Microsoft Azure customers will be able to use OpenAI's GPT-3

Microsoft announced yesterday it will begin offering an updated version of the AI natural language program (NLP) GPT-3 to business customers as part of its Azure cloud platform. Why it matters: The move puts what is likely the most powerful AI writing and reading algorithm at the fingertips of large businesses that will be able to use it to automatically analyze and generate new written content. Driving the news: While OpenAI -- the artificial general intelligence research company that created GPT-3 -- has and will continue selling access to the model through its own API, Microsoft will offer a version for corporate clients that emphasizes "safety and security," says Eric Boyd, corporate vice president of Azure AI at Microsoft. How it works: GPT-3 is a natural language transformer program that was trained on half a trillion words on the internet, making it the largest such model in the world when it was released last summer. The catch: Like all NLP models, GPT-3 can incorporate bias found in its training set, producing text that can be marked with sexism, Islamophobia and other very human ills that could expose corporate users to legal and reputational risk.