Microsoft today announced the launch of Windows AI Studio, a new experience aimed at helping enterprises and developers more easily get started with building and deploying AI applications locally on Windows devices.
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 such as Hugging Face.
A key goal of Windows AI Studio is to simplify the process of developing generative AI applications. The studio provides an end-to-end guided workspace with tools for customizing and fine-tuning small language models on developers' own data. The studio also introduces features like Prompt Flow and Gradio templates, facilitating rapid testing of fine-tuned models.
According to Microsoft, Windows AI Studio brings them closer to supporting hybrid AI development patterns, giving developers the flexibility to choose whether to run models in the cloud on Azure or locally on Windows devices.
Microsoft also highlighted that Windows AI Studio will showcase state-of-the-art AI models optimized specifically for Windows. This includes Llama 2-7B, Mistral-7B, Falcon-7B, and Stable Diffusion XL.
These models take advantage of Microsoft's AI optimizations built into Windows including DirectML, the native Windows machine learning API, and ONNX Runtime which enables high-performance inferencing. The combo of DirectML and ONNX Runtime provides a streamlined yet powerful AI development experience on Windows. Microsoft says it plans continued enhancements to support more large models, fine-tuning, and low-precision data types in Windows AI Studio.
For enterprises, Microsoft is aiming to make AI development and deployment more accessible while addressing security concerns. The latest Windows 11 update includes new enterprise-grade features for Windows Subsystem for Linux like enhanced monitoring and controls through Microsoft's Intune management platform.
With Windows AI Studio and a comprehensive set of AI and productivity tools for developers, Microsoft hopes to establish Windows as the premiere OS for organizations to build and harness AI. This also brings Microsoft closer to supporting what it calls "Hybrid Loop development patterns", which gives developers flexibility to run models in the cloud on Azure or locally on Windows.