Microsoft makes companies pay for AI use – these are the prices

BinChat, Microsoft’s GPT-4 based chatbot, will no longer be completely free for commercial use. The company announced this in a blog post on Tuesday. To continue using the service in a commercial environment, a software subscription of “Microsoft 365” will be required in the future 20 euro per month per user. Customers who want to use the service without the extensive 365 software package can use Bing Chat as a standalone offering $5 subscription per user per month.

Prices in US dollars refer to the US. How much the service will cost in Europe was not initially disclosed. The service will remain free for private users for the time being.

Data protection for business customers

When it comes to AI-powered chats, companies are concerned that their company’s data is not adequately protected. Many have therefore restricted or blocked access to ChatGPT for their employees. Microsoft manager Yusuf Mehdi therefore emphasized that Microsoft offers a high level of data protection with Bing Chat Enterprise. User and company data is protected and cannot be leaked. «What comes in – and what comes out – remains protected. Chat data isn’t saved and Microsoft doesn’t have access to it – meaning no one can see your data», assured Mehdi. In addition, the customer data would not be used to train the language models.

Mehdi also announced the prices of the much more extensive AI package in the blog post «Microsoft 365 Copilot» for business customers. It should be a premium 30 dollars per user per month in addition to the 365 subscription. Copilot is tightly integrated with the Microsoft Office applications Word, Excel and Powerpoint and can analyze the content of emails, calendars, chats and documents. Copilot uses OpenAI’s GPT-4 large language model to help users with a variety of tasks.

Mehdi explained that some generative AI apps (such as ChatGPT) focus on a single skill, such as real-time transcription or text conception. Microsoft Copilot, on the other hand, offers “thousands of skills” and can “think through all the content and context to handle any task.”

The technology used by Microsoft is mainly based on the GPT-4 language model, which was only presented to a wider audience by the start-up OpenAI in mid-March. Closely tied to the small San Francisco company, Microsoft has invested some $13 billion in OpenAI, according to industry estimates. In addition to OpenAI, Microsoft mainly competes with Google and its AI service Bard.

At the same time as Microsoft, Facebook parent company Meta opened its new artificial intelligence Llama 2 to business customers on Tuesday. Unlike Microsoft’s enterprise AI products, Meta’s AI language model is open source and free.

(oli/sda/awp/dpa)