Microsoft makes the ChatGPT Large language AI model available in preview as part of applications designed for the company’s Azure OpenAI service, paving the way for developers to integrate the large language model into a wide variety of business development and end-user applications.
It appears that Microsoft has already had several users work with this integration, citing ODP Corporation (the parent company of Office Depot and OfficeMax), Singapore’s Smart Nation Digital Government Office, and contract management software vendor Icertis as reference customers.
Developers using the Azure OpenAI service can use ChatGPT to add various features to applications, including repeating call center calls, automating claims processing, and even creating new ads with personalized content, among others.
Generative AI like ChatGPT is already being used to improve Microsoft’s product offerings. For example, according to the company the premium version of Teams can use AI to create chapters in conversations and auto-generated summaries, while Viva Sales can provide data-driven guidance and suggest email content to help teams reach their customers.
Enterprise use cases for Azure OpenAI ChatGPT
Ritu Jyoti, vice president of the IDC group for global AI and automation research, said the proposed use cases make a lot of sense and she expects much of the initial use of Microsoft’s new ChatGPT-powered offering to be internal. will be aimed at companies.
“For (for example) helping HR build job descriptions, helping employees with internal knowledge management and discovery — in other words, empowering employees with internal search,” she said.
The price of the service works with tokens – one token covers about four characters of a given query in written English, with an average paragraph of 100 tokens and an essay of 1,500 words at about 2,048. According to Jyoti, one of the reasons why GPT-3 based applications became more popular just before ChatGPT went viral was that the price of the OpenAI foundation dropped to around $0.02 for 1,000 tokens.
ChatGPT over Azure costs even less, at $0.002 per 1,000 tokens, potentially making the service more cost-effective than using an in-house large language model, she added.
“I think the price is great,” Jyoti said.
According to Gartner vice president and renowned analyst Bern Elliot, Microsoft appears to be operating the service with an emphasis on responsible AI practices. interview with a New York Times reporter in which the chatbot declared his love and tried to convince him to leave his spouse.
“I think, historically, Microsoft has taken responsible AI very seriously, and that’s to their credit,” he said. “It’s positive to have a strong track record of ethical usage and delivering enterprise-level privacy, so I think that’s to their advantage.”
That’s an important consideration, he said, given the concerns raised by the use of AI in the enterprise — more specifically, data protection and contextualization of datasets. The last issue generally revolves around making sure enterprise AI gets answers from the correct information base, which ensures those answers are correct and eliminates the “hallucinations” seen in more generalized AI.
Copyright © 2023 IDG Communications, Inc.
