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Posted on August 1, 2024August 28, 2024 by admin

Accelerating AI app development with Azure AI and GitHub

Microsoft is empowering developers to become AI developers, bringing Azure AI industry leading models to the global GitHub community of more than 100 million

More than 60,000 organizations use Microsoft Azure AI today to explore the power of custom AI applications. However, the market is quickly moving from experimentation to scale, and we see more developers around the world becoming AI developers. With this natural evolution, the needs of developers and their requirements to access and build with AI models and tools are transforming as well.

To support this shift to scale, we are excited to partner with GitHub to empower their more than 100 million developers to build AI applications directly from GitHub.com with seamless integrations with Codespaces and Microsoft Visual Studio Code. Our collaboration starts today as we bring Azure AI’s leading model selection to developers through GitHub Models, along with simple APIs to empower responsible, production-ready AI applications.

For more insights into how GitHub Models can help you increase experimentation and accelerate your development cycles, all in GitHub, please read the blog from GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke.

Simplifying AI development

As AI model innovation accelerates, Azure remains committed to delivering the leading model selection and greatest model diversity to meet the unique cost, latency, design, and safety needs of AI developers. Today, we offer the largest and most complete model library in the market, including the latest models from OpenAI, Meta, Mistral and Cohere and updates to our own Phi-3 family of small language models. With GitHub Models, developers can now explore and utilize the latest models along with AI innovations and next-generation frontier models. This offering gives every developer the flexibility to choose the best combination of unique capabilities, performance metrics, and cost efficiencies.

While continuous model innovation brings more choice, it also brings complexity when selecting the right model for the right scenario. Today, developers have a range of options for cloud vs. edge, general-purpose vs. task specific, and more. On top of that, organizations often need multiple models to enable better quality, lower cost of goods sold, and to address complex use cases for each industry. GitHub Models opens the door for developers to experiment with multiple models, simplifying model experimentation and selection across the best of the Azure AI catalog, quickly comparing models, parameters, and prompts.

By making Azure AI an open, modular platform, we aim to help our customers rapidly go from idea to code to cloud. With Azure AI on GitHub, developers can do just that by utilizing Codespaces to set up a prototype or use the Prompty extension to generate code with GitHub Models directly in Microsoft Visual Studio Code.

In the coming months, we will expand our integration even further, bringing Azure AI’s language, vision, and multi-modal services to GitHub, along with additional Azure AI toolchain elements, further streamlining the AI application development process.

Integrating safety by default

Developers building with AI want to be confident their AI applications are trustworthy, safe, and secure. GitHub Models gives developers a strong foundation from the start with built-in safety and security controls from Azure AI.

Azure AI works with model providers and other partners such as HiddenLayer to reduce emerging threats, from cybersecurity vulnerabilities, to malware, and other signs of tampering. And we have taken this further in GitHub Models by integrating Azure AI Content Safety for top foundation models including Azure OpenAI Service, Llama, and Mistral. Azure AI Content Safety enables built-in, real time protection for risks such as the generation of harmful content, copyright materials, hallucination, and new AI specific attacks such as jailbreaks and prompt injection attacks.

If developers want to go deeper, they can customize these controls in Azure AI, using evaluations to test and monitor their applications for ongoing quality and safety.

AI simplicity with a single API

Increased model selection gives developers the broadest range of options for the individual applications they are building. But each model naturally brings with it increased complexity. To counteract this, we’re making it incredibly easy for every developer to experiment with a range of models through the Azure AI model inference API. Using this single API, GitHub developers can now access a common set of capabilities to compare performance across a diverse set of foundational models in a uniform and consistent way, easily switching between models to compare performance without changing the underlying code.

The Azure AI Inference SDK provides client libraries in Python and JavaScript with support for C# and .NET coming soon. This SDK makes it easy to integrate AI into your applications by simplifying common tasks related to authentication, security and retries in your programming language of choice. You can get started today with Python and JavaScript samples.

Streamlining GitHub Enterprise access through Microsoft Azure

Beyond these new integrations, we are also making it easier than ever for organizations to access GitHub Enterprise through Azure, combining GitHub’s cloud-native platform with Azure’s robust enterprise-grade security and scalability.

Organizations with an existing Azure subscription can purchase GitHub products via self-service, directly through Microsoft Sales or via Microsoft Cloud Solution Providers and can adjust the number of GitHub seats as needed to ensure efficient usage. Additionally, eligible organizations may take advantage of the Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC) and Azure Commitment Discount (ACD).

Companies can now spin-up a GitHub instance directly from the Azure Portal and connect their Microsoft Entra ID with GitHub to facilitate user management and access control. With an Azure subscription, you have all the necessary tools for creating an intelligent AI application, including access to GitHub’s complete range of services like repositories, Actions, Advanced Security, and Copilot. This makes it incredibly simple and efficient to give developers everything they need to build and deploy AI applications at scale.

We invite you to experience the power of this integrated end-to-end development experience. New customers can explore these capabilities with a free 30-day trial of GitHub Enterprise.