Microsoft has announced the availability of Azure OpenAI. It allows companies to integrate services such as GPT, Dall-E or Codex into their cloud applications. The highly publicised ChatGPT should arrive soon.

It was Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, who announced in a blog the general availability of Azure OpenAI. It must be said that the subject is trendy with the recent media coverage of ChatGPT and the financial interest of the Redmond firm in the start-up. In concrete terms, Azure OpenAI has been in testing for a year and offers companies the opportunity to integrate OpenAI tools into their cloud applications.

Among these services, companies will be able to use GPT version 3.5, which is the generative AI engine used by ChatGPT and PowerBI. There is also Codex, the basis of Copilot, GitHub's code completion solution and Dall-E, an AI-based image generator. Among the uses, the Microsoft boss highlights some feedback from test customers such as Al Jazeera, which works with Azure OpenAI on content extraction, translation and topic scheduling. For its part, KPMG relies on the tool to make "significant gains" on its CSR tax system.

ChatGPT will arrive soon

However, ChatGPT is not yet included in the Azure OpenAI package. In his presentation Satya Nadella indicated that this service would arrive soon. Microsoft believes in the potential of the conversational assistant to the point of wanting to integrate it into several services such as the search engine Bing or in several programs of the Office suite (Word, PowerPoint and Outlook). At the Davos forum, the executive said that tools like ChatGPT are needed to boost productivity. "We need something that really changes the productivity curve, to have real economic growth," he said.

Lastly, the availability of the service is announced as general by Microsoft. But our colleagues at The Register have noted that the service is available in four American regions and one in Western Europe. It is likely that the announcement effect is spread over time on the deployment and that Azure OpenAI will be fully operational for all in a few days.