Microsoft has announced that it is rolling out its Azure OpenAI service this week. With this, Microsoft will be giving more people access to OpenAI’s technologies, including ChatGPT, and also allow businesses integrate DALL-E into their cloud services.
Although currently, Azure OpenAI services, which has been available to a limited set of customers since it was unveiled in 2021, does not include ChatGPT.
However, Microsoft’s move will make that stale news as Azure’s OpenAI services, which features a number of AI models like GPT-3.5 (the language system that ChatGPT is based on), Codex (an AI system that translates natural language into code), and DALL-E (which accepts written prompts to synthesize art and other images), will be open to businesses and developers to utilise in their apps.
Microsoft Corporation said the launch of the Azure OpenAI Services will happen soon, especially as Microsoft has been on track to increase its stake in OpenAI. According to people familiar with the company, Microsoft is in discussions to invest as much as $10 billion for a higher stake in OpenAI.
The tech giant has been in close relationship with the Elon Musk-founded OpenAI since it invested $1 billion in the company in 2019. With the investment, Microsoft has purchased an exclusive license to the underlying technology behind GPT-3.
Since ChatGPT took the world by storm last year, Microsoft has been on its feet to have more grip on the company. It has been reported that Microsoft plans to further intensify its competition with search engine giant, Google, by integrating ChatGPT into its own search engine, Bing. The company also has plans to add OpenAI’s DALL-E, which is an AI text-to-image model, to Bing.
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While speaking at the World Economic Forum on Tuesday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made comments on OpenAI integration, “Every product of Microsoft will have some of the same AI capabilities to completely transform the product,” said Nadella. According to Nadella’s comments, tools like ChatGPT, are needed to boost productivity.
“We need something that truly changes the productivity curve so we can have real economic growth,” said Nadella.
Microsoft also has plans to integrate more AI technology into some of its Microsoft Office apps like Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook.