Microsoft announced the general availability of its Azure OpenAI Service to give more businesses and developers access to the most advanced AI models in the world. Availability is restricted to customers who meet and adhere to the standards for responsible and ethical AI principles that Microsoft has set and published (linked here). Customers are required to apply for access describing their intended use-case or application before they are given access to the service.

This service includes GPT-3.5, Codex, and DALL•E 2 — all backed by the trusted enterprise-grade capabilities (e.g. compliance, security) and AI-optimised infrastructure of Azure. Coming soon, customers will be able to access ChatGPT, a fine-tuned version of GPT-3.5 that has been trained and runs inference on Azure AI infrastructure.

Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service debuted on an invite-only basis in November 2021. From start-ups like Moveworks to multinational corporations like KPMG and companies like Al Jazeera , digital organisations small and large are applying the capabilities of Azure OpenAI Service to advanced use cases such as customer support, customisation and gaining insights from data using search, data extraction and classification.