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 the launch of new enterprise tools for agents. These advancements are designed to accelerate the journey from AI experimentation to tangible business impact.
Introducing GPT-4.5 in preview on Azure OpenAI Service
Building on the success of previous models, GPT-4.5 is the latest and strongest general-purpose model. This research preview demonstrates the achievements from scaling pre and post-training, a step forward in unsupervised learning techniques.
- Natural interaction: GPT-4.5 offers a more natural interaction experience. It has a broader knowledge base, and its higher “EQ” can help to improve coding, writing, and problem-solving tasks.
- Accuracy and hallucinations: With a lower hallucination rate (37.1% versus 61.8%) and higher accuracy (62.5% versus 38.2%) compared to GPT-4o, developers can rely on more precise and relevant responses.
- Stronger human alignment: Enhanced alignment techniques improve GPT-4.5’s ability to follow instructions, understand nuances, and engage in natural conversations, making it a more effective tool for coding and project management.
Developers can leverage GPT-4.5 in numerous ways to enhance productivity and creativity. In communication, users can rely on GPT-4.5 to craft clear and effective emails, messages, and documentation. It also offers personalized learning and coaching experiences, helping users to acquire new skills or deepen knowledge in specific areas. During brainstorming sessions, GPT-4.5 can generate innovative ideas and solutions, making it a valuable tool for creative thinking.
For project planning and execution, GPT-4.5 assists users in organizing their tasks, ensuring thorough and efficient approaches. It can also handle complex task automation, simplifying intricate processes and workflows. Developers can streamline their coding workflows by getting step-by-step guidance and automating repetitive tasks, to save time and reduce errors. Overall, GPT-4.5 is a versatile model. Starting today, enterprise customers can access GPT-4.5 in Azure AI Foundry. GPT-4.5, is also available in GitHub Copilot Chat to Copilot Enterprise users.
New models: Phi-4, Stability AI, and recent releases
The latest wave of AI models shares a common focus: delivering specialized capabilities with greater efficiency. These releases represent a shift toward purpose-built AI that excels in specific domains while requiring fewer computational resources. Here are some standout launches on Azure AI Foundry.
Microsoft’s Phi models continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible with smaller, more efficient architectures:
- Phi-4-multimodal unifies text, speech, and vision for context-aware interactions. Retail kiosks can now diagnose product issues via camera and voice inputs, eliminating the need for complex manual descriptions.
- Phi-4-mini packs impressive performance into just 3.8 billion parameters with a 128K-token context window. It outperforms larger models on coding and math tasks while increasing inference speed by 30% compared to previous models.
Stability AI continues to advance generative imaging with models that accelerate creative workflows:
- Stable Diffusion 3.5 Large generates high-fidelity marketing assets faster than previous versions, maintaining brand consistency across diverse visual styles.
- Stable Image Ultra achieves photorealism for product imagery, reducing photoshoot costs through accurate material rendering and color fidelity.
- Stable Image Core an enhanced version of SDXL (text-to-image generative AI model developed by Stability AI), provides high-quality output with exceptional speed and efficiency.
Cohere enhances information retrieval capabilities with its latest ranking technology:
- Cohere ReRank v3.5 delivers more accurate search results through its 4,096-token context window and support for over 100 languages, surfacing relevant content even without exact keyword matches.
The GPT-4o family expands with two specialized variants:
- GPT-4o-Audio-Preview handles audio prompts and generates spoken responses with appropriate emotion and emphasis, which is ideal for digital assistants and customer service.
- GPT-4o-Realtime-Preview eliminates conversation lag with breakthrough latency reduction, creating genuinely human-like interaction flows.
Agora, a pioneer in enabling real-time engagement, has been using GPT-4o-Realtime.
GPT-4o-Realtime has revolutionized voice interaction for our conversational AI product, empowering developers with multilingual human-like voices, stable streaming, and ultra-low latency across customer service, telemedicine, and education.
—Patrick Ferriter, Senior Vice President, Product & Marketing, Agora
These advances collectively signal AI’s evolution toward more natural, responsive, and efficient interactions across diverse use cases and deployment environments.
New customization tools
As our model library surpasses 1,800 offerings, we continue to push the boundaries of experimentation and observability. Our new suite of fine-tuning tools complements the rise of unsupervised learning techniques.
- Distillation workflows: Azure OpenAI Service now offers a code-first approach to model distillation with Stored Completions API (Application programming interface) and SDK (Software Development Kit). This allows smaller models to inherit knowledge from larger models like GPT-4.5, reducing cost and latency while maintaining high performance for specific tasks.
- Reinforcement fine-tuning: Now in private preview, this technique teaches models to reason in new ways by rewarding correct logical paths and penalizing incorrect reasoning.
- Provisioned Deployment for fine-tuning: Azure OpenAI Service now offers Provisioned Deployments for fine-tuned models, ensuring predictable performance and costs through Provisioned Throughput Units (PTUs) in addition to token-based billing.
- Fine-tuning for Mistral Models: Exclusive to Azure AI Foundry, Mistral Large 2411 and Ministral 3B now support fine-tuning for industry-specific tasks like healthcare document redaction.
Secure automation and scale for enterprise agents
In today’s enterprise landscape, security, and scalability are strategic imperatives. We’re introducing two powerful features designed to help you securely harness AI for mission-critical tasks:
- Bring your Vnet: Azure AI Agent Service now enables all AI agent interactions, data processing, and API calls to remain securely within your organization’s own virtual network, eliminating exposure to the public internet. Early adopters like Fujitsu are leveraging this capability to improve sales by 67% with their sales proposal creation agent, saving countless hours that can be redirected toward customer engagement and strategic planning, all while maintaining data integrity.
- Magma (Multi-Agent Goal Management Architecture): Available through Azure AI Foundry Labs, Magma revolutionizes complex workflow orchestration by coordinating hundreds of AI agents in parallel. This architecture enables tackling large-scale challenges like supply chain optimization with unprecedented speed and accuracy, bridging the physical and digital agentic world. Magma is available for experimentation in Azure AI Foundry.
To learn more about building multi-agent applications with Azure AI Foundry, check out this informative webinar.
Create your AI solution with Azure AI Foundry
We are excited about these new developments and look forward to seeing how you will leverage these powerful tools and features to drive innovation. Get going with new models and tools in Azure AI Foundry.
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