Microsoft removes another Bing brand from Copilot

Microsoft continues to distance its new flagship pre-generative artificial intelligent platform Copilot from its second-rate Bing branding as it looks to monetize its large language models.

Yesterday, Microsoft announced a new subscription-based version of its AI platform Copilot under the brand Copilot Pro, and tucked away in the reveal was a small the small branding change Bing Image Creator to simply Designer.

From Bing Image Creator to Designer

When Microsoft began bundling the power of OpenAI’s text-to-image model DALL-E into the company’s general image search engine Bing it was initially branded with the straightforward title of Bing Image Creator.

However, it looks like with the announcement of a new $20 per user a month subscription model in place to monetize Copilot comes new branding for the text-to-image model, now called Designer.

What is different in Designer?

While DALL-E was recently updated to version 3 and combined with the latest ChatGPT-4 models the focus on more up-to-date data as well as the mitigation of harmful content and privacy, it doesn’t appear that Microsoft is offering any additional features alongside the name change.

Per Microsoft’s Copilot Pro pricing info, Designer will be the name for the text-to-image model for both the Pro and Consumer versions of Copilot.

The free version of Copilot will support consumer created AI images with fifteen boosts per day, while Copilot Pro will support AI created images with one hundred boosts per day, the ability to produce landscape formatted images and well as bump in speed at which images are generated.

To contextualize Bing Image Creator being rebranded to Designer it should be noted that Microsoft also introduced its OpenAI borrowed LLM as Bing Chat to later be renamed to Copilot.

Why change from Bing branding?

Early on Microsoft believed Bing search could be an all-encompassing and nebulous query home bolstered by adding ChatGPT models to it. However, it would seem someone in marketing alerted the higher ups to stagnant branding Bing carries with it, and if Copilot is to succeed, it will have to do so on its own.

As a result, the Bing branding is being detached from Copilot despite it being the underlying infrastructure to many of the LLMs used in platform, and rebranded with more general terms so Microsoft can apply it to many more of its businesses outside of its second rate search efforts.