Azure Updates: RAN; VMware Rapid Migration Plan; Analyst ratings

General Manager David Seda discussed Microsoft’s recent inclusion in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud AI Developer Services, along with Google, AWS, and IBM. Currently, customers have access to up to 1,600 small and large language models through Azure from OpenAI, Mistral AI, Cohere, Hugging Face, Meta, and others. AI Search is intended to enable AI models by grounding them in particular data sources for contextual outputs. Additionally, Microsoft provides customers with AI Content Safety controls to achieve safe generative AI experiences. 

In the latest edition of its Cloud Cultures series, Microsoft CVP Corey Sanders discussed AI entrepreneurship in the American “Rust Belt”—a region in the Northeast and northern Midwest traditionally famous for heavy industry. Synthetaic is one of many small companies in the region working with Microsoft. Its Rapid Automatic Image Categorization, or RAIC, offering automates analysis for large unstructured datasets to train models. The University of Cincinnati is hosting the 1819 Innovation Hub, a startup accelerator intended to boost innovation in the Cincinnati region. 

Technical Fellow Victor Bahl looked into Microsoft’s radio access networking (RAN) slicing capabilities, a key component of 5G networking. The 3rd Generation Partnership Project, or 3GPP, has begun to develop RAN standards, which is particularly valuable for latency-sensitive services. Bahl detailed the ways that Microsoft is dealing with RAN standards, managing search-space complexity and using standalone predictors.