Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on April 16 announced new updates for the tech giant’s Azure OpenAI Foundry, which he celebrated as a “leap forward in AI reasoning”, in a post on social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter).

“More big updates to Foundry today: o3 and o4-mini from OpenAI are both simul-shipping, delivering a leap forward in AI reasoning,” Satya Nadella wrote, quoting a post by the Microsoft official X account on the same.

Azure OpenAI Service: New Updates — All You Need to Know

According to the post by Microsoft, the Azure OpenAI Service has been updated to include OpenAI’s latest o3 and o4-mini models, which provide key features such as: support for multiple APIs, reasoning summary, multimodality, and full tools support.

The Azure AI Foundry is a website that allows web developers to “customise, host, run, and manage AI-driven applications built in GitHub, Visual Studio, and Copilot Studio, with APIs for all their needs”, according to a description on the application’s official website.

‘Next-level reasoning AI’, says product developer

In a Microsoft blog post detailing the updates, Steve Sweetman, Product Lead for Azure OpenAI Service, announced that Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service in Azure AI Foundry and GitHub are now available with the latest iterations in the o-series of OpenAI models: OpenAI o3 and OpenAI o4-mini.

“Both o3 and o4-mini offer significant improvements on quality and safety while supporting the existing features of o1 and o3-mini and delivering comparable or better performance through its integration and support of the newest APIs and reasoning features,” according to Sweetman.