Microsoft launches ChatGPT as an Azure Managed Service
How Microsoft wants to commercialize ChatGPT

Currently, Microsoft is focusing on providing access to large base models for artificial intelligence in Azure. Now, in addition to DALL-E 2 or Codex, ChatGPT is also available via the Azure OpenAI Service. This allows companies to use speech AI for their own applications.
ChatGPT is now available to Microsoft Azure customers in the Azure OpenAI Service so they can use the technology in their own applications and services via the Azure cloud. The goal is clearly to attack competitors, especially Google, once via the search engine Bing, which now works with ChatGPT and now as a managed service in the Azure Cloud, so that companies can use the service for their own use cases.
The whole thing is still in preview, but you can apply for early access as a company.

Microsoft issued in their statement that over 1,000 brands are enrolled in the Azure OpenAI Service. The Azure OpenAI Service of ChatGPT is priced at $0.002 per 1,000 tokens, or about 750 words, with billing for ChatGPT usage to begin March 13. (ChatGPT interpretes raw text as a series of tokens; the word “fantastic”, for instance, would be then divided into the single tokens “fan,” “tas” and “tic,” for example.) That’s the same price as the developer-focused ChatGPT API, which launched has already launched this march [1][2].
We are curious to see what happens next with ChatGPT in the future, but Microsoft’s move definitely makes sense and will certainly be able to revive its cloud business.
Sources and Further Readings
[1] Microsoft, ChatGPT is now available in Azure OpenAI Service (2023)
[2] TechCrunch, ChatGPT comes to Microsoft’s enterprise-focused, Azure-powered managed service (2023)
