Microsoft and Meta their AI partnership

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In recent months, AI innovation has made impressive strides, sparking excitement about the potential to revolutionize industries and our work processes.

During Microsoft Inspire, Meta and Microsoft jointly announced their support for the Llama 2 family of large language models (LLMs) on Azure and Windows. Llama 2 is designed to empower developers and organizations in creating AI-powered tools and experiences. Both Meta and Microsoft share a commitment to democratizing AI and its benefits, and Meta's open approach with Llama 2 is particularly exciting. Microsoft is proud to be Meta's preferred partner as they introduce Llama 2 to commercial customers for the first time.

Azure customers can now easily fine-tune and deploy the 7B, 13B, and 70B-parameter Llama 2 models on Azure, the platform known for its adoption of frontier and open models. Additionally, Llama will be optimized to run on Windows locally. This will enable Windows developers to leverage Llama by targeting the DirectML execution provider through the ONNX Runtime, ensuring a seamless workflow as they integrate generative AI experiences into their applications.

The collaboration between Meta and Microsoft in the field of AI is longstanding, starting from integrating ONNX Runtime with PyTorch for a developer-friendly experience on Azure, to Meta's choice of Azure as a strategic cloud provider. This latest announcement builds on this partnership, further solidifying Microsoft's position as the world's supercomputing platform for AI and expanding its open model ecosystem.

Azure's purpose-built AI supercomputing platform offers comprehensive support, from the facility and hardware to the software, for the world's leading AI organizations. With the inclusion of Llama 2 models in Azure AI, developers gain access to powerful tools for model training, fine-tuning, inference, and AI safety features.

Incorporating Llama 2 models into Windows makes it the ideal platform for developers to create AI experiences tailored to their customers' needs. Leveraging tools like Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), Windows Terminal, Microsoft Visual Studio, and VS Code, developers can unleash their creativity and build exceptional AI experiences.

With Llama 2 as the latest addition to Azure AI's model catalog, developers and ML professionals can easily discover, evaluate, customize, and deploy pre-built large AI models at scale. The catalog streamlines infrastructure management when operationalizing Llama 2 and offers support for model fine-tuning and evaluation, including powerful optimization techniques like DeepSpeed and ONNX Runtime, significantly enhancing the speed of model fine-tuning.

Responsible AI is a core focus for Microsoft, and they have invested heavily in making Azure the go-to platform for responsible AI innovation. Customers can evaluate Llama 2 with their sample data to assess its performance for their specific use case. Moreover, prompt engineering and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) techniques enable the development, evaluation, and optimization of meta-prompts for safer and more reliable user experiences.

Microsoft and Meta's collaboration also extends to safety measures, combining Meta's safety techniques with Azure AI Content Safety to ensure a safer online experience when deploying Llama 2 models in Azure AI with a layered safety approach.