The new Azure OpenAI Service will give customers access to OpenAI’s powerful natural language GPT-3 models – with the security, reliability and enterprise capabilities of Microsoft Azure.
Since OpenAI, an AI research and deployment company, introduced its groundbreaking GPT-3 natural language model platform last year, users have discovered countless things that these AI models can do with their powerful and comprehensive understanding of language. For instance, a sports franchise that’s developing a new app to engage with fans during games could use the models’ ability to quickly and abstractly summarize information to convert transcripts of live television commentary into game highlights that someone could choose to include within the app. The marketing team could use GPT-3’s capability to generate original content and its understanding of what’s happening in the game to help the team brainstorm ideas for social media or blog posts and engage with fans more quickly. At its Ignite conference today, Microsoft announced it will help its customers uncover these kinds of experiences with the new Azure OpenAI Service, which allows access to OpenAI’s API through the Azure platform and will initially be available by invite only. The new Azure Cognitive Service will give customers access to OpenAI’s powerful GPT-3 models, along with security, reliability, compliance, data privacy and other enterprise-grade capabilities that are built into Microsoft Azure. Microsoft will also offer Azure OpenAI Service customers new tools to help ensure outputs that the model returns are appropriate for their businesses, and it will monitor how people are employing the technology to help ensure it’s being used for its intended purposes. “We are just in the beginning stages of figuring out what the power and potential of GPT-3 is, which is what makes it so interesting,” said Eric Boyd, Microsoft corporate vice president for Azure AI. “Now we are taking what OpenAI has released and making it available with all the enterprise promises that businesses need to move into production.” Built by OpenAI, GPT-3 is part of a new class of models that can be customized to handle a wide variety of use cases that require a deep understanding of language, from converting natural language to software code to summarizing large amounts of text and generating answers to questions. As more people are able to access and use them, the models become even more capable, said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. He looks forward to the day when you can tell a computer what you want in plain language — even if the request is fuzzy like “find the strategy document I can’t remember the name of but wrote three years ago and has this image in it” — and the software will be able to execute that request. “GPT-3 has really proven itself as the first powerful, general purpose model for natural language — it’s one model you can use for all these things, which developers love because you can try things very easily,” Altman said. “For a while now, we’ve wanted to figure out a way to scale it as broadly as possible, which is part of the thing that really excites us about the partnership with Microsoft.
