What you need to know
- Microsoft is launching a new "Windows AI Studio" experience designed to simplify getting started with developing AI experiences on Windows 11.
- The AI Studio will also be able to highlight best-in-class AI large language models.
- Microsoft is making its own Arm chips
- Copilot comes to all of Microsoft 365
- Bing Chat rebranded to Copilot
- Microsoft Loop now generally available
- Microsoft Mesh and Immersive Spaces
- Microsoft Planner merges To Do and Project
- Microsoft launches Copilot Studio
- Microsoft Security Copilot
- Copilot web app goes live
Microsoft is holding its Ignite 2023 conference right now, and it just unveiled a new "Windows AI Studio" experience for developers looking to build AI-powered apps and experiences on Windows 11. The new Windows AI Studio will be accessible via a Visual Studio Code extension, and will streamline the process of choosing everything a developer needs to jumpstart AI development.
This is how Microsoft describes the new Windows AI Studio:
"Windows AI Studio simplifies generative AI app development by bringing together cutting-edge AI development tools and models from Azure AI Studio and other catalogs like Hugging Face, enabling developers to finetune, customize and deploy state-of-the-art small language models, or SLMs, for local use in their Windows apps. This includes an e2e guided workspace setup that includes model configuration UI and guided walkthroughs to finetune popular SLMs – like Phi, Llama 2 and Mistral. Developers can then rapidly test their fine-tuned model using the Prompt Flow and Gradio templates integrated into the workspace"
In addition to streamlining the setup process for building AI experiences, Windows AI Studio will also highlight AI models optimized specifically for GPUs and NPUs, though this feature is coming later.
Alongside the Windows AI Studio, Microsoft is also sharing updates on DirectML, Olive, and the Windows ONNX Runtime. Earlier this year, the company shared details on how developers would be able to run Llama 2 locally. Now, Microsoft has a sample showing Llama 2 7B running locally and performantly on a variety of different Windows hardware.
The Windows AI Studio joins Microsoft's new Copilot Studio, which is a service that lets enterprise customers create their own AI chatbots based on Microsoft Copilot. Copilot Studio will also have advanced features, with deeper integration with Azure AI and its associated services. Microsoft says that administrators will have access to a full suite of analytics for how the Copilots are used, with monitoring for user sentiment and so on.
Be sure to learn more about the Windows AI Studio on Microsoft's website.
