Last Updated on May 14, 2024 by Arnav Sharma
Microsoft made the announcement on Wednesday that customers of Azure Government now have access to the artificial intelligence-based Azure OpenAI Service.
According to the firm, the new services, which will be offered to customers that have heightened requirements for security and privacy, will be able to make use of the AI-accelerated capabilities that are included in the company’s standard Azure OpenAI Service.
“Azure OpenAI Service REST APIs provide access to OpenAI’s powerful language models, including GPT-4, GPT-3, and Embeddings,” Chief Technology Officer, Strategic Missions and Technologies at Microsoft, Bill Chappell, stated in a blog posting about the new service. “You are able to adapt these models to your particular task, which may include, but is not limited to, content generation, summarization, semantic search, and natural language-to-code translation.”
Chappell pointed out that users in the government might particularly benefit from producing responses utilising grounded data, which only draws queue results and suggested answers from internal data sources that the organisation deems to be trustworthy. In general, “the less work the model needs to do, which means there is less opportunity for error,” and “the closer you can get your source material to the final form of the answer you want, the better.”
Microsoft allows customers who meet additional Limited access eligibility criteria and attest to specific use cases to apply to modify the Azure OpenAI content management features. If Microsoft approves a customer’s request to modify data logging, then Microsoft does not store any prompts and completions associated with the approved Azure subscription for which data logging is configured off in Azure commercial.
According to Microsoft, the data of government users will continue to be protected thanks to the encryption of quick queries using MACsec AES-128 block cypher. In addition, the Azure OpenAI model will simply allow the data to transit through it; it will not keep the data. Additionally, Microsoft has guaranteed that the data provided by the government will not be utilised to further train any AI models.
I help organisations secure their cloud infrastructure and stay ahead of evolving cyber threats. Microsoft MVP and Certified Trainer, author of Mastering Azure Security, and founder of arnav.au — a platform for practical Cloud, Cybersecurity, DevOps and AI content.