UPDATE 1-Microsoft to offer OpenAI's GPT models to government cloud customers

(Adds blog details in paragraph 6, Azure background in paragraph 5)

June 7 (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp is bringing the powerful language-producing models from OpenAI to U.S. federal agencies using its Azure cloud service, it said in a blog post on Wednesday.

The Redmond, Washington-based company has added support for large language models (LLMs) powering GPT-4 the latest and the most sophisticated of the LLMs from OpenAI, and GPT-3, to Azure Government.

Use of LLMs have boomed since the launch of ChatGPT from OpenAI, in which Microsoft holds a stake, and businesses of all shapes and sizes are racing to build features on top of them.

It is the first time Microsoft is bringing the GPT technology to Azure Government, which offers cloud solutions to U.S. government agencies, and marks the first such effort by a major company to make the chatbot technology available to governments.

Microsoft generally offers it to Azure commercial cloud users through Azure OpenAI Services, which had 4,500 customers as of May.

Microsoft said government customers can adapt the language models for specific tasks including content generation, language-to-code translation and summarization. (Reporting by Yuvraj Malik and Samrhitha Arunasalam in Bengaluru; Editing by Maju Samuel)