General availability of Azure OpenAI

Service expands access to large,

advanced AI models with added
enterprise benefits
Posted on January 16, 2023

Eric Boyd Corporate Vice President, AI Platform

Large language models are quickly becoming an essential platform for people to
innovate, apply AI to solve big problems, and imagine what’s possible. Today, we are
excited to announce the general availability of Azure OpenAI Service as part of
Microsoft’s continued commitment to democratizing AI, and ongoing partnership with
OpenAI.

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.

Empowering customers to achieve more

We debuted Azure OpenAI Service in November 2021 to enable customers to tap into
the power of large-scale generative AI models with the enterprise promises customers
have come to expect from our Azure cloud and computing infrastructure—security,
reliability, compliance, data privacy, and built-in Responsible AI capabilities.

Since then, one of the most exciting things we’ve seen is the breadth of use cases Azure
OpenAI Service has enabled our customers—from generating content that helps better
match shoppers with the right purchases to summarizing customer service tickets,
freeing up time for employees to focus on more critical tasks.

Customers of all sizes across industries are using Azure OpenAI Service to do more with
less, improve experiences for end-users, and streamline operational efficiencies
internally. From startups like Moveworks to multinational corporations like KPMG,
organizations small and large are applying the capabilities of Azure OpenAI Service to
advanced use cases such as customer support, customization, and gaining insights from
data using search, data extraction, and classification.

“At Moveworks, we see Azure OpenAI Service as an important component of our

machine learning architecture. It enables us to solve several novel use cases, such as
identifying gaps in our customer’s internal knowledge bases and automatically
drafting new knowledge articles based on those gaps. This saves IT and HR teams a
significant amount of time and improves employee self-service. Azure OpenAI
Service will also radically enhance our existing enterprise search capabilities and
supercharge our analytics and data visualization offerings. Given that so much of
the modern enterprise relies on language to get work done, the possibilities are
endless—and we look forward to continued collaboration and partnership with
Azure OpenAI Service."—Vaibhav Nivargi, Chief Technology Officer and
Founder at Moveworks.

“Al Jazeera Digital is constantly exploring new ways to use technology to support
our journalism and better serve our audience. Azure OpenAI Service has the
potential to enhance our content production in several ways, including
summarization and translation, selection of topics, AI tagging, content extraction,
and style guide rule application. We are excited to see this service go to general
availability so it can help us further contextualize our reporting by conveying the
opinion and the other opinion.”—Jason McCartney, Vice President of
Engineering at Al Jazeera.

“KPMG is using Azure OpenAI Service to help companies realize significant

efficiencies in their Tax ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) initiatives.
Companies are moving to make their total tax contributions publicly available. With
much of these tax payments buried in IT systems outside of finance, massive data
volumes, and incomplete data attributes, Azure OpenAI Service finds the data
relationships to predict tax payments and tax type—making it much easier to
 validate accuracy and categorize payments by country and tax type.”—Brett
Weaver, Partner, Tax ESG Leader at KPMG.

Azure—the best place to build AI workloads

The general availability of Azure OpenAI Service is not only an important milestone for
our customers but also for Azure.

Azure OpenAI Service provides businesses and developers with high-performance AI

models at production scale with industry-leading uptime. This is the same production
service that Microsoft uses to power its own products, including GitHub Copilot, an AI
pair programmer that helps developers write better code, Power BI, which leverages
GPT-3-powered natural language to automatically generate formulae and expressions,
and the recently-announced Microsoft Designer, which helps creators build stunning
content with natural language prompts.

All of this innovation shares a common thread: Azure’s purpose-built, AI-optimized

infrastructure.

Azure is also the core computing power behind OpenAI API’s family of models for
research advancement and developer production.

Azure is currently the only global public cloud that offers AI supercomputers with
massive scale-up and scale-out capabilities. With a unique architecture design that
combines leading GPU and networking solutions, Azure delivers best-in-class
performance and scale for the most compute-intensive AI training and inference
workloads. It’s the reason the world’s leading AI companies—
including OpenAI, Meta, Hugging Face, and others—continue to choose Azure to
advance their AI innovation. Azure currently ranks in the top 15 of the TOP500
supercomputers worldwide and is the highest-ranked global cloud services provider
today. Azure continues to be the cloud and compute power that propels large-scale AI
advancements across the globe.