Azure OpenAI Service: Satya Nadella says new update ‘leap forward’ for Azure AI Foundry — All you need to know | Mint

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on April 16 announced new updates for the tech giant’s Azure OpenAI Foundry, which he celebrated as a “leap forward in AI reasoning”, in a post on social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter).

“ big updates to Foundry today: o3 and o4-mini from OpenAI are both simul-shipping, delivering a leap forward in AI reasoning,” Satya Nadella wrote, quoting a post by the Microsoft official X account on the same.

Azure OpenAI Service: New Updates — All You Need to Know

According to the post by Microsoft, the Azure OpenAI Service has been updated to include OpenAI’s latest o3 and o4-mini models, which provide key features such as: support for multiple APIs, reasoning summary, multimodality, and full tools support.

The Azure AI Foundry is a website that allows web developers to “customise, host, run, and manage AI-driven applications built in GitHub, Visual Studio, and Copilot Studio, with APIs for all their needs”, according to a description on the application’s official website.

‘Next-level reasoning AI’, says product developer

In a Microsoft blog post detailing the updates, Steve Sweetman, Product Lead for Azure OpenAI Service, announced that Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service in Azure AI Foundry and GitHub are now available with the latest iterations in the o-series of OpenAI models: OpenAI o3 and OpenAI o4-mini.

“Both o3 and o4-mini offer significant improvements on quality and safety while supporting the existing features of o1 and o3-mini and delivering comparable or better performance through its integration and support of the newest APIs and reasoning features,” according to Sweetman.

• New innovations in safety: The o-series reasoning models use deliberative alignment, a training strategy that teaches reasoning models safety specifications and trains them to reason explicitly about these specifications before answering. According to Sweetman, “Both o3 and o4-mini feature the next level of safety improvements within the o-series of models so you can use the power of these models knowing these models are pushing the frontiers on safety as well.”
• New audio models available: Azure OpenAI Service has also introduced three powerful new audio models available for deployment today in East US2 on Azure AI Foundry: GPT-4o-Transcribe and GPT-4o-Mini-Transcribe, which are speech-to-text models outperforming previous benchmarks, and GPT-4o-Mini-TTS, a customisable text-to-speech model enabling detailed instructions on speech characteristics.
• A new era in AI reasoning: “Imagine a world where AI reasoning is not just a tool but a partner in innovation. The o3 and o4-mini models are not just upgrades; they are gateways to new possibilities, enabling you to push the boundaries of what AI can achieve,” Sweetman wrote. He added that these tools aid in solving complex problems, creating seamless workflows, or “exploring new frontiers in AI”.

(This is a developing story, more updates coming)