Microsoft and OpenAI continue to make announcements on their latest AI models and ChatGPT, and just this week announced three new innovations designed to help organizations work more efficiently and intelligently.
Quite frankly, Microsoft, OpenAI and others are making new AI announcements faster than we can keep up, so here is a breakdown of three big announcements on generative AI technology including ChatGPT plugins, GPT-4 in Azure OpenAI Service and GitHub Copilot X.
ChatGPT plugins
ChatGPT creator OpenAI is beginning to roll out plugins in ChatGPT so the AI research and development company can study their real-world use, impact and safety and alignment challenges.
In a blog, OpenAI says users have been asking for plugins since ChatGPT was launched in November 2022, as plugins can unlock a wider range of possible use cases.
To start, OpenAI is working with a small set of users and will roll out larger-scale access as the company learns more. That expanded access will include plugin developers, ChatGPT users, and after an alpha period, API users who want to integrate plugins into their products.
According to OpenAI, plugin developers who have been invited off a waitlist can use the company’s documentation to build a plugin for ChatGPT, which lists the enabled plugins in the prompt shown to the language model as well as documentation to instruct the model how to use each.
The company says the first plugins have been created by Expedia, FiscalNote, Instacart, KAYAK, Klarna, Milo, OpenTable, Shopify, Slack, Speak, Wolfram, and Zapier.
OpenAI is also hosting two plugins itself, including a web browser and code interpreter.
“We’ve also open-sourced the code for a knowledgebase retrieval plugin, to be self-hosted by any developer with information with which they’d like to augment ChatGPT,” OpenAI says in the blog.
Read the announcement for more information.
GPT-4 in Azure OpenAI Service
Microsoft is making GPT-4 available in preview in Azure OpenAI Service, allowing customers and partners already using Azure OpenAI Service to apply for access to GPT-4 and start building with the new advanced language model that OpenAI released last week.
“With this milestone, we are proud to bring the world’s most advanced AI models—including GPT-3.5, ChatGPT, and DALL•E 2—to Azure customers, backed by Azure AI-optimized infrastructure, enterprise-readiness, compliance, data security, and privacy controls, along with many integrations with other Azure services,” says Eric Boyd, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of AI platform, in a blog.
The new Bing chat and Microsoft 365 Copilot already run on GPT-4, but bringing GPT-4 to Azure OpenAI Service allows businesses to take advantage of the same models to build their own applications.
According to Boyd, organizations are already leveraging Azure OpenAI Service to develop virtual assistants in minutes using natural language with Copilot in Power Virtual Agents.
“GPT-4 has the potential to take this experience to a whole new level using its broader knowledge, problem-solving abilities, and domain expertise,” Boyd says. “With GPT-4 in Azure OpenAI Service, businesses can streamline communications internally as well as with their customers, using a model with additional safety investments to reduce harmful outputs.”
Other use cases include improving customer experiences, summarizing long-form content, helping develop software and reducing risk by predicting the right tax data, Boyd writes.
Read the announcement for more information.
GitHub Copilot X
The Microsoft-owned GitHub last month launched Copilot for Business, an at-scale AI developer tool that included a more advanced OpenAI model and new capabilities to improve the quality of AI code generating.
Now, GitHub is adopting OpenAI’s new GPT-4 model to launch GitHub Copilot X, that also includes chat and voice for Copilot, and Copilot to pull requests, the command line and docs to answer questions on projects, the company says.
Calling it the “future of AI-powered software development,” GitHub says it is essentially a ChatGPT-like experience in editor with GitHub Copilot Chat. The Chat interface is focused don developer scenarios and natively integrates with VS Code and Visual Studio, the company says.
However, GitHub Copilot Chat does more than suggest code, as it recognizes what a developer has typed and what error messages are shown. In addition, it is deeply embedded into the IDE, the company says.
This enables developers to get in-depth analysis and explanations of what code blocks are intended to do, generate unit tests, and even get proposed fixes to bugs, according to GitHub.
The company says GitHub Copilot Chat builds upon the work that parent company Microsoft has done with OpenAI, such as ChatGPT and the new Bing.
The Chat feature will also join GitHub’s voice-to-code AI technology extension, which the company is now calling GitHub Copilot Voice, where developers can verbally give natural language prompts.
Developers can also sign up for a preview of the first AI-generated descriptions for pull requests on GitHub, which adds support for AI powered tags in pull request descriptions through a GitHub app that organization admins and individual repository owners can install, the company says.
Microsoft also announced last week an AI copilot in Microsoft Power Apps designed to help developers build and interact with software applications.
Read the announcement for more information.
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