Microsoft gives customers access to OpenAI's powerful language model

Microsoft has announced Azure OpenAI Service that will give customers access to OpenAI's powerful models in addition to the security, reliability, compliance, data privacy and other enterprise-grade capabilities built into Microsoft Azure.

OpenAI, an AI research and deployment company, introduced its groundbreaking ‘GPT-3' natural language model platform last year.

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," he said during the company's annual ‘Ignite' conference.

As more people are able to access and use them, the models become even more capable, according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

"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.


Earlier this year, Microsoft began using GPT-3 in Power Apps to help people who have no coding or programming background build apps by translating plain language commands into formulas.

Microsoft subsidiary GitHub and OpenAI also introduced Copilot, a tool that uses a new model based on GPT-3 called Codex, which helps software developers write code more efficiently and avoid repetitive tasks with automatic code completion and suggestions.

The Azure OpenAI Service will offer customers direct access to GPT-3 in a format that is designed to be intuitive enough for developers to use, yet robust enough for machine learning experts to work with the models as they wish, the company said - IANS