Microsoft’s dedication to democratizing AI through chatbot functionality.
In a nutshell, Microsoft is granting Azure customers access to machine learning-based models, allowing businesses and enterprises to utilize the world’s most advanced (and discussed) AI services developed by OpenAI research laboratories.
Microsoft continues to transform its partnership with OpenAI into “live” commercial services with new and enhanced Azure cloud platform features. Large language models and generative AI are quickly becoming an essential platforms for innovation, problem-solving, and imagining “what’s possible,” according to the Redmond company, and Azure is attempting to become one of the leading players in this new, promising market for AI-based services and products.
Microsoft announced that Azure OpenAI Service is now generally available, allowing more business and enterprise customers to begin using – or rather “apply for access” to – OpenAI-developed AI models. Among these models are the widely discussed DALLE 2, Codex, and GPT-3.5. Customers will also have access to the ChatGPT chatbot, which is a refined version of the GPT-3.5 ML algorithm, though they will have to wait a bit longer.
Microsoft bots will supervise OpenAI models hosted on the Azure platform, so textual prompts and completions are “evaluated against our content policy with automated systems.” Obviously, “content with a high severity rating” will be filtered out.
Microsoft claims that Azure’s “purpose-built, AI-optimized infrastructure” can accelerate the deployment and adoption of AI by cloud customers.
Azure OpenAI Service users will have access to the same “high-performance AI models at production scale with industry-leading availability” that Microsoft uses to power its products. Among these products are GitHub Copilot, a Codex-based AI that helps programmers write better code, Power BI, which uses GPT-3-powered natural language to automatically generate formulae and expressions, and Microsoft Designer, which helps content creators design new content using natural language prompts beginning with a blank canvas.
Microsoft stated that while Azure uses generative AI capabilities to create new enterprise products, OpenAI uses Azure as the “core computing power” behind its family of ML models for research advancement and developer productivity.
The partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI has the potential to become one of the most essential building blocks for the future of Azure, the Windows platform, and Microsoft’s overall business. Microsoft is rumored to be interested in investing an additional $10 billion in OpenAI research and integrating ChatGPT into Bing as a competitive advantage against Google, according to recent rumors.
