Microsoft announces Windows AI Studio, a new experience to accelerate local AI development on Windows

At Ignite 2023, Microsoft today announced Windows AI Studio, a new experience to accelerate local AI development and deployment on Windows.

Many developers and enterprises want to add AI experiences to their apps but developing them was not easy for most of them. There are many tools, frameworks, and open-source models available, and it is difficult to select among them.

The new Windows AI Studio solves these issues by simplifying the generative AI app development by bringing together AI development tools and models from Azure AI Studio and other AI model catalogs like Hugging Face. This will enable Windows app developers to finetune, customize and deploy state-of-the-art small language models, or SLMs, for local use in their apps.

• Windows AI Studio also includes an e2e guided workspace setup that includes model configuration UI and guided walkthroughs to finetune popular SLMs – like Phi, Llama 2 and Mistral.
• Using AI Studio, developers can then rapidly test their fine-tuned model using the Prompt Flow and Gradio templates integrated into the workspace.
• Windows AI Studio also supports Hybrid Loop development patterns and enable hybrid AI scenarios across Azure and client devices. Hybrid AI allows developers to either run their models on the cloud on Azure or on the edge locally on Windows (or across the two) to meet their needs.
• Prompt Flow makes it easier than ever to implement this hybrid pattern by switching between local SLMs and cloud LLMs.

In the coming weeks developers can access Windows AI Studio as a VS Code Extension.