Cohere has announced that its flagship enterprise AI model, Command, will now be accessible through the Microsoft Azure AI Model Catalog and Marketplace as a managed service for the first time. The partnership brings Cohere’s English and multilingual capabilities to Microsoft Azure, enabling global use across various languages and regions. 

Notably, Azure AI customers can now employ Cohere’s models without their data leaving the Azure cloud. Jaron Waldman, Cohere’s Chief Product Officer, highlighted the significance of this move in aligning with customer data locations and facilitating efficient scaling of AI prototypes. 

Eric Boyd, CVP of Azure AI Platform at Microsoft, expressed enthusiasm about offering Cohere’s Command model as a service, emphasizing the expanded choices for developers in building Generative AI applications.

At Ignite 2023, Microsoft announced the newest iteration of the Phi Small Language Model (SLM) series termed Phi which is also available in Azure AI service. It also includes Meta’s Llama 2, OpenAI’s LLMs and Jais, a 13-billion parameter model developed by UAE tech firm G42. 

Additionally, at Ignite, NVIDIA launched an AI foundry service aimed at accelerating the development and optimisation of custom generative AI applications for enterprises and startups on Microsoft Azure. The service integrates three components: NVIDIA AI Foundation Models, NVIDIA NeMo framework and tools, and NVIDIA DGX Cloud AI supercomputing services.