Microsoft has recently made an announcement that its Azure OpenAI Service is now available in a more secure format for the US government. The American Federal, State, and Local governments and partners can now have specific compliance when it comes to regulatory standards for classification and security. With the government’s access to OpenAI’s GPT large models, they can now benefit from the time-saving technology that has been making headlines lately. Also, the service’s REST APIs offer the government a way to access language and multimodal models that include GPT-3, GPT-4, and Embeddings.
Microsoft hopes that the government will use these existing models to create their AI-enabled applications to help improve their efficiency in their operations. The use cases for Azure OpenAI Service for the government include content generation, summarization, semantic search optimization, and code generation and rectification. Bill Chappell, the CTO Strategic Missions, and Technologies of Microsoft, stated that queries submitted to the Azure OpenAI Service only transit through the commercial environment via an encrypted network. Thus, the queries do not remain in the commercial environment. Chappell also confirmed that government data is not used to train OpenAI models like how regular consumer data is used.
Although how the US government plans to use generative AI to its benefit remains to be seen, they are likely to be cautious at first as they get to grips with integrating artificial intelligence with the sensitive data they handle. Microsoft assures that its Azure OpenAI Service is secure by explaining the 250,000 km of fiber optic and undersea cables that make up its global network backbone. The government data will never leave this and enter the public internet.
In conclusion, Microsoft aims to heavily assist the US government with their operations and make use of the latest AI technology. With their partnership, the government can operate more efficiently and ensure a more secure communication system with their data.
