Announcing new models, customization tools, and enterprise agent upgrades in Azure AI Foundry 

By Dustin Ward

At Microsoft, we are dedicated to advancing AI innovation to empower organizations, transform industries, and redefine productivity. Today, we are excited to announce major updates to Azure AI Foundry, our integrated platform for designing, customizing, and managing enterprise-grade AI applications. These updates include groundbreaking new models like OpenAI’s GPT-4.5, enhanced fine-tuning and distillation techniques, and…

Empowering innovation: The next generation of the Phi family

By Dustin Ward

We are excited to announce Phi-4-multimodal and Phi-4-mini, the newest models in Microsoft’s Phi family of small language models (SLMs). These models are designed to empower developers with advanced AI capabilities. Phi-4-multimodal, with its ability to process speech, vision, and text simultaneously, opens new possibilities for creating innovative and context-aware applications. Phi-4-mini, on the other…

Azure NetApp Files: Revolutionizing silicon design for high-performance computing

By Dustin Ward

High-performance computing (HPC) workloads place significant demands on cloud infrastructure, requiring robust and scalable resources to handle complex and intensive computational tasks. These workloads often necessitate high levels of parallel processing power, typically provided by clusters of central processing unit (CPU) or graphics processing unit (GPU)-based virtual machines. Additionally, HPC applications demand substantial data storage…

AI innovation starts here—join Microsoft at NVIDIA GTC

By Dustin Ward

AI is within reach of any company, large or small. But many companies are unclear where and how to practically apply AI within their business; have concerns about security, privacy and compliance; and perceive AI as complex and costly to integrate into existing services, products and processes. Rapidly evolving AI technologies can also make it…

AWS Weekly Roundup: Cloud Club Captain Applications, Formula 1®, Amazon Nova Prompt Engineering, and more (Feb 24, 2025)

By Dustin Ward

AWS Developer Day 2025, held on February 20th, showcased how to integrate responsible generative AI into development workflows. The event featured keynotes from AWS leaders including Srini Iragavarapu, Director Generative AI Applications and Developer Experiences, Jeff Barr, Vice President of AWS Evangelism, David Nalley, Director Open Source Marketing of AWS, along with AWS Heroes and technical…