If you don't trust OpenAI, you can choose to trust Microsoft. Azure OpenAI is 3-months behind OpenAI that costs 3x as much, but you get more 'security' and better performance.
Yes and I recommend that people interested in GPT-4 use this service as it’s isolated from OpenAI and it is the absolute best model right now.
That said, there are 3 quite worrying future possibilities, both stemming from the level of investment and commitment by Microsoft in OpenAI - a huge percentage of Azure’s value is bet on an exclusive partnership with them. That gives OpenAI a lot of leverage. And customer data is a very tempting cookie jar to build a long term moat for these companies
Possibility 1: someone overtakes OpenAI models and you’re stuck on Azure who won’t offer that model
Possibility 2: OpenAI decides to break with Microsoft and you’re stuck with a useless application. AWS Bedrock is far less likely to leave an AI application obsolete.
Possibility 3: OpenAI put pressure on Microsoft to loosen the data protections around the service, or go around them entirely. This is a particular concern as the systems in the service become more complex and agentic and more difficult for Microsoft to audit. Model weights are highly opaque and Microsoft cannot trace the exact possible behaviour of these systems. What if GPT-6 changes its own weights during inference for example? How can Microsoft ever understand if that’s a true critical piece of functionality or a proxy method to access customer data etc.
It took like 2 extra months for Azure OpenAI to get GPT-4 turbo. There's a noticeable time delay between OpenAI deploying their latest model and when Microsoft manages to shove it in Azure.
And it's not just the models. E.g., the Assistants API is not available yet in Azure, and there is no expected ship date for it. But I'm confident it's coming.
That said, there are 3 quite worrying future possibilities, both stemming from the level of investment and commitment by Microsoft in OpenAI - a huge percentage of Azure’s value is bet on an exclusive partnership with them. That gives OpenAI a lot of leverage. And customer data is a very tempting cookie jar to build a long term moat for these companies
Possibility 1: someone overtakes OpenAI models and you’re stuck on Azure who won’t offer that model
Possibility 2: OpenAI decides to break with Microsoft and you’re stuck with a useless application. AWS Bedrock is far less likely to leave an AI application obsolete.
Possibility 3: OpenAI put pressure on Microsoft to loosen the data protections around the service, or go around them entirely. This is a particular concern as the systems in the service become more complex and agentic and more difficult for Microsoft to audit. Model weights are highly opaque and Microsoft cannot trace the exact possible behaviour of these systems. What if GPT-6 changes its own weights during inference for example? How can Microsoft ever understand if that’s a true critical piece of functionality or a proxy method to access customer data etc.