OpenAI and Microsoft for Enterprise-Level AI: Introducing Azure

Learn about technical prerequisites for Azure OpenAI (AOAI) Service, including the need for an Azure subscription and access to Azure OpenAI, as Microsoft integrates powerful language models like GPT-3.5 into its AI portfolio.

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Technical requirements

The following are the technical requirements for this chapter:

  • An Azure subscription, which you can create for free here.

  • The access granted to Azure OpenAI in the desired Azure subscription. At the time of writing, access to this service is granted only by application. You can apply for access to Azure OpenAI by completing the form.

Microsoft’s role in artificial intelligence

Microsoft has a long history of investing in AI research and development, with a focus on building AI-powered tools and services that can be used by businesses and individuals to solve complex problems and improve productivity.

It also boasts a series of milestones in terms of achieving human parity in AI domains such as speech recognition (2017), machine translation (2018), conversational Q&A (2019), image captioning (2020), and natural language understanding (2021).

Human parity in AI refers to the point at which an AI system can perform a task or tasks at a level that is equal to or indistinguishable from a human being. This concept is often used to measure the performance of AI systems, especially in areas such as natural language understanding, speech recognition, and image recognition. Achieving human parity in AI is considered a significant milestone as it demonstrates the AI’s ability to effectively match human capabilities in a given domain.

In the next few sections, we’ll explore Microsoft’s research history and background in AI to fully understand its journey toward its partnership with OpenAI and, finally, the development of the AOAI Service.

Microsoft AI background

Early research in the field of AI traces back to the late 1990s when Microsoft established its machine learning (ML) and applied statistics groups. Starting with those, Microsoft started researching and experimenting with intelligent agents and virtual assistants. In this case, the prototype was Clippy, a personal digital assistant for Microsoft Office:

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