If you have been following along you know that I have been comparing LLMs inside the different services in Copilot. Unsurprisingly, the most current and powerful models tend to be the winner, but what about the same LLM between different services?
Recently, GPT 6.1 Sol appeared in my Copilot Chat as you can see above. Thus, I put it head to head with GPT 6.1 Sol in Cowork and the results are here:
https://github.com/directorcia/general/blob/master/Copilot/Comparisons/20261009-GPT61-Grok-Eval.md
The news is that Copilot Chat won!
Now, I think the real take away here is no so much that Copilot Chat is ‘better’ than Cowork, it is that the same LLM in any Copilot service is equivalent. That leads to the following rule of thumb:
‘You DON’T need to use Cowork for everything! Copilot Chat is the best place to start’
For validation I repeated the test but with Opus 5.5 in Chat and Cowork here:
https://github.com/directorcia/general/blob/master/Copilot/Comparisons/20261009-Opus55-Grok-Eval.md
and again Chat came out on top. So, I am pretty confident that my rule of thumb above is valid.
The big different is that Cowork require PAYG billing. Thus, for these tests:
Cowork GPT Sol 6.1 = US$101
Cowork Claude Opus 5.5 = US$234
Not cheap at all! But if you use these same LLMs, in Copilot Chat instead you pay NO MORE than the flat monthly M365 Copilot license.
That’s the real message here I feel, start with the included services BEFORE moving to the paid option because from what I see they produce the same result.
