Generative AI on Microsoft Azure

Chapter 1. Technical Fundamentals of Generative AI Models and Applications

We can affirm that generative AI (GenAI) is already a big industry in itself. It can dominate supply chain and geopolitics, directly impact trading stock prices, and define the immediate destiny of companies and executives around the world. It also brings an entirely new paradigm for software development, emergent capabilities, and large-scale distributed inference, among others. This chapter intends to be the entry door to this revolution, by introducing not only Microsoft Azure as a differentiator for your GenAI projects but also complex topics like advanced adoption patterns, model training and customization phases, etc.

From a purely technological perspective, since the arrival of the first generative pretrained transformer (GPT) models, Microsoft Azure has played a significant role in its evolution, providing the infrastructure and tools necessary for large-scale AI model development and deployment. Because of the role of Microsoft technologies as the enterprise-grade de facto choice, most of the big adopters have leverage tools such as Microsoft Foundry, Azure OpenAI Service, and more recently Microsoft Fabric. Don’t get me wrong: we don’t intend to sell anything here, but the market talked and there is an omnipresence of Azure for all GenAI, enterprise-level things.

One of the key differentiators of Microsoft Azure since 2022 was the launch of the Azure OpenAI Service. This collaboration between ...