ChatGPT Will be Integrated to Microsoft Azure Very Soon

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Techspace - Microsoft is giving more people, or at least more customers, access to OpenAI's technologies including ChatGPT made by OpenAI. The tech giant has announced that it's now making the Azure OpenAI Service generally available after giving a limited number of enterprise customers access to it when it debuted in November 2021. As Bloomberg notes, customers who have access to the service can use various OpenAI tools for their own cloud applications, including the Dall-E AI art generator and the GPT-3.5 language system. Microsoft says it's also adding access to ChatGPT, which it describes as a "fine-tuned version of GPT-3.5," to the service "soon."

The tech giant has been associated with OpenAI ever since it invested $1 billion in the Elon Musk-founded startup back in 2019. This announcement comes shortly after reports were published that Microsoft is in talks to invest an additional $10 billion in the company. "These [AI] models are going to change the way that people interact with computers," Microsoft's head of AI platforms Eric Boyd previously told The Financial Times in an interview.

While OpenAI has been around for a while, it was recently thrust into the spotlight following ChatGPT's debut. The program has the ability to return long, coherent answers that aren't immediately recognizable as machine-generated responses. It was good enough to alarm educators, who expressed concerns that it could be used for cheating. Earlier this month, New York City public schools banned ChatGPT from school devices and WiFi networks.

The Information also previously reported that Microsoft was planning to integrate the OpenAI software powering ChatGPT into Bing. While it's still unclear what the software could do for the search engine, sources said it could enable Bing to return results in a format that's friendlier and easier to digest. ChatGPT is available for free at the moment, but OpenAI intends to make money off it in the future and has already opened a waitlist for those interested in testing a paid version of the bot.

How Does ChatGPT Work?

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OpenAI is nothing if not a master of grabbing headlines with its head-turning research on artificial intelligence. Products resulting from its research, such as AI Gym, MuseNet, and Dall-E, have always made an impact. The company’s latest – ChatGPT, released at the end of November – has delivered yet again. ChatGPT is a conversational AI model based on the  Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) family of AI models.

ChatGPT is a generative AI chatbot designed to answer questions, which is not a new concept. However, ChatGPT represents a watershed moment in the history of generative AI as it can deliver human-like conversations on diverse topics, including writing poetry, debugging code, and even assisting with troubleshooting software and hardware issues.

How does it work? According to OpenAI, the model uses reinforcement learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), adopting the same methods as InstructGPT (an earlier sibling model), but with slight differences in the data collection setup. An initial model was trained using supervised fine-tuning by human AI trainers who provided conversations in which they played both sides: the human user and an AI assistant.

To create a reward model for reinforcement learning, OpenAI collected two or more model responses ranked by quality, from conversations that AI trainers had with the AI assistant. Using these responses, OpenAI fine-tuned the model using Proximal Policy Optimization. ChatGPT is built to interact in a conversational way, and it keeps track of the input received and its responses.

The capabilities of generative AI like ChatGPT can meaningfully reduce the manual effort in completing certain tasks. The business potential of such software has garnered massive venture-capital investment in startups producing it, at a time funding has otherwise dried up. Already, some companies have used the tech to create marketing content or demonstrate how they could negotiate a cable bill.  Undoubtedly, we will see more companies try to integrate ChatGPT into their various services in the foreseeable future.