Microsoft has announced its plans to provide U.S. federal agencies with access to OpenAI’s advanced language models via its Azure cloud service. This integration includes support for OpenAI’s language models including GPT-4 and GPT-3 into Azure Government. This move by Microsoft is significant as it is the first instance of a major company making chatbot technology accessible to the US government. The company has also stated that government customers will be able to customize language models for specific purposes such as generating content, translating language to code, and summarizing information.
Large language models (LLMs) have become popular since the introduction of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, in which Microsoft has a stake. Companies of different sizes and types are competing to develop functionalities utilizing these models. Microsoft typically provides access to Azure OpenAI Services for Azure commercial cloud users, which already has 4,500 customers as of May.
In recent times, Microsoft services have faced at least three outages since the beginning of the year. Microsoft Outlook, used by many companies to ensure efficient functioning, has been reported for having issues. One user reported, Outlook on the Web not working, and when trying to access the email site, an error message appeared saying Service Unavailable followed by HTTP Error 503. The service is unavailable. Microsoft has opened an investigation into the issue.
