Microsoft unveils Azure OpenAI Service for Government & AI customer commitments

The final two days have been busy ones at Redmond: yesterday, Microsoft announced its new Azure OpenAI Service for presidency. In the present day, the tech large unveiled a brand new set of three commitments to its prospects as they search to combine generative AI into their organizations safely, responsibly, and securely.

Every represents a continued transfer ahead in Microsoft’s journey towards mainstreaming AI, and assuring its enterprise prospects that its AI options and strategy are reliable.

Generative AI for presidency companies of all ranges

These working in authorities companies and civil companies on the native, state, and federal stage are sometimes beset by extra knowledge than they know what to do with — together with knowledge on constituents, contractors, and initiatives.

Generative AI, then, would appear to pose an amazing alternative: giving authorities staff the potential to sift by way of their huge portions of information extra quickly and utilizing pure language queries and instructions, versus clunkier, older strategies of information retrieval and knowledge lookup.

Nonetheless, authorities companies sometimes have very strict necessities on the know-how they will apply to their knowledge and duties. Enter Microsoft Azure Authorities, which already works with the U.S. Protection Division, Power Division and NASA, as Bloomberg noted when it broke the information of the brand new Azure OpenAI Companies for Authorities.

“For presidency prospects, Microsoft has developed a brand new structure that allows authorities companies to securely entry the big language fashions within the business atmosphere from Azure Authorities permitting these customers to keep up the stringent safety necessities crucial for presidency cloud operations,” wrote Invoice Chappell, Microsoft’s chief know-how officer of strategic missions and applied sciences, in a blog post saying the brand new instruments.

Particularly, the corporate unveiled Azure OpenAI Service REST APIs, which permit authorities prospects to construct new purposes or join current ones to OpenAI’s GPT-4, GPT-3, and Embeddings — however not over the general public web. Quite, Microsoft permits authorities purchasers to connect with OpenAI’s APIs securely over its encrypted, transport-layer safety (TLS) “Azure Spine.”

“This site visitors stays solely throughout the Microsoft world community spine and by no means enters the general public web,” the weblog submit specifies, later stating: “Your knowledge is rarely used to coach the OpenAI mannequin (your knowledge is your knowledge).”

New commitments to prospects

On Thursday, Microsoft unveiled three commitments to its all of its prospects when it comes to how the corporate will strategy its improvement of generative AI services and products. These embrace:

1. Sharing its learnings about growing and deploying AI responsibly
2. Creating an AI assurance program
3. Supporting prospects as they implement their very own AI methods responsibly

As a part of the primary dedication, Microsoft mentioned it should publish key paperwork, together with the Accountable AI Commonplace, AI Impression Evaluation Template, AI Impression Evaluation Information, Transparency Notes, and detailed primers on accountable AI implementation. Moreover, Microsoft will share the curriculum used to coach its personal staff on accountable AI practices.

The second dedication focuses on the creation of an AI Assurance Program. This program will assist prospects make sure that the AI purposes they deploy on Microsoft’s platforms adjust to authorized and regulatory necessities for accountable AI. It would embrace parts akin to regulator engagement help, implementation of the AI Danger Administration Framework revealed by the U.S. Nationwide Institute of Requirements and Know-how (NIST), buyer councils for suggestions, and regulatory advocacy.

Lastly, Microsoft will present help for purchasers as they implement their very own AI methods responsibly. The corporate plans to ascertain a devoted crew of AI authorized and regulatory specialists in several areas all over the world to help companies in implementing accountable AI governance methods. Microsoft may even collaborate with companions, akin to PwC and EY, to leverage their experience and help prospects in deploying their very own accountable AI methods.

The broader context swirling round Microsoft and AI

Whereas these commitments mark the start of Microsoft’s efforts to advertise accountable AI use, the corporate acknowledges that ongoing adaptation and enchancment might be crucial as know-how and regulatory landscapes evolve.

The transfer by Microsoft is available in response to the considerations surrounding the potential misuse of AI and the necessity for accountable AI practices, together with recent letters by U.S. lawmakers questioning Meta Platforms’ founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg over the corporate’s launch of its LLaMA LLM, which experts say could have a chilling effect on improvement of open-source AI.

The information additionally comes on the heels of Microsoft’s annual Construct convention for software program builders, the place the corporate unveiled Fabric, its new knowledge analytics platform for cloud customers that seeks to put Microsoft ahead of Google’s and Amazon’s cloud analytics choices.