We announced it in January and today it is already a reality: Microsoft has integrated the ChatGPT model into its cloud service, Azure OpenAI. From now on, companies and developers will be able to include the AI created by OpenAI in their own apps in the Azure cloud, allowing a multitude of services and applications to have their own chatbots in the future.
According to Microsoft, Azure OpenAI users can now access a preview of ChatGPT, and purchase packages of 1,000 tokens at a price of $0.002. To access ChatGPT functionality in Azure OpenAI, which will begin billing starting March 13, developers must request special access, because the service is “currently only available to Microsoft-managed customers and partners.”
Azure OpenAI, Microsoft’s cloud service, also includes other OpenAI AIs, such as DALL-E 2, GPT-3.5 and Codex. The Redmond company combines the functionalities of these artificial language models with the data management and scaling of Azure, the company’s most cost-effective service to date.
After investing $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019 and buying an exclusive license to the technology behind GPT-3 in 2020, Microsoft positioned itself as one of the big tech companies with the biggest head start in the artificial intelligences race. A relationship with OpenAI that grew even closer earlier this year, when Microsoft invested $10 billion in the software company.
In these past two months, Microsoft launched its own AI chatbot in Bing and the Edge browser (which had some teething problems) and announced Copilot, an AI powered by OpenAI technology and developed via Azure OpenAI Service, which will be integrated into its Microsoft Dynamics 365 suite of business apps.
