From low code to no code: Azure GPT-3 and Microsoft's Power Platform

Microsoft has been making major investments in very large language models, from the hardware to run them in Azure (which it talks about as an'AI supercomputer') to the DeepSpeed library that speeds up training and running machine-learning models with billions of parameters by spreading them across multiple GPUs. In 2020, Microsoft got an exclusive licence for the powerful (and sometimes controversial) GPT-3 natural language generation model from OpenAI, which uses 175 billion parameters to produce what can look very much like something written by a person. OpenAI has a GPT-3 API that's trained and run on Azure, but it's in private beta and researchers and academics have to apply individually to join a waitlist. Similarly, Microsoft hasn't yet started even a private preview for what it calls the Open AI GPT and Azure Service and the page to sign up for notifications says there is no release date yet. But Microsoft is already using GPT-3 and other natural language generation in its products for features that are much more sophisticated than writing automatic captions for images.