Microsoft offers GPT Large Language Model to U.S. government

On June 7, Microsoft Corp. released a blog post stating that it will use its Azure cloud service to provide OpenAI Large Language Models (LLM) to U.S. government agencies, including the U.S. Department of Defense.

Azure government customers can use OpenAI's two large language models, the latest GPT-4, and the earlier GPT-3 large model, through Microsoft Azure OpenAI Services.

This is the first time Microsoft has introduced GPT technology to a government agency, and the first case in the world to introduce AI large models represented by GPT to government. In the context of national agencies and large multinational groups around the world that have banned GPT big models for security reasons, Microsoft's move seems to send a different signal.

Microsoft said that federal, state and local government customers can use GPT-4 and GPT-3 to complete services such as generating answers to research questions, generating computer code and summarizing field reports, as well as adapting the language model for specific tasks, including content generation, language-to-code translation and summarization.

Microsoft reportedly hosts OpenAI models in its commercial cloud computing space, separate from the cloud used by Azure government customers, which adheres to a variety of specific security and data compliance rules, and data from Azure government customers is not used to train the models.

OpenAI is the developer of ChatGPT, a chatbot, with products such as the large language model GPT-3 and the multimodal model GPT-4, according to the data. Microsoft is OpenAI's largest investor, investing $1 billion in it in 2019 and adding a second multi-year investment of a reported $10 billion in January 2023.

Since OpenAI launched ChatGPT, AI Big Models have seen an unparalleled wave of growth, with major companies including Google and Baidu releasing their own AI Big Models. Among them, Microsoft and Google have successively launched AI products in cybersecurity, which have attracted widespread attention and discussion in the industry.

Microsoft has made its OpenAI models available to its commercial customers, and the Azure OpenAI service has grown rapidly in recent months, with 4,500 customers as of May this year, including groups such as Volvo, IKEA, Mercedes-Benz Group and Shell.