A preview of Microsoft’s Windows AI Studio has landed – a set of tools and models from catalogs, including Azure AI Studio and Hugging Face – however you’ll need Linux to run it.
The preview was announced at Microsoft’s Ignite event and the Visual Studio Code extension requires Ubuntu 18.04 or greater as well as Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) to run. It will also only run on Nvidia GPUs.
The “preview” nature of the extension became apparent when El Reg navigated its features. We made it work after a fashion, but it was hard to escape the feeling that Microsoft’s vision for local generative AI app development is very much lashed together, at least in preview form.
Once we installed all the prerequisites, we dodged the “GPU is not detected” error via a driver download from Nvidia, made Ubuntu 18.04 the default Linux distribution in WSL and the studio, and then fired up.
