The potential of generative AI surpasses current expectations, with its impact spanning industries such as healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and education, reshaping both work and daily life. Developers are at the forefront of this transformation, driving innovation and accelerating business and societal advancements at an unprecedented pace. Azure, trusted by organizations globally for mission-critical workloads, offers a secure and responsible platform for developers to build confidently with generative AI.
Bring your data to life through generative AI
Generative AI has swiftly emerged as a defining technology of our generation, reshaping how we search and consume information daily. It’s been inspiring to witness customers across various industries embrace the Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service. In March, Microsoft introduced the preview of OpenAI’s GPT-4 in Azure OpenAI Service, enabling developers to seamlessly integrate custom AI-powered experiences into their applications. Today, GPT-4 is generally available on Azure OpenAI Service, and Microsoft is expanding its capabilities with new features that allow you to apply generative AI to your data and orchestrate AI with your systems.
Microsoft is thrilled to introduce Azure AI Studio, which allows developers to ground advanced conversational AI models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GPT-4, on their own data with just a few clicks. With Azure OpenAI Service on your data, now in public preview, combined with Azure Cognitive Search, users can unlock insights hidden in vast amounts of data, text, and images using natural language-based app interfaces. These tools empower developers to create richer experiences, helping users access specific information, such as inventory levels or healthcare benefits, and much more.
To enhance large language models' capabilities further, Microsoft is excited to announce that Azure Cognitive Search will now support vectors in Azure (currently in private preview), allowing for the storage, indexing, and search of vector embeddings across various data types, including text, images, audio, video, and graphs. Additionally, support for plugins in Azure OpenAI Service, also in private preview, will simplify the integration of external data sources and streamline API development and consumption. Available plugins include Azure Cognitive Search, Azure SQL, Azure Cosmos DB, Microsoft Translator, and Bing Search.
Today, customers such as DocuSign, Volvo, Ikea, Crayon, and over 4,500 others are already benefiting from Azure OpenAI Service. Discover more about the latest advancements with Azure OpenAI Service.
Our ongoing innovation in AI also extends to new features in Azure Machine Learning, empowering developers and data scientists to harness the power of generative AI with their data. The preview of foundation models in Azure Machine Learning allows data scientists to fine-tune, evaluate, and deploy open-source models curated by Azure Machine Learning, alongside models from Hugging Face Hub and Azure OpenAI Service, all within a unified model catalog. This provides a comprehensive repository of popular models directly within the Azure Machine Learning registry.
Microsoft is also excited to announce the upcoming preview of Azure Machine Learning’s prompt flow, designed to streamline the process of prompting, evaluating, tuning, and operationalizing large language models. With prompt flow, developers can quickly create workflows connecting various language models and data sources, enabling the creation of intelligent applications and the evaluation of workflow quality to select the best prompts for their needs. Explore all the announcements for Azure Machine Learning.
Microsoft has been witnessing remarkable momentum in machine learning, exemplified by customers like Swift, a member-owned cooperative that provides a secure global financial messaging network. Swift is using Azure Machine Learning to develop an anomaly detection model with federated learning techniques, enhancing global financial security while maintaining data privacy. We look forward to seeing what Microsoft's customers create next.
Deploy and scale AI-driven intelligent applications on Azure
Azure's cloud-native platform is the optimal environment for running and scaling applications while seamlessly integrating native AI services. Whether prioritizing control or flexibility, Azure ensures a productive experience, regardless of the approach you choose.
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) offers complete control and the fastest path to developing and deploying intelligent, cloud-native apps across Azure, data centers, or at the edge, with built-in code-to-cloud pipelines and guardrails. Microsoft is excited to introduce some of the most anticipated innovations for AKS, supporting the scale and critical nature of applications running on it.
To provide enterprises with greater control, Microsoft is announcing long-term support for Kubernetes, allowing customers to remain on the same release for up to two years—double the current duration. Additionally, Azure Linux is now available as a container host operating system platform, optimized for AKS. Azure customers can also access a vibrant ecosystem of first-party and third-party solutions with simple click-through deployments from Azure Marketplace. Lastly, Microsoft is excited to announce that confidential containers, aligned with Kata Confidential Containers, will soon be available as a first-party supported offering on AKS. This feature supports zero-trust operator deployments, enhancing security for your applications.
Azure also offers a variety of serverless execution environments, allowing you to build, deploy, and scale applications dynamically without the need to manage infrastructure. Azure Container Apps, a fully managed service, enables microservices and containerized applications to run on a serverless platform. Microsoft is previewing several new features to simplify serverless application development. Developers can now run Azure Container Apps jobs on demand, schedule applications, and execute event-driven tasks asynchronously. This new capability allows smaller tasks within complex jobs to run in parallel, simplifying unattended batch jobs alongside core business logic. These advancements make it easier and more intuitive to build intelligent, cloud-native apps on Azure.
AI-powered integrated tools designed to help developers succeed
Building intelligent, AI-powered apps on Azure is just one part of our innovation focus. Equally important is enabling developers to dedicate more time to strategic, impactful work, reducing the time spent on tasks like debugging and managing infrastructure. We’re investing in GitHub Copilot, Microsoft Dev Box, and Azure Deployment Environments to streamline processes and boost developer productivity and scale.
GitHub Copilot, the world’s first large-scale AI developer tool, helps millions of developers code up to 55% faster. Microsoft has announced new Copilot integrations within Visual Studio, minimizing setup time for new projects. We’re also introducing enhanced features for Microsoft Dev Box, including new starter developer images and deeper Visual Studio integration, which speed up setup and improve performance. Additionally, Microsoft is announcing the general availability of Azure Deployment Environments with support for HashiCorp Terraform, alongside Azure Resource Manager.
Foster secure and reliable experiences in the age of AI
When building, deploying, and running intelligent applications, security must be a fundamental consideration—not an afterthought. Developer-first tools and workflow integration are essential. Microsoft is investing in new features and capabilities to help you embed security early in your software development lifecycle, identify and resolve security issues before deployment, and use tools to deploy trusted containers to Azure.
Microsoft is excited to introduce GitHub Advanced Security for Azure DevOps, coming soon in preview. This solution integrates the core features of GitHub Advanced Security into the Azure DevOps platform, allowing you to embed automated security checks into your workflow. It includes CodeQL-powered code scanning to detect vulnerabilities, secret scanning to prevent sensitive information leaks, and dependency scanning to identify vulnerabilities in open-source dependencies and provide update alerts.
Responsible AI usage is equally crucial. Over nearly seven years, we have developed a cross-company program to ensure our AI systems are responsibly designed. Our experience with privacy and GDPR has shown that policies alone are insufficient; we need tools and engineering systems to support responsible AI development. Microsoft is introducing new products and features to enhance accuracy, safety, fairness, and explainability throughout the AI development lifecycle.
Azure AI Content Safety, now in preview, helps developers create safer online environments by detecting and scoring unsafe images and text in multiple languages, aiding businesses in prioritizing content moderation. It can be customized to meet specific organizational regulations and policies. As part of our commitment to responsible AI, Azure AI Content Safety will be integrated across our products, including Azure OpenAI Service and Azure Machine Learning, to support content evaluation and moderation.
Additionally, the responsible AI dashboard in Azure Machine Learning now supports text and image data in preview. This feature helps users identify model errors, understand performance and fairness issues, and provide explanations for various machine-learning model types, including text and image classification and object detection. In production, users can continue to monitor for model and data drift, perform data integrity tests, and intervene with model monitoring, now in preview.
Microsoft is dedicated to assisting developers and machine learning engineers in applying AI responsibly through shared learning, resources, and specialized tools and systems. To learn more, join us at the Building and Using AI Models Responsibly breakout session and download our Responsible AI Standard.
Let’s write this history, together
AI represents a significant shift in computing. Whether it’s integrated into your workflow or drives the development of next-generation intelligent apps, this community of developers is at the forefront of this transformation.
Microsoft is thrilled to bring Microsoft Build to you this year, where we will delve into the latest AI technologies, connect you with experts from both within and outside of Microsoft, and highlight real-world solutions powered by AI.
Learn more here.