Microsoft has expanded its artificial intelligence (AI) offerings to the higher education sector by enhancing privacy features for its Copilot product, set to be accessible to all faculty and higher education students above 18 years starting in early 2024. The program, previously known as Bing Chat Enterprise, will now include commercial data protection, allowing users to engage with Microsoft's AI's capabilities, such as GPT-4 and the DALL-E 3 image generator, without the need to share their data contributions for model training purposes.
Utilization in Academia: Enhancing Learning and Research
Microsoft highlights that students will be able to use Copilot's functions to condense articles, obtain detailed explanations, refine writing competencies, receive critiques on their work, generate ideas, among other educational benefits. An Associate Vice President at Florida State University, Jonathan Fozard, confirmed the substantial improvements AI has brought to the domain of higher education, emphasizing the impact of such tools in molding future leaders.
Introduction to Copilot for Microsoft 365
Concurrently, Microsoft is making Copilot for Microsoft 365 available to the educational staff. Priced at $30 per user per month, starting on January 1, 2024, this version combines large language models with an organization's proprietary data, enhancing productivity. The included data encompasses emails, calendar entries, chat history, and documents. It further offers standard features such as query answers and image generation while safeguarding intellectual property through Microsoft's Customer Copyright Commitment, promising protection against copyright infringement in the use of AI-generated content.
As detailed by the Microsoft Education Blog, this move signifies Microsoft's dedication to advancing AI tools to support educational innovation and resourceful research across higher education institutions.
