Days and nights have been busy diving deeper into the AI landscape. I've been reading a great book by Tom Taulli called Artificial Intelligence Basics: A Non-Technical Introduction. It's been a huge help in getting down the vocabulary and understanding the background to the technology from the 1950s on. In combination with the book, I've been messing around a lot with Azure's OpenAI Service and looking closely at the infrastructure and security aspects of the service. In my last post I covered the controls available to customers to secure their specific instance of the service.

When Azure OpenAI Service launched in 2021, the service -- a part of Azure Cognitive Services -- provided enterprise-tailored access to OpenAI's API through the Azure platform for applications like language translation and text autocompletion. But after expanding the service in May with fine-tuning features, Microsoft is today introducing invite-only access to DALL-E 2 for select Azure OpenAI Service customers. Customers can use DALL-E 2 to generate custom images using either text or images. In line with the consumer DALL-E 2 service, they can leverage inpainting and outpainting -- capabilities that generate new content within a portion of an image or push an image beyond its original confines, respectively -- in addition to a feature that generates variations on an existing image. Early adopters include brands like Mattel, which used DALL-E 2 to come up with ideas for a new Hot Wheels model car.

Developers will soon be able to use GPT-3, OpenAI's flagship language model, through the new Azure OpenAI Service, announced at the Microsoft Ignite conference this week. The public release of GPT-3 comes after one year of limited trials through OpenAI's own API service and a few specialized integrations with Microsoft's software development products. With the release of Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft will make the power of large language models available to a wide range of organizations and industries. It will be an opportunity for the software giant to strengthen its hold on the new business applications taking shape around advances in natural language processing and generation. The new service can also have important implications for OpenAI, which is becoming increasingly dependent and entrenched in the business goals of Microsoft.