[tempusalaria]

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.

[whimsicalism]

Good luck to OAI breaking with Microsoft when they have a 49% ownership share in your company and own all of your GPUs.