Last year, during Build 2022, Microsoft enhanced its Azure Cognitive Services with Azure OpenAI Service. The enhancement was designed to assist developers in efficiently and responsibly deploying high-quality models as APIs and incorporating language capabilities into their products.
The company has announced the general availability of its Azure OpenAI service which was previously in preview. Alongside this announcement, Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella further highlighted that there were plans underway to incorporate OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot as part of the service.
ChatGPT is coming soon to the Azure OpenAI Service, which is now generally available, as we help customers apply the world’s most advanced AI models to their own business imperatives. https://t.co/kQwydRWWnZ
— Satya Nadella (@satyanadella) January 17, 2023
According to Eric Boyd, Microsoft’s CVP for AI Platform:
With Azure OpenAI Service now generally available, more businesses can apply for access to the most advanced AI models in the world—including GPT-3.5, Codex, and DALL•E 2—backed by the trusted enterprise-grade capabilities and AI-optimized infrastructure of Microsoft Azure, to create cutting-edge applications. Customers will also be able to access ChatGPT—a fine-tuned version of GPT-3.5 that has been trained and runs inference on Azure AI infrastructure—through Azure OpenAI Service soon.
Microsoft has been working closely with OpenAI ever since 2019 when they partnered up and Microsoft needed OpenAI to incorporate new AI capabilities into Azure. And as it now seems, Microsoft is reportedly going to inject an additional $10 billion investment into its partnership with OpenAI in a bid to add ChatGPT capabilities to its products and services. There was an indication that the company was working toward adding ChatGPT features to its Office apps which will, in turn, help users to generate text automatically using natural language prompts.
In related news, Microsoft was also reportedly working closely with OpenAI to enhance the search experience in Bing by incorporating ChatGPT features with the aim of helping users generate human-like responses rather than just displaying the usual links.
