write code for my 3D open world game.” Let’s see what co-pilot actually gives us. Entering the prompt exactly the same, and at least with the free version of co-pilot, it won’t generate code for us. It says, “I’m sorry, but I cannot write code for your 3D open world game. This is a very complex and creative task that requires a lot of planning, design, and testing. I can only help you with basic aspects of game development, such as finding resources, learning concepts, and generating ideas.” It then goes on to basically tell me how I can go about learning to code. I had this set on more creative. If I put it on more precise and give it the exact same prompt again, this time it wrote some really basic code, but it does say creating a 3D open world game is a complex task that involves various components such as graphics rendering, physics simulation, AI, and more. Here’s a very basic example of how you might start setting up a 3D environment using Unity C# scripting. I have no idea if this code would actually run or not, but it doesn’t seem like it’s substantial enough to actually really do anything. In the commercial, it actually appears to write much more in-depth code.
Here, the next prompt that the commercial shows on screen is “quiz me in organic chemistry.” Go ahead and start a new topic, quiz me in organic chemistry. It gave me a question, but man, it was slow. I don’t know what was going on, but it took forever to do this. It asked, “What is the IAC name for the organic compound with the following structure,” gave the structure, and then gave four options and then told us to reply with the answer. Here, I have absolutely no clue. I’ll just say one for ethanol, and I got it correct. And then it asks if I want another question. Jumping back to the commercial, here they give the prompt, “design a sign for my classic Truck Repair Garage mics,” and those are the signs that it produced. Let’s see what happens when we give it that same prompt here. Here are the four images that it generated, and again, here’s what they looked like in the ad. Not quite the same, not horrible. I couldn’t really get the words right. These are all kinds of cool neon. I have a feeling the prompt that was used to get these actual images aren’t the prompt that they showed off in the commercial, if I just had to guess.
And then the last prompt that the commercial shows is “can you help me,” and then the rest is cut off. It doesn’t ever actually show what she was asking for, and it obviously showed this prompt to give the payoff of the commercial, which was co-pilot responding, “Yes, I can help.” But what we’ve looked at here so far is kind of just scratching the surface of co-pilot. Yes, you can go to co-pilot.microsoft.com. You get these three options here. If you’re on a newer version of Windows, you actually get a co-pilot bar that you can press a button on Windows, and it will pop up co-pilot on the side.
But Microsoft also has what they call co-pilot Pro and co-pilot Pro Pro, which is actually 20 bucks a month to use, and it gives you a little bit more control over what you can do with co-pilot, gives better outputs, and it also allows you to use co-pilot inside of Microsoft 365 apps. So, if you have a Microsoft 365 account, you can use co-pilot inside of Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Word, you name it. Pretty much all of the Microsoft apps allow you to use co-pilot inside of them.
However, I have noticed that the outputs that you get from the pro version tend to be quite a bit better than the outputs you get from the non-pro version. Now, let’s try those exact same prompts from the commercial, but this time let’s try them in the pro version. We asked the pro version to generate storyboard images for the dragon scene in my screenplay. We actually get images that are probably a little bit closer to what we saw in the ad. As a reminder, here’s what the ad showed, and check out this one down here in the bottom left. If I click into it and get a bigger view of it, it’s looking a little bit closer to the demo one that they gave us. Not too bad. While I’m on this image page, another new feature that co-pilot just rolled out (and I believe this is on both the free and the paid version) is the ability to select and segment out just sections of an image. So, I can select just the dragon here, blur the background of everything behind the dragon, or make it so the dragon has color but everything else is black and white. There are more features being rolled out soon for this segment feature.
Now, the next prompt from the commercial (write code for my 3D open world game) gave a fairly similar response – that it gave some code but looking at it, it doesn’t look like it would actually do anything. It says, “This code provides a starting point for your game’s main script. You’ll need to expand on this with additional scripts to handle player movement, etc.” But looking at this, I’m not a coder, but I can tell you that there’s really not really even the start to anything there. So, even though the commercial is saying it can write code for your 3D open world game, I think that’s a feature they may have gotten ahead of themselves a little bit. It doesn’t seem to do great with that prompt yet.
Next up, let’s ask it to quiz me in organic chemistry. It’s running much faster. What I found interesting is that it asked the same question as last time, which I know happens to be ethanol. But let’s have it give us another question. And by the way, this is just the free version. Here’s what we get. “Which of the following reactions is an example of a substitution reaction?” I have no idea. I’m going to guess two; it’s the only one that has an equal sign in it. Not correct. Who would have thought? I don’t know anything about organic chemistry. And finally, I’m going to switch it back to creative mode here, and this time we’ll ask it to design a sign for my classic Truck Repair Garage mics. Once again, fairly similar results, although this time, in two of the signs, it did spell “miks” right, so I guess it’s a little bit of an improvement. I don’t know if that’s just sort of luck. I don’t think it’s using any sort of different model between the free version and the paid version. I think I just got a different seed this time that was better with generating text.
Where co-pilot Pro really stands out and starts to make it feel worth it is if you are a big user of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. If you use PowerPoint, Excel, Word, OneNote, Outlook, you use those suite of tools, co-pilot Pro is something you might want to look into. So, if I open up PowerPoint and start with a blank presentation, if you look up in the top right up here, you can see I now have an option in my PowerPoint for co-pilot. I click this and it opens up my co-pilot dashboard. The very first thing I tried when I opened up co-pilot was I copied and pasted an outline for a presentation into co-pilot and said, “Here’s an outline for a slide presentation, make this presentation for me.” But it couldn’t do that. That was kind of a bummer. I was really hoping to see it take a whole outline that I generated and then AI turned that into slides for me. However, I can create a presentation and give it a topic and it will generate the whole presentation from scratch. It just won’t generate the outline for me. So, I create a presentation about the world’s largest birds. After several seconds, it says, “Okay, here you go. A presentation about the world’s largest birds has been created with multiple slides.” It looks like it generated six slides for us: the largest birds in the world, ostrich some details about the ostrich, Southern caari, emperor penguin, Indian Condor, hoats eagle. I don’t know why it has a picture of like a fly or mosquito here. It made a pretty decent job with the text, but it kind of failed on the images. Being a presentation about birds, it seems kind of odd that just the first has a picture of a bird, not a particularly big bird, and then the rest really have nothing to do with birds. It’s more showing their habitat than what the bird actually looks like. I can then ask questions about this deck or add a slide about. So, that’s what co-pilot can do inside of PowerPoint.
One quick thing before we wrap up. I am going to be giving away a GeForce RTX 4080 Super. It’s actually really heavy because the card is in this box right now. Nvidia sent this to me. I thought about putting it in my computer, and I went no, I’m going to give it to somebody. I’m going to give it to somebody who watches this channel. In order to win it, you just have to register for the free GTC conference. I’ll put a link below to where you can learn more about it. This video isn’t sponsored by them, but I did tell them I would shout out GTC and their free virtual event. The link to GTC will be in the description. It’s totally free to register. It’s a virtual online event that you can watch. They do have an in-person component, but in order to be eligible to win this, all you have to do is register for the free virtual event. And that’s what I’ve got for you today.
In conclusion, I really like Microsoft co-pilot because it is using GPT-4 Turbo, so it should give us pretty good responses like what you can expect from the paid version of chat GPT. However, as of right now, it doesn’t seem to be very fine-tuned or good at writing code. The direct integrations inside of PowerPoint and Excel and Microsoft Word, at least, leave a little bit to be desired. With Excel, I was having some issues using it in the downloadable app. PowerPoint honestly didn’t really feel that helpful to me. I couldn’t upload an outline and have it make a presentation based on the outline. When I asked it to make a presentation for me, it made a really short one and then didn’t even add images that were relevant to the rest of the presentation. Some of the Microsoft 365 integrations are not super great yet. I think the pro version needs some work. I don’t think I could honestly recommend going and grabbing the pro version, especially if you’re paying for chat GPT+ right now because the 365 integration still kind of wonky. And there’s not enough value in the paid version over what you get in the free version. That’s just my feeling on it right now. I think it’s going to get there. I think a lot of the 365 integrations are going to work a lot better. I think Microsoft is actively working on this.
As of this video, as of right now, today, as I’m recording this, I don’t think it’s worth the 20 bucks. It’s hard to justify that 20 bucks when the 365 doesn’t work very well, and the difference between what we get out of the free results and the paid results inside of the chatbot doesn’t seem too different.
This is very, very early stages, but because there was a Super Bowl ad and a lot more people are aware of this product, I thought I would give my thoughts on it and play around with it and show it to you. So, there you have it. I hope you found this helpful and can make a better, more informed decision about co-pilot. I will be making more videos about co-pilot in the future. I think it will improve, so this is just where it’s at right now.
Thank you so much for tuning in. I really, really appreciate you. I’ll see you in the next video! Bye, bye.
