An introduction to Azure OpenAI Service: Benefits, use cases and best practices

Azure OpenAI Service offers a wide range of models with different capabilities and price points, including the latest GPT-4 models currently in preview. With its advanced capabilities and Microsoft's support, Azure OpenAI Service is ideal for organisations looking to create and deploy powerful artificial intelligence tools.

Here we look at how Azure OpenAI Service works in more detail and evaluate these key areas:

1. How to get started
2. Best practices
3. Key benefits
4. Use cases
5. Things to consider

Azure OpenAI Service: how it works

Azure OpenAI Service leverages the concept of prompt engineering, where a system prompt provides context to an AI model, and enables it to respond more accurately to user prompts. By providing a system prompt that specifies the context and purpose of the AI, developers can create powerful AI systems without the need for extensive training data.

This is a significant advantage over traditional machine learning models, which require a large amount of data to be trained before they can be used effectively. With Azure OpenAI Service, developers can use a wide range of pre-built models that are already optimised for performance and accuracy, saving time and resources.

For example, if given the system prompt “you are an expert in farming grain”, the AI model would draw on its pre-trained knowledge about farming and grain cultivation to generate a response.

It might provide tips on the best times to plant and harvest specific types of grains, the optimal soil conditions for each type of grain, and the most effective irrigation and fertilisation techniques.

Azure OpenAI Service also provides customisation capabilities and tools that allow developers to have control over the content that their AI models generate and deploy. This enables organisations to tailor their AI systems to their specific needs and requirements.

How to begin using Azure OpenAI Service

Getting started with Azure OpenAI Service requires a couple of prerequisites, such as a valid Azure subscription. You will also need access to Azure OpenAI in this Azure subscription.

Access to this service is currently granted only by application. You can find out more about how to apply for access to Azure OpenAI via Microsoft’s documentation. Once these prerequisites are met, you can then sign into the Azure OpenAI Studio.

Here you’ll find the OpenAI Playground, a tool that allows users to experiment with the capabilities of the GPT-4 API without writing any code. The Playground provides a simple text box where you can input prompts, and GPT-3 generates a completion based on the prompt.

The Playground also allows users to adjust various configuration settings, such as the temperature and length of the generated text, and provides pre-filled Python and curl code samples based on the selected settings.

The Playground offers a range of examples to get you started, such as text summarisation and question-answering tasks. From this page, you can quickly iterate and experiment with the capabilities.

It's important to note that Azure OpenAI also performs content moderation on the prompt inputs and generated outputs. The prompts or responses may be filtered if harmful content is detected.

Best practices for using Azure OpenAI Service

When using Azure OpenAI Service, there are some best practices that you should keep in mind. These include:

1. Start small: Starting small helps you to identify any issues or challenges early on, which can save time and resources in the long run.
2. Be clear in your prompts: Make it clear to the model being used what kind of outputs you are expecting. Detailed examples and instructions can be useful here.
3. Monitor your AI models: It is important to establish metrics for performance and accuracy and monitor your models against these metrics on an ongoing basis. This will help you identify any issues or areas for improvement and refine your models accordingly.
4. Ensure data privacy and security: AI models often require access to sensitive data, such as customer information or financial data. It's important to ensure that this data is stored and processed securely and that appropriate access controls are in place to protect it.

Key benefits

Some of the key benefits of Azure OpenAI Service include:

1. Ease of use: Azure OpenAI Service offers simple REST APIs that can be called from any programming language.
2. Customisation offers: The OpenAI API offers a range of customisation options, allowing developers to fine-tune models to better fit their specific needs.
3. Security: Azure OpenAI is designed with enterprise-grade security features, such as role-based access control, network isolation and compliance certifications. These features ensure that enterprises can trust Azure OpenAI to protect their data and AI models.

Use cases for Azure OpenAI Service

Azure OpenAI Services are being used across industries and organisations to scale up applications with powerful AI tools. Here are a few use cases: 

• Copywriting: The GPT-3.5/4 model speeds up human creativity by producing ideas quickly. This can lead to more efficient product descriptions, headlines, and website content for organisations.
• Sentiment analysis: This involves analysing large volumes of text data to determine the overall sentiment or tone. This could be useful for a variety of applications, including social media monitoring, customer feedback analysis and market research.
• Advanced chatbots:  Azure OpenAI services can be used to build powerful chatbots that can handle customer service inquiries, technical support issues and other common tasks. With the ability to understand natural language, these chatbots can provide a more personalised experience for users and can help reduce the workload on customer service and support teams.

Things to consider when using Azure OpenAI Service

When it comes to using Azure OpenAI services, it is important for your organisation to consider the ethical and legal implications of their usage:

• Data privacy: In order to comply with data privacy laws like GDPR and CCPA, organisations should ensure that they follow best practices when using Azure OpenAI Service. This includes implementing appropriate access controls, data encryption and data residency measures.
• Bias: Models can sometimes produce unfair or biassed results, particularly when they are trained on biassed datasets. To address this, organisations should test for biases within their models and use more diverse datasets to ensure fairness.
• Transparency: These models have been referred to as “black boxes” because it can be difficult to explain why a model has given a result within a set of parameters. To address this issue, services like Model interpretability - Azure Machine Learning can help debug machine learning models and understand influences in the behaviour of models.

Conclusion

Azure OpenAI Service is just one of the many AI/ML services that Azure offers. Other popular tools offered by Azure include Azure Machine Learning Studio, Azure Cognitive Services and Custom Vision. These services enable organisations to build, train and deploy powerful AI tools at scale.

Audacia is a leading software development company based in the UK, headquartered in Leeds. We can provide the artificial intelligence services you need to deliver new digital products and services at scale.

To learn more about the artificial intelligence services we provide, contact us today on 0113 543 1300 or at info@audacia.co.uk