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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
    • Windows 11 Copilot+ PCs running on the NPU
    • 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 Deepseek R1 Distilled model is optimized for the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) and available to download on Snapdragon powered Copilot+ PCs running Windows 11. For more information, see Running Distilled DeepSeek R1 models locally on Copilot+ PCs, powered by Windows Copilot Runtime.

The AI Toolkit now supports a Bring Your Own Model approach. You can use the AI Toolkit to download your own models, such as DeepSeek-R1, from catalogs like Ollama and run them locally.

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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