Microsoft has introduced an Azure AI Inference SDK for .NET. The SDK can be used to access and use AI models from the Azure AI Model Catalog for inference tasks like chat in .NET applications.

The SDK joins other recent additions by Microsoft including the OpenAI library for .NET and the AI Toolkit for Visual Studio Code.

The Model Catalog in Azure AI Studio can be used to browse through AI models and deploy them, either to Managed Compute or as a Serverless API.  The model catalog was first introduced in early 2023, featuring a "curated selection of open-source models". The latest version of the catalog includes models from a range of providers including Azure OpenAI Service, Mistral, Meta, Cohere, NVIDIA, and Hugging Face. In addition to deploying existing models, users can request new ones.

Microsoft says the advantage of the catalog is that serverless API deployments remove the complexity of having to host and provision the hardware to run the models. When deploying models with serverless API, you don't need quota to host them and you are billed per token.

The language models from the catalog come with default configurations of Azure AI Content Safety moderation filters which detect harmful content.

The models in the catalog are organized into three collections: Curated by Azure AI, Azure OpenAI Models, and Open Models from Hugging Face Hub. 

The Curated by Azure AI collection is a collection of non-Microsoft models optimized for the Azure platform. The Azure OpenAI Models are Microsoft-specific models available exclusively through Azure OpenAI Service. The final group are the Open Models from Hugging Face Hub. This extensive collection is made up of hundreds of models from Hugging Face for real-time inference.

If you can't find the model you want, you can request a new model via an online form and hope that it's popular enough to be developed.

The Azure AI Inference SDK for .NET is available now.

More Information

What is the Azure AI Model Catalog?

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