Microsoft's Azure AI portfolio of services already boasts over 60,000 customers worldwide. To further empower customers in building and scaling AI solutions, Microsoft today announced several new capabilities across its Azure AI portfolio, including enhancements to the rapidly growing Azure OpenAI service.
One notable introduction is the Azure OpenAI Data Zone deployment option. Designed to provide enterprises with greater control over data privacy and residency, this feature will enable organizations in the United States and European Union to process and store their data within specific geographic boundaries, ensuring compliance with regional data residency requirements. The Data Zones deployment option is currently available for the Standard (PayGo) tier and will soon be extended to the Provisioned tier.
To bolster the reliability of the Azure OpenAI service, Microsoft is now offering a 99.9% latency service level agreement (SLA) for token generation. This SLA guarantees consistent token generation speeds at all times, providing developers with increased confidence in the service's performance.
Microsoft also highlighted the availability of new AI models for developers. The Azure AI service now incorporates three advanced multimodal medical imaging models: MedImageInsight for image analysis, MedImageParse for image segmentation across imaging modalities, and CXRReportGen to generate detailed structured reports. Additionally, Cohere Embed 3, an industry-leading AI search model, and Ministral 3B, a small language model from Mistral AI, are now accessible on Azure AI. Microsoft also announced the availability of fine-tuning for the Phi-3.5-mini and Phi-3.5-MoE models.
Furthermore, Azure AI models are now available through the GitHub Marketplace via the Azure AI model inference API. This integration allows developers to explore and compare model performance in a playground environment for free. To deploy a model, developers can log in to their Azure account and switch to a paid tier.
Microsoft plans to make further Azure AI announcements at Microsoft Ignite 2024 later this month.