Microsoft today announced that Microsoft Azure government customers in the United States, such as federal, state and local governments or their partners, can now access Microsoft Azure OpenAI services, enabling all levels of government in the United States to access generative AI tools in a way that meets the strict security requirements for government cloud operations.
Microsoft said the Azure OpenAI service communicates securely through Transport Layer Security (TLS), and Azure Government connects directly to the commercial Microsoft Azure network, never interfacing with the public Internet or Microsoft corporate network.
In addition, Microsoft says Azure Government customers’ data is never used to train OpenAI models. similar measures are in place on ChatGPT, but are not the default setting.
Azure OpenAI Services enables government customers to use GPT-4, GPT-3, and embedding through the Azure OpenAI Services REST API, which you can use to accelerate content generation, simplify content summarization, optimize semantic search, and streamline code generation. Microsoft has extended each of these as described below:
- Accelerate content generation: Automatically generate responses based on task or project queries to help reduce the time and effort required for research and analysis, allowing teams to focus on higher-level decision-making and strategic tasks.
- Streamlined Content Summary: Generate log summaries and quickly analyze articles, analysts and field reports.
- Optimize semantic search: Enable enhanced information discovery and knowledge mining.
- Simplify code generation: Build custom applications using natural language to query proprietary data models and quickly generate code documentation.
“One of the most effective ways to generate reliable answers is to prompt models to derive responses from the underlying data,” said Bill Chappell, chief technology officer for strategic tasks and technologies at Microsoft. “If your use cases rely on up-to-date, reliable information rather than purely creative scenarios, we strongly recommend providing underlying data based on trusted internal data sources.”
“In general, the closer your source material is to the final form of the answer you want, the less work the model needs to do, which means less opportunity for error.”
Microsoft Azure OpenAI services require registration and are available only to approved customers and partners. Microsoft has released Azure Government OpenAI Access QuickStart to help governments use it (the relevant address).
