Microsoft has expanded its Models as a Service (MaaS) catalog for Azure AI Studio, building beyond the 40 models announced at the Microsoft Ignite event last month with the addition of the Llama 2 code generation model from Meta Platforms in public preview. In addition, GPT-4 Turbo with Vision has been added to accelerate generative AI and multimodal application development. Similar to things like Software as a Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), MaaS lets customers use AI models on-demand over the web with easy setup and technical support.

“They won’t have to go through all the trouble of installing it on their own cloud server space, private cloud, hybrid cloud, or other locations,” writes VentureBeat, noting that “even with Microsoft experts helping and trained IT personnel, this can be a non-trivial task for enterprises.”

“Not every customer wants to think about operating infrastructure, which is why at Ignite we introduced Models as a Service, which operates models as API endpoints that you simply call, much the way you might call the Azure OpenAI Service,” John Montgomery, Microsoft corporate VP of program management for AI platforms wrote in a blog post.

“Models as a Service essentially allows developers to integrate foundation models as an API endpoint to their applications and fine-tune models without having to manage the underlying GPU infrastructure,” IT Pro explains, adding that “Llama 2 is the first family of large language models” through Azure AI Studios, with more expected to follow.

At Ignite, “Microsoft said pro developers will be able to ‘easily integrate the latest AI models such as Llama 2 from Meta, Command from Cohere, Jais from G42, and premium models from Mistral as an API endpoint to their applications,’” per IT Pro.

VentureBeat says offering a variety of open-source Llama models “seems like a smart move on Microsoft’s part, expanding the choices of AI for Azure cloud storage and service customers and giving them a far lower-cost option (the models themselves are free, though various implementations may not be)” to the GPT-3.5 and 4 models Microsoft already had at its disposal as a result of its investment in OpenAI.