SANTA CLARA,CA/USA – FEBRUARY 1, 2014: Microsoft corporate building in Santa Clara, California. Microsoft is a multinational corporation that develops, supports and sells computer software and services.

The integration of OpenAI’s ChatGPT – the revolutionary chatbot which has been the talk of the tech town for the past few months – to Microsoft’s Azure may be sooner than you think. In a blog post, the company confirmed that it would soon bring the popular chatbot to its cloud-based service. To add to this, Microsoft announced the general availability of its Azure OpenAI Service as part of its continued commitment to democratizing AI.

The Azure OpenAI service gives cloud customers access to tools such as GPT-3.5, DALL-E 2, and Codex, further enabling them to use the OpenAI products in their own applications running in the cloud. It has been available to a limited set of customers ever since it was unveiled in November 2021. The general availability of the Azure OpenAI service will build on the existing partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI, further enabling customers to access ChatGPT through the service as well. Microsoft declined from providing a specific timeline, simply informing that the popular chatbot will be accessible through Azure OpenAI Service “soon.”

“ChatGPT is coming soon to the Azure Open AI Service, which is now generally available, as we help customers apply the world’s most advanced AI models to their own business imperatives,” read a tweet by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on the development.

OpenAI, in its own tweet, added, “We’ve learned a lot from the ChatGPT research preview and have been making important updates based on user feedback. ChatGPT will be coming to our API and Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service soon.”

Microsoft has been restrictive when it comes to Azure OpenAI Service. The company debuted it in November 2021 on an invite-only basis, and according to the company, it has been used in customer support, customization, and gaining insights from data using search, data extraction, and classification. And from the looks of it, it has been a successful venture.

“Al Jazeera Digital is constantly exploring new ways to use technology to support our journalism and better serve our audience. Azure OpenAI Service has the potential to enhance our content production in several ways, including summarization and translation, selection of topics, AI tagging, content extraction, and style guide rule application. We are excited to see this service go to general availability so it can help us further contextualize our reporting by conveying the opinion and the other opinion,” said Jason McCartney, Vice President of Engineering, Al Jazeera.

The general availability of the service does not entail that anybody can access it. According to an official, the availability of the service is “restricted to customers who meet and adhere to the standards for responsible and ethical AI principles that Microsoft has set and published.” Customers who are interested to get their hands on it need to apply for access and describe why and how they intend to use it before they are given access to the service. In order to prevent the potential abuse of the service, Microsoft will also vet the applications and screen for harmful content that users might input.