26th May, 2021
Built by OpenAI, an independent AI research and deployment company, GPT-3 is a massive natural language model that runs exclusively on Azure.
Through a partnership with OpenAI that aims to accelerate breakthroughs in AI — from jointly developing the first supercomputer on Azure that is powerful enough to meet the demands of very large AI models to testing and commercializing new AI technologies — Microsoft has a license to the code behind the GPT-3 model that allows it to integrate the technology directly into its products.
“This will allow people to query and explore data in ways they literally couldn’t do before, and that will be the magical moment,” Lamanna said.
Although these “citizen developers” didn’t need to know computer programming languages, they still previously had to understand the logic of writing formulas that might look something like this: first(Sort(Search(‘BC Orders’, “stroller”, “aib_productname”), ‘Purchase Date’, Descending), 10).
With the new GPT-3-powered features, a person can get the same result by typing plainspoken language like: “Show 10 orders that have a stroller in the product name and sort by purchase date with newest on the top.”
The features don’t replace the need for a person to understand the code they are implementing but are designed to assist people who are learning the Power Fx programming language and help them choose the right formulas to get the result they need. That can dramatically expand access to more advanced app building and train people to use low code tools more rapidly.
The new features announced at Microsoft Build will be available in preview in the English language throughout North America by the end of June.
“GPT-3 is the most powerful natural language processing model that we have in the market, so for us to be able to use it to help our customers is tremendous,” said Bryony Wolf, Power Apps product marketing manager. “This is really the first time you’re seeing in a mainstream consumer product the ability for customers to have their natural language transformed into code.”
GPT-3 is part of a new class of models, which Microsoft is broadly exploring through its AI at Scale initiative, that learn from examining billions of pages of publicly available text. They so deeply absorb nuances of language, grammar, knowledge concepts, and context that the same model can perform a broad set of tasks that involve generating text.
OpenAI released an Azure-powered API last year that allows developers to explore GPT-3 capabilities. Since then, people have used it to do everything from writing poetry and tweets to generating articles, summarizing emails, answering trivia questions, and generating computer code from plain language.
This discovery of GPT-3’s vast capabilities exploded the boundaries of what’s possible in natural language learning, said Eric Boyd, Microsoft corporate vice president for Azure AI. But there were still open questions about whether such a large and complex model could be deployed cost-effectively at scale to meet real-world business needs.
“We’re finding ways to bring it into Azure and our mainstream products,” Boyd said. “We think there are a whole bunch more things that GPT-3 is capable of doing. It’s a foundational new technology that lights up a ton of new possibilities, and this is sort of that first light coming into production,” he said.
The Power Platform team, which also works on low code tools to boost business productivity such as Power BI, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents, quickly realized that GPT-3’s ability to translate conversational language into code could help advance the core mission of democratizing software development or making it more straightforward for a wider variety of people.
