Azure OpenAI Service on Your Data in Public Preview

I think it's inevitable that the LLM providers will build out more and more of the dev tools around their stack, such as this Azure service. The model providers can offer significantly better products via their direct access to the model weights, and retrieval augmented generation (what's going on here) is one good example. Think of them as AWS but with the world's best EC2 instances. How many of these MLOps / infra companies will be able to outsell OpenAI?

https://hua.substack.com/p/openai-is-a-hyperscaler

Have we heard anything about this becoming available inside of the OpenAI Playground directly?

What about 3.5-turbo-16k or 0613 being available in Azure?

Lastly, how does this differ from just doing document retrieval Q&A using Langchain or just using embeddings directly?

If I’m reading this right, it’s more focused on procedural/operational stuff rather than true analytics?

I gave up on Azure since they never bothered responding to my OpenAI application.