Ignite 2023: Microsoft Announces Windows AI Studio, Updates Dev Home and WSL

Microsoft today announced Windows AI Studio for local AI development and deployment, plus updates for Dev Home and the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).

“Many developers and enterprises want to bring AI differentiated experiences to their apps and we have heard from these developers that they need an easier and trusted way to get started with local AI development,” Microsoft’s Logan Iyer and Raji Rajagopalan explain. “With many tools, frameworks, and open-source models available it is difficult to select the most trusted models or pick the right set of tools to test, finetune and optimize the models that best fit diverse business needs. That’s why we are thrilled to announce Windows AI Studio, a new experience for developers, that extends the tooling of Azure AI Studio to jumpstart AI development locally on Windows.”

Microsoft announced Azure AI Studio at Build 2023 back in May as a way for developers to create their own copilots by melding powerful AI models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GPT-4 with their own data. And so Windows AI Studio works similarly, but with small language models (SLMs) for local use in Windows apps. And the software giant is already looking ahead to what it calls “Hybrid Loop” development patterns and a future in which it will enable hybrid AI scenarios across Azure and client devices. This will let developers run their models in the cloud in Azure, locally on Windows, or across the two.

Windows AI Studio will be made available in preview as an extension for Visual Studio Code in the coming weeks, Microsoft says. In the meantime, you can learn more about it on the Microsoft Developer website.

Microsoft also announced the release of Dev Home 0.7, an update to the app that first arrived (in preview) in Windows 11 version 23H2. It adds support for Azure DevOps (ADO), which lets you clone an Azure repository to get your PC in a code-ready state, manage ADO projects, pin ADO widgets representing query results and query tiles, and onboard new team members and projects.

And there’s a big set of updates to WSL for enterprises that adds support for Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, Intune management, and advanced networking controls. With these updates, WSL should meet the security needs of even the largest businesses. You can learn more about the WSL updates here.