There's been a button on your screen this whole time that these lessons have never once mentioned. Maybe it's on the bar at the bottom of your Windows screen. Maybe it's in the corner of your web browser. It says Copilot, and odds are it's been sitting there for a couple of years now, unexplained, like a stranger standing quietly in your kitchen.
Today, introductions. The stranger has a name, and so do a couple of others you've probably heard at family dinners. By the end of this lesson you'll know who's who - and here's the important part - you won't owe any of them a thing. This is a lesson with no steps, no setup, and no decision at the end. Just meeting the neighbors.
The secret that makes this easy
Here's the reveal up front: they're all the same kind of thing. ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot - three names, three companies, one idea. Each one is an AI assistant: a typing box, a conversation, an answer. Different porch lights, same neighborhood.
And you've earned one piece of jargon to go with it. The letters you keep hearing on the news - LLM - stand for large language model, and that's the part inside all three of these that does the talking. So the next time somebody drops it at Thanksgiving, you'll know what they mean - it's been doing the talking with you since lesson one.
Which means something worth stopping on. For seven lessons you thought you were learning ChatGPT. You weren't. You were learning how to talk to AI - say it plain, say it messy, talk back, hand it your papers, give big things a room. Those skills work on every one of these. You didn't learn a machine. You learned a language, and the whole neighborhood speaks it.
ChatGPT - your regular
The one you know. Made by a company called OpenAI, and the name your family most likely says when they say any of them. These lessons happen there for a plain reason: its front door was the easiest to walk through on day one, and everything a beginner needs is free. It's your regular - the diner where you know the booth and they know your order. That counts for something, and nothing in the rest of this lesson takes it away.
Copilot - the one already in the house
Copilot is Microsoft's assistant, and Microsoft's way of introducing it was to set it on your counter without knocking - that's the button on the Windows taskbar, and in the Edge browser. Chatting with Copilot is free; it comes along with the computer, the way the calculator does. Ask it the same things you'd ask your regular - the everyday dozen works fine over there.
Two honest footnotes about the house guest. First, Microsoft has scattered its buttons a bit - taskbar here, browser there - and is currently gathering them into one spot, so its furniture is moving even more than most. The word to look for is always Copilot. Second, there's a version of Copilot that works inside Word and Excel - writing drafts in your documents, tidying your spreadsheets - and that version comes only with Microsoft's paid subscription. The free hello and the paid coworker share a name, which confuses everybody, not just you.
Claude - the thoughtful one down the street
Claude is made by a company called Anthropic, and if you've heard of it at all, it was probably from the writer or the careful reader in your family - Claude's reputation runs a little different from the others. A free account needs no credit card, and inside you'll find furniture you already recognize: standing instructions, memory, even projects. The skills from these lessons walk right in.
And one disclosure, because this site believes in them: Claude helps make these very pages. That's not a reason to visit - it's just a fact you deserved to have before hearing anything nice about it.
Nobody's keeping attendance
So what are you supposed to do with all this? Nothing. That's the lesson's favorite sentence. You have a regular, and your regular is fine. What's different now is that the neighborhood has faces. When Copilot pops up on some screen, you know who that is. When somebody at dinner says "just ask Claude," you know what they mean. And if some rainy afternoon curiosity taps you on the shoulder, you know exactly which doors are there - and that a hello is free at every one of them.
A few things you might be wondering
Do my lessons work on the others? The skills, yes - all of them. The buttons sit in slightly different places, the way the light switches sit in different spots in somebody else's house. But you know what a light switch looks like. Talk plainly, talk back, look for the plus sign, check behind the three dots. It's all there.
Does my setup follow me? No, and it's worth knowing why: each assistant keeps its own notebook. The instructions you wrote in lesson two and the memory it's built since live at ChatGPT and stay there. Settle in somewhere new someday, and you'd give it the same little interview all over again. You've done it once. It goes faster the second time.
Is the Copilot on my taskbar the same as the Copilot in Word? Same name, same company, different arrangement - one's the free neighbor who chats over the fence, the other is hired help that comes with a subscription. Lesson eleven talks plainly about what paying gets you, at every house on the street.
So which one is best? That's the question the ads want you to ask, and it has no answer. Neighbors aren't ranked; they're known. All three of these are good. You're not marrying anybody. You're waving over fences.
What this looks like in real life
Nikki met her second neighbor by accident. Rainy Tuesday, her laptop open for solitaire, and there was that Copilot button she'd never once pressed. Cookbook project humming along at her regular; nothing to lose. So she pressed it and asked the kind of thing she'd ask anybody:
Nikki, trying the button, just to see
"My rosemary has been in a pot on the porch all summer and it's huge. I'm in Wisconsin - can it survive winter in the ground here, or does it need to come inside? Don't sugarcoat it, I've killed two already."
The answer came back sensible and a little different in tone from what her regular might have said - and Nikki noticed the important thing: she hadn't needed to learn anything. Same kind of box, same kind of conversation, same plain talk. Ten minutes later she was back at ChatGPT, where her mother's recipes live. But now, when her grandson says "ask Claude" or the taskbar button catches her eye, she's not on the outside of anything. She knows the neighbors.
Notice what changed and what didn't. Her regular is still her regular - the cookbook never moved. What changed is smaller and better: no button on her screen is a stranger anymore.
That's the lesson
And that's part two of the road, finished. Count what you're carrying now: the everyday dozen, papers by camera, rooms for big projects, and a neighborhood full of names you know. The machine part is done - you can work this thing. Part three is about something better than working it: getting wise to it. Lesson nine starts with the most important thing on this whole site - what to do about the fact that, every so often, with total confidence, it's just plain wrong.