Microsoft announced that it will open-source the AI model Llama 2, a competitor to Meta Platforms, and provide it to Azure AI Studio, a cloud platform AI clearinghouse, in the form of Model as a Service (MaaS).

MaaS allows customers to use AI models, such as Llama 2, on-demand over the internet, with easy setup. They don't need to install it on their own cloud server space, private cloud, hybrid cloud, or elsewhere. This is not an easy task even for enterprises, even with the help of Microsoft experts and trained IT personnel.

As John Montgomery, Vice President of Project Management at Microsoft's AI platform, said in a blog post:

"In Azure AI, you have long been able to deploy models to your own infrastructure - just go to the model directory, select the model and virtual machine you want to deploy, and you're done. But not every customer wants to operate infrastructure, which is why we introduced Model as a Service at Ignite, which runs the model as an API endpoint that you simply call, just like you might call Azure OpenAI services."

By offering Meta's Llama 2 through Azure AI as Model as a Service in public preview, Llama-2-7b (text generation), Llama-2-7b-Chat (chat completion), Llama-2-13b (text generation), Llama-2-13b-Chat (chat completion), Llama-2-70b (text generation), and Llama-2-70b-Chat (chat completion) are available.

Providing various open-source Llama models is a wise move by Microsoft, as it increases the AI options for Azure cloud storage and service customers and provides them with a low-cost alternative to OpenAI's GPT-3.5 and 4 models (the models are free, but implementation may not be).

This also follows Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's reported surprise and anger at the sudden firing of CEO Sam Altman by the former OpenAI board in November, before rehiring him, stating that he wanted to diversify Microsoft's AI bets more broadly.

But that doesn't mean OpenAI was overlooked in today's announcement. On the contrary, Montgomery also shared news of OpenAI's latest publicly available AI model, GPT-4 Turbo with Vision - which enables AI to analyze and describe photos and visual materials - now also available to Azure customers in Azure AI Studio.

According to Montgomery, some customers like Instacart and WPP are already using this model. In addition, Azure AI Studio includes tools for fine-tuning all the models provided.