Google has begun rolling out private access to its Veo and Imagen 3 generative AI models. Starting today, customers of the company's Vertex AI Google Cloud package can begin using Veo to generate videos from text prompts and images. Then, as of next week, Google will make Imagen 3, its latest text-to-image framework, available to those same users. To that point, OpenAI's Sora model is still only available to select artists, academics and researchers -- though that could change quickly with the company teasing 12 days of product demos starting December 5. Of Veo, Google says the model creates 1080p footage "that's consistent and coherent" and can run "beyond a minute." The tool is also capable of working with both text prompts and images.

Azure Machine Learning (AML) team is excited to announce the availability of Azure Arc-enabled Machine Learning (ML) public preview release. All customers of Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes now can deploy AzureML extension release and bring AML to, and the edge using Kubernetes on their hardware of choice. The design for Azure Arc-enabled ML helps IT Operators leverage native Kubernetes concepts such as namespace, node selector, and resources requests/limits for ML compute utilization and optimization. By letting the IT operator manage ML compute setup, Azure Arc-enabled ML creates a seamless AML experience for data scientists who do not need to learn or use Kubernetes directly. Data scientists now can focus on models and work with tools such as Azure Machine Learning AML Studio, AML 2.0 CLI, AML Python SDK, productivity tools like Jupyter notebook, and ML frameworks like TensorFlow and PyTorch.

Today, we're pleased to announce the private preview of a new AI-powered project from Microsoft's Healthcare NExT initiative which is designed to enable our healthcare partners to easily create intelligent and compliant healthcare virtual assistants and chatbots. These bots are powered by cognitive services and enriched with authoritative medical content, allowing our partners to empower their customers with self-service access to health information, with the goal of improving outcomes and reducing costs. So, if you're using a health bot built by one of our partners as part of our project, you can interact in a personal way, typing or talking in natural language and receiving information to help answer your health-related questions. Our partners, including Aurora Health Care, with 15 hospitals, over 150 clinics and 70 pharmacies throughout eastern Wisconsin and northern Illinois, Premera Blue Cross, the largest health plan in the Pacific Northwest, and UPMC, one of the largest integrated health care delivery networks in the United States, are working with us to build out bots that address a wide range of healthcare-specific questions and use cases. For instance, insurers can build bots that give their customers an easy way to look up the status of a claim and ask questions about benefits and services.

Microsoft has made Project Malmo available for novice to experienced programmers on GitHub via an open-source license. It's a platform that uses the world of Minecraft as a testing ground for advanced artificial intelligence research. The system, which had until now only been open to a small group of computer scientists in private preview, is primarily designed to help researchers develop sophisticated, more general artificial intelligence, or AI, that can do things like learn, hold conversations, make decisions and complete complex tasks. That's key to creating systems that can augment human intelligence--and eventually help us with everything from cooking and doing laundry to driving and performing lifesaving tasks in an operating room. Katja Hofmann, a researcher in Microsoft's Cambridge, UK, research lab, who leads the development of Project Malmo, said the system will help researchers develop new techniques and approaches to reinforcement learning.

Microsoft has officially made Project Malmo, its Minecraft-based artificial intelligence research platform, available to all through Github. The open-source system was previously only available to a small group of researchers. The system, which had until now only been open to a small group of computer scientists in private preview, is primarily designed to help researchers develop sophisticated, more general artificial intelligence, or AI, that can do things like learn, hold conversations, make decisions and complete complex tasks. Minecraft may seem an odd choice for studying artificial intelligence, but Microsoft notes that researchers involved in the private preview were keen on its "endless possibilities for collaboration and exploration" as an ideal testing ground for AI research. In addition, Microsoft notes that the public launch heralds the arrival of new tools to the platform, like the ability to run experiments at a much faster pace (called overclocking), that should be a boon to researchers.

Microsoft has made Project Malmo, a platform that uses the world of Minecraft as a testing ground for advanced artificial intelligence research, available for novice to experienced programmers on GitHub via an open-source license. The system, which had until now only been open to a small group of computer scientists in private preview, is primarily designed to help researchers develop sophisticated, more general artificial intelligence, or AI, that can do things like learn, hold conversations, make decisions and complete complex tasks. That's key to creating systems that can augment human intelligence -- and eventually help us with everything from cooking and doing laundry to driving and performing lifesaving tasks in an operating room. Katja Hofmann, a researcher in Microsoft's Cambridge, UK, research lab, who leads the development of Project Malmo, said the system will help researchers develop new techniques and approaches to reinforcement learning. That's an area of AI in which agents learn how to complete a task by being given a lot of room for trial and error and then being rewarded when they make the right decision.

This post is authored by Ted Way, Program Manager, Data Group, Microsoft. We are excited to announce the private preview of Azure Machine Learning as part of the IOT Suite launch at Hannover Messe, the world's leading trade fair for industrial technology, in Microsoft Azure Germany. Customers interested in participating in the preview can email AzureGermany@microsoft.com. A core set of Azure ML features are available in Germany, with more in the process of being added. The German datacenter is a physically and logically separate allocation of Azure, one in which all customer data and required support systems reside in German datacenters.