Microsoft boosts Azure AI Search with more storage and support for big RAG apps
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Microsoft’s Azure AI Search is becoming more affordable for developers building generative AI applications. While the actual price hasn’t decreased, “significantly raised vector and storage capacity” has enabled the company to offer more data per dollar. The cloud-based service is also extending its retrieval system to now support applications from its partner and investment, OpenAI.
Formerly Azure Cognitive Services, Azure AI Search helps companies to provide “accurate, hyper-personalized” responses in their AI applications.
Microsoft says the newest update will let developers scale their apps to a “multi-billion vector index” within a single search without being penalized on speed or performance. It boasts an increase in vector index size of 11 times, a six-fold increase in total storage, and double the improvement in indexing and query throughput.
This benefit will be available to customers subscribing to Azure AI Search’s basic and standard tiers within the U.S., UK, United Arab Emirates, Switzerland, Sweden, Poland, Norway, Korea, Japan, Italy, India, France, Canada, Brazil, Asia Pacific, and Australia.
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More flexibility in LLMs
For enterprise customers building on Azure AI Search, Microsoft offers more flexibility for outside large language models. The company’s retrieval augmented generation system will now work with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, GPTs and its Assistant API. This means Microsoft will now be the power source whenever someone runs a query or adds a file to one of these AI products.
It’s a big win for Microsoft, which notes that ChatGPT receives 100 million weekly visitors and has over 2 billion developers building with its API. There is a tremendous opportunity for Microsoft’s Azure AI Search to run here.
Today’s news is just one in a long string of updates Microsoft has made throughout the AI era. Over the years, Azure AI Search has received speech, search, language, and security updates, support for Private Endpoints and Managed Identities, and more. The company has beefed up its efforts to ensure AI is safe and reliable, such as launching new tools last month to protect LLMs.