One advantage of ChatGPT over the competition is that it lets you create custom GPTs for just about anything. OpenAI has big plans for custom GPTs, considering that it has a storefront for them. In reality, custom GPTs haven’t really taken off, and that might be because they’re restricted to ChatGPT Plus, the premium ChatGPT subscription that costs $20 per month.
Microsoft, whose Copilot AI integrates ChatGPT functionality, also seems to think that custom GPTs could become a thing. The company has quietly rolled out the feature to Copilot Pro users. But just like ChatGPT Plus, you have to pay a $20/month fee for access to Copilot Pro.
Copilot Pro gives you access to GPT-4 and GPT-4 Turbo. It also lets you use the AI chatbot in Microsoft 365 apps. Plus, you can create significantly more images with Designer than you can with the free version of Copilot.
Custom GPTs were added to the premium version of Copilot a few days ago, as seen in the screenshot and video above.
A new My Custom Copilot tab is available to Copilot Pro users, which lets them create custom GPTs. I’m not a subscriber of Copilot Pro, but I do pay for ChatGPT Plus. The custom GPT feature is one of the main things that got me to finally pull the trigger and get a subscription to OpenAI’s chatbot.
Sadly, the custom ChatGPT experience turned out to be less exciting than I thought. And while I got ChatGPT Plus for the custom chatbots, I actually stayed for access to GPT-4 as well as the new ChatGPT features that will roll out first to premium subscribers.
I did play with the custom GPT builder, and it’s incredibly easy to get your custom ChatGPTs going. All you need to do is come up with a set of instructions that will govern the ChatGPT bot. The custom GPTs can still answer pretty much everything you ask of them, but they’ll be focused on a specific set of instructions. You can even upload files to give a custom chatbot more information about the tasks it has to perform.
It’s no surprise that custom Copilot GPT creation is similar. As you can see in the tweets from Paul Couvert, you can create a new Copilot GPT with the press of a button.
You’ll chat with Copilot to set up the custom bot, and the process is similar to OpenAI’s custom GPT setup. That’s not surprising. Microsoft is the biggest investor in OpenAI, and ChatGPT is at the core of Copilot. It seems only natural for Microsoft to want to replicate the custom GPT features that OpenAI offers.
There is one big difference between the custom GPT that OpenAI supports and Microsoft’s custom Copilot GPT. The latter will be available to Copilot users who do not pay for the Pro subscription. You’d still need someone to share those custom Copilots with you so you can get access to them.
If you’re on Copilot Pro, you can start creating custom Copilots that can handle specific tasks just for you. You don’t have to share them with anyone else. The same goes for custom GPTs on ChatGPT Plus.
It’ll be interesting to see if Microsoft can help this custom GPT feature take off. I might not be using custom GPTs that much, but I still think the feature is promising. It might be one of the precursors to next-gen apps where AI plays a central role, as well as personal AI assistants that can do specific tasks for the user.
