Microsoft is rolling out its Azure OpenAI service this week, allowing companies to integrate tools like DALL-E into their own cloud apps. Microsoft has been testing this Azure service for a little over a year now, and soon it will gain access to ChatGPT, the conversational AI that made headlines last year.
The Azure OpenAI service features a number of AI models created by OpenAI, including GPT-3.5, Codex, and DALL-E, so that companies and developers can use these systems in their own apps and workloads. Microsoft essentially packages GPT-3.5 with the scalability you’d expect from Azure and additions for management and data processing. Developers could use Azure OpenAI to build apps that use AI for support tickets or content matching to improve search results in online stores. Such models are already widely used as tools to summarize documents and analyze text.
Microsoft uses its own Azure OpenAI service to power GitHub Copilot, the $10-per-month service that helps suggest lines of code to developers in their code editor. Power BI also uses GPT-3 natural language models to generate formulas and expressions, and the upcoming Microsoft Designer app uses DALL-E 2 to generate art from text prompts.
The launch of Azure OpenAI comes just days after rumors that Microsoft plans to further integrate ChatGPT and other AI models in the OpenAI language into its products and services. Microsoft is rumored to be preparing to challenge Google with ChatGPT integration in Bing search results, and the company is reportedly looking at integrating some language AI technology into its Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook apps.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum on Tuesday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was optimistic about OpenAI integration. “Every product from Microsoft will have some of the same AI capabilities to completely transform the product,” said Nadella, at a Wall Street Journal panel. Tools like ChatGPT, Nadella argues, are needed to increase productivity. “We need something that really changes the productivity curve so we can have real economic growth,” Nadella said.
