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What is the AI Toolkit for Visual Studio Code?

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The AI Toolkit for Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is a VS Code extension that simplifies generative AI app development by bringing together cutting-edge AI development tools and models from the Azure AI Foundry catalog and other catalogs like Hugging Face.

Note

Additional documentation and tutorials for the AI Toolkit for VS Code are available in the GitHub repository: microsoft/vscode-ai-toolkit. You'll find guidance on Playground, working with AI models, fine-tuning local and cloud-based models, and more.

AI Toolkit features

The AI Toolkit for VS Code (AI Toolkit) enables you to:

  • Download and run AI models locally. The AI Toolkit provides access to highly optimized models for the following platforms and hardware:
    • Windows 11 running with DirectML acceleration
    • Windows 11 running directly on the CPU
    • Linux with NVIDIA acceleration
    • Linux running directly on the CPU
    • MacOS support is coming soon
  • Test models in an intuitive playground or in your application with a REST API.
  • Fine-tune your AI model - locally or in the cloud (on a virtual machine) - to create new skills, improve reliability of responses, set the tone and format of the response. The AI Toolkit provides a guided walkthrough to fine-tune popular small-language models (SLMs) - like Phi-3 and Mistral.
  • Deploy your AI feature either to the cloud or with an application that runs on a device.

Note

The AI Toolkit was previously known as Windows AI Studio. The extension has been renamed to reflect the focus on enabling AI development in VS Code across platforms.

Want to learn more about the AI Toolkit for VS Code? Dona Sarkar and John Lam provide an overview of the AI Toolkit in this video from Microsoft Build 2024:

For the latest documentation and to download and use the AI Toolkit, please visit the GitHub page.

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