Jan 18
Microsoft Azure Has Made OpenAI Services Available But Access Is Limited & Subject To Approval
The Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service requires registration and is currently only available to Microsoft managed customers and partners.
As seen below, when you log into the Microsoft Azure portal, OpenAI services can be accessed under cognitive services and Marketplace. From here, OpenAI can be selected as a service and an instance created.
What I really find interesting is the potential augmented list of regional availability. One of the challenges raised by many was latency and regional availability of OpenAI. However, this geographic and regional availability problem has been solved by leveraging the Microsoft Azure cloud.
And…this is where the process ends for me, Microsoft is following a limited access approach to Azure OpenAI Services.
In the words of Microsoft:
As part of Microsoft’s commitment to responsible AI, we are designing and releasing Azure OpenAI Service with the intention of protecting the rights of individuals and society and fostering transparent human-computer interaction. For this reason, we currently limit the access and use of Azure OpenAI, including limiting access to the ability to modify content filters and modify abuse monitoring.
There is however a registration process with Azure OpenAI only being currently available to managed customers and partners working with Microsoft account teams.
Microsoft Azure is focussing on these four areas in terms of LLM functionality:
- Similarity Embeddings (Clustering, regression, anomaly detection, visualisation)
- Text Search Embedding (Search, context relevance, information retrieval)
- Code Search Embedding (Code search and relevance)
- Completion
In closing, what interested me most about this development was to what extend Azure will make a no-code studio-like interface available to users to fine-tune, manage training data and create custom LLM models.
From what I could glean from the documentation, there is one embeddings/document search example. The resources on OpenAI’s Github are far more superior and helpful than anything that is available via the Azure OpenAI documentation.
⭐️ Please follow me on LinkedIn for updates on Conversational AI ⭐️
I’m currently the Chief Evangelist @ HumanFirst. I explore and write about all things at the intersection of AI and language; ranging from LLMs, Chatbots, Voicebots, Development Frameworks, Data-Centric latent spaces and more.
