Recapping Microsoft Azure Open Source Day

Microsoft recently hosted Azure Open Source Day, an online event featuring speakers from the Azure team and Microsoft partners, to discuss new projects, development with open source components, and new customer initiatives.

Microsoft alone now has 60,000 dependencies and 9.5 million open-source references in its code base. Although open-source uptake has ebbed and flowed over time, the current trend is toward increased adoption, Microsoft representatives stated.

“[Vendors trust that they can] contribute to vendor neutral frameworks and can collaborate with competitors in that context. We’ve collaborated with many competitors in these projects,” said Brendan Burns, CVP of Azure OSS.

Microsoft will make Foundation Models part of Azure Machine Learning, with options to operationalize Hugging Face models at scale so that users do not need to adapt scripts, dependencies, and optimization.

Product marketing manager Takuto Higuchi explained the role of Hugging Face. “[The name is unusual but it is] actually named after the idea of a computer model being able to respond to human interactions, like a hug.” It offers fine tuning and easy deployment for things like named entity recognition, translation, and question answering with Azure Machine Learning, he explained.