In a surprising move, Microsoft has decided to retire the GPT Builder feature in Copilot Pro for consumers, just three months after it began rolling out the service broadly. The tool enables customers to build and configure customized GPTs for specialized use-cases. However, fast-forward three months, and it turns out that the company has decided to kill off the tool for consumers this July for unspecified reasons.
When and why is GPT Builder being retired for consumers?
As discovered by Windows Latest, Microsoft began recently rolling out email notifications for GPT Builder's retirement. Although the email doesn't go into a lot of details, it does offer ways to cancel the Copilot Pro subscription, which may make sense for some, considering that the $20/month subscription won't bundle GPT Builder anymore.
In a dedicated support document, Microsoft shed some more light on the topic, stating that it is "evaluating" its strategy regarding Copilot extensibility in consumer use-cases. As such, it has now reached the conclusion that GPT Builder for consumers is not a viable offering, with the company still remaining committed to enterprise and commercial support for the technology. Microsoft will remove GPT Builder for consumers from July 10, with associated GPTs and data being removed by July 14.
How will I be affected by this retirement?
Consumers cannot take any significant action in response to this retirement, except save the instructions for their GPTs for reference or cancel their Copilot Pro subscriptions. Microsoft will delete all Copilot GPTs and related data from its platform, and it will not be possible for customers to access the GPTs that they created previously. The decision to kill off GPT Builder so soon after launch is rather surprising, and it indicates that while the company is all-in on its Copilot and other AI initiatives, it will only support them as long as it makes commercial sense to do so.
