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Microsoft, one of many largest winners of the generative AI growth to this point because of its early backing of OpenAI and integration of the latter startup’s tech into Bing, Azure, and numerous different companies, has been making an attempt to keep away from placing all of its AI eggs in a single basket.
As we speak, the company announced that it’s making Meta Platforms’ rival open-sourced AI mannequin Llama 2 accessible in Azure AI Studio, its cloud platform AI clearinghouse, within the type of a “model-as-a-service.”
Understanding AI models-as-a-service
Much like the now-old acronym of SaaS (software-as-a-service), MaaS presents prospects the power to make use of AI fashions corresponding to Llama 2 on-demand over the net when wanted with minimal setup. They received’t must undergo all the difficulty of putting in it on their very own cloud server house, personal cloud, hybrid cloud, or different areas. Even with Microsoft specialists serving to and skilled IT personnel, this generally is a non-trivial job for enterprises.
As John Montgomery, Microsoft Company Vice President of Program Administration for its AI Platform efforts defined in a blog post:
“In Azure AI, you will have been in a position to deploy fashions onto your personal infrastructure for a very long time – merely go into the mannequin catalog, choose the mannequin to deploy and a VM to deploy it on and also you’re off to the races. However not each buyer needs to consider working infrastructure, which is why at Ignite we launched Fashions as a Service, which operates fashions as API endpoints that you just name, a lot the best way you would possibly name the Azure OpenAI Service.
As we speak, we’re making Meta’s Llama 2 accessible in Fashions as a Service by means of Azure AI in public preview, enabling Llama-2-7b (Textual content Era), Llama-2-7b-Chat (Chat Completion), Llama-2-13b (Textual content Era), Llama-2-13b-Chat (Chat Completion), Llama-2-70b (Textual content Era), and Llama-2-70b-Chat (Chat Completion).”
Hedging AI bets whereas giving prospects extra selections
Providing this wide selection of various open-source Llama fashions looks like a sensible transfer on Microsoft’s half, increasing the alternatives of AI for Azure cloud storage and repair prospects and giving them a far lower-cost choice (the fashions themselves are free, although numerous implementations might not be) to Microsoft’s buddy OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and 4 fashions.
In any case, Llama 2 arguably received the 12 months with regards to generative AI since it’s the popular open-source choice for a lot of customers and enterprises.
It follows studies of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who was stated to be stunned and furious in regards to the prior OpenAI board’s abrupt resolution to terminate CEO Sam Altman again in November earlier than finally re-hiring him, stating that he wants to spread Microsoft’s AI bets more widely.
OpenAI nonetheless well-represented
However that doesn’t imply that OpenAI is being overlooked within the chilly with at the moment’s bulletins. Quite the opposite: Montgomery additionally shared the information that OpenAI’s newest publicly accessible AI mannequin, GPT-4 Turbo with Imaginative and prescient — which supplies the AI the capabilities of analyzing and describing images and visible materials — can also be now accessible to prospects of Azure within the Azure AI Studio.
Already, prospects corresponding to Instacart and WPP are utilizing this mannequin, in line with Montgomery.
And, the Azure AI Studio consists of instruments for fine-tuning all of the fashions provided.
At this level, because the AI cloud wars proceed to rage on, the one actual query is: what number of fashions will Microsoft be capable of add to Azure AI Studio? Is Mistral or Deci subsequent?
The information at the moment additionally follows Microsoft’s launch earlier this week of Phi-2, its personal small language mannequin (SML), although that is just for analysis functions and might’t be used for business circumstances. Nonetheless, Llama-2 and GPT-4 Turbo with Imaginative and prescient can.