Ignite 2024: The latest OpenAI advances

Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI, the creators of generative AI projects like ChatGPT has received significant attention from Microsoft over the last two years. Ignite 2024 was no exception with a session about OpenAI advancements hosted by Microsoft’s Steve Sweetman and Yina Arenas, together with NBA VP of Stats, Charlie Rohlf. 

The NBA is just one of many high profile customers using Azure OpenAI Service, in this case to strengthen its relationship with its fans. Currently, the NBA uses OpenAI to ingest live game-related data, draw on historical content, and process it all with GPT models. 

Rohlf explained that the NBA has a computer vision system in each arena tracking the body movements of players, converting the data it collects into points like drives and post ups. He noted the need to train chat models on the often very specific language of basketball. 

[W]e have all these exciting new things like a dunk score, where we take that tracking data and we can measure how high the ball gets and where the player took it back behind his head for a dunk. And we can measure all those things and come up with an automatic dunk score that ranks the quality of the dunks.

Arenas gave the example of other groups using OpenAI Service. Leia, an EU-based legal services group is developing with data zones to ensure that data remains in the EU. For its part, PwC is using capabilities to audit customer workloads for security. Walmart is preparing for the upcoming Black Friday shopping rush in the US, relying on Azure for the scalability of its systems.