ChatGPT has been making a lot of waves in mainstream media lately. The capabilities and potential use-cases demonstrated by the GPT-3 large language model have managed to wow consumers and enterprise customers alike. Naturally, Microsoft, which invested $1 billion in ChatGPT's founding company OpenAI - with reports of more financing to follow, wants to capitalize on this momentum. As such, it has committed to launch ChatGPT on Azure soon.
Microsoft has announced that its Azure OpenAI service is now generally available, which means that customers can access complex AI models such as GPT-3.5, Codex, and DALL•E 2 on the cloud. For those unaware, GPT is the family of large language models powering ChatGPT, Codex is the model that is used to convert natural language to programming code in GitHub Copilot, and DALL•E can generate images after receiving only textual inputs.
As such, Microsoft has boasted that Azure is the "best place to build AI workloads" for customers of all sizes across various industries looking to save time on operational activities and offering streamlined AI-powered services to end-users. It claims that customers can build AI applications on Azure by leveraging purpose-built AI-optimized infrastructure with enterprise-grade functionalities.
That said, Microsoft has noted that it is committing to innovating in the AI space in a responsible way - many people think that this isn't the case right now at least. It emphasizes:
We have taken an iterative approach to large models, working closely with our partner OpenAI and our customers to carefully assess use cases, learn, and address potential risks. Additionally, we’ve implemented our own guardrails for Azure OpenAI Service that align with our Responsible AI principles. As part of our Limited Access Framework, developers are required to apply for access, describing their intended use case or application before they are given access to the service. Content filters uniquely designed to catch abusive, hateful, and offensive content constantly monitor the input provided to the service as well as the generated content. In the event of a confirmed policy violation, we may ask the developer to take immediate action to prevent further abuse.
We are confident in the quality of the AI models we are using and offering customers today, and we strongly believe they will empower businesses and people to innovate in entirely new and exciting ways.
Although ChatGPT will be available as a service on Azure for customers to build upon soon, the Redmond tech giant hasn't really defined a concrete release date yet.
