Microsoft is discontinuing its Azure OpenAI service for individual developers in China due to regulatory requirements.
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Microsoft has announced the general availability of its new Cobalt 100-based VMs on Azure. These VMs offer significant performance improvements.
NVIDIA's Blackwell platform, which offers significant cost and energy consumption improvements for AI training, was delayed but is now being adopted by major players like Microsoft and OpenAI.
Microsoft has launched Drasi, an open-source platform designed to simplify data change processing by using continuous queries and automated reactions.
Microsoft and Rezolve AI have partnered to bring AI-powered commerce and retail solutions to businesses worldwide.
Microsoft has launched a new HD version of its neural text-to-speech service. The new voices offer improved expressiveness, conversational tone, and natural variations.
KT Corporation and Microsoft have formed a multibillion-dollar partnership to advance AI and cloud technologies in Korea.
Meta launched Llama 3.2 models, including vision and text-only models. Microsoft and Google have made these models available on their respective cloud platforms.
Google has sent a formal complaint to the European Commission, the regulations agency of the European Union, claiming Microsoft's cloud business is anti-competitive.
Microsoft Azure AI Content Safety has received a new Multimodal API that allows it to detect harmful and inappropriate content made by users or by AI.
Microsoft has introduced new features in Azure AI Content Safety, including the ability to correct hallucinated AI-generated content and a hybrid deployment option for on-device scenarios.
Microsoft has introduced a new watermarking feature in Azure OpenAI Service to address the growing concerns of disinformation and deepfakes. This feature adds invisible watermarks to DALL·E images
Microsoft has announced it is expanding the number of TTS AI voices for English (Indian) and Hindi customers for its Azure AI speech services to use.
Microsoft and Oracle have just announced some new partnerships that extend their previous collaborations for cloud services and AI.
OpenAI has released a new GPT-4o model with Structured Outputs and reduced pricing. Microsoft is also offering the new model at the same price, highlighting benefits such as consistent data formats.
Microsoft has launched new AI security features, Prompt Shields and Protected Material Detection, in Azure AI Content Safety and Azure OpenAI Service.
Microsoft's Azure OpenAI service has received DoD Impact Level 4 and 5 Provisional Authorization, enabling U.S. government agencies with high-security needs to leverage generative AI capabilities
Microsoft has announced the general availability of the Mv3 High Memory VMs on Azure. It has also shared more details about Very High Memory VMs.
Microsoft unveiled detailed specifications and architecture of its in-house AI accelerator chip, Maia 100, at Hot Chips 2024. The chip boasts impressive specs and a vertically integrated system.
Cerebras Systems launched Cerebras Inference, the world's fastest AI inference solution. It's 20x faster than NVIDIA's solutions and offers 100x higher price-performance.
There's a reportedly leaked document that seems to indicate Microsoft's AI employees are being paid more on average compared to Azure team members.
The Azure AI Speech service now includes a Text to Speech Avatar feature that can convert text into a video of a photorealistic human avatar speaking with a natural-sounding voice.
AI21 Labs has launched the Jamba 1.5 family of open models, featuring Jamba 1.5 Mini and Jamba 1.5 Large. These models boast groundbreaking efficiency, long context handling, speed, and quality.
Microsoft quietly announced some changes to how it will report its financial numbers for the upcoming 2025 fiscal year. It will merge Windows and Devices into one financial category.
Microsoft Azure will make multi-factor authentication mandatory across services. It will affect various services in two phases, the first in October and the second phase in early 2025.
Tenable discovered two security vulnerabilities in Microsoft's Azure Health Bot service. The first vulnerability, found in the "Data Connections" feature, allowed unauthorized access to resources.
Microsoft and Palantir announced an expanded partnership to bring advanced AI capabilities including OpenAI's LLMs via Azure OpenAI service to the U.S. Defense and Intelligence Community.
OpenAI released a new model, GPT-4o-2024-08-06, with Structured Outputs support and a reduced API price. The new model is now available on Microsoft Azure, and it seems to perform better.
Neon, an open-source database startup, received a $25 million strategic investment from Microsoft's Venture Fund, M12. Neon plans to use this funding for research and development of its products.
GitHub has launched a new service called GitHub Models, which allows developers to experiment with various AI models for free. These include popular models like OpenAI's GPT-4, Microsoft's Phi 3, etc.
Microsoft announced the availability of Phi-3-mini and Phi-3-medium small language models for fine-tuning on Azure, allowing developers to customize these models for various use cases.
Microsoft has revealed it will deprecate the Virtual Network Injection feature for Azure Data Explorer. No new customers can use this feature, and current users will see it shut down on Feb. 1, 2025.
Microsoft quietly revealed this week it will retire Azure Lab Services due to its many other virtual desktop services. However, the actual retirement won't happen for nearly three years.
Microsoft has announced the availability of GPT-4o mini, OpenAI's fastest model, on Azure OpenAI Service. This model is available for free trial in the Azure OpenAI Studio Playground.
Microsoft is gradually implementing multi-factor authentication (MFA) for all Azure users to enhance security. This rollout will occur in two phases. All existing Azure MFA methods are supported.
Microsoft has revealed more improvements and additions to its Azure AI Speech services. They include even more AI-based voices, new chat avatars, and a new Text Stream API for faster speech generation
As part of Build 2024, Microsoft has announced that its in-house Arm-based Azure Cobalt 100 processor is now available to try out with its new Azure Virtual Machines via a preview program.
Microsoft's plans to become carbon-negative by 2030 have taken a hit due to big increases in indirect emissions from building new data centers. They have gone up by over 30 percent since 2020.
Microsoft has announced that GPT-4o, the latest AI large language model from OpenAI, is now available to access from its Azure OpenAI Service in a preview version with text and image support.
Microsoft has announced that Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is now available in the Azure Marketplace so that you can use it in an Azure Virtual Machine. This version will be supported for up to 12 years.