Model Mondays S2E13: Open Source Models (Hugging Face)

1. Weekly Highlights

1. Weekly Highlights

Here are the key updates we covered in the Season 2 finale:

• O1 Mini Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (GA): Fine-tune models with as few as ~100 samples using built-in Python code graders.
• Azure Live Interpreter API (Preview): Real-time speech-to-speech translation supporting 76 input languages and 143 locales with near human-level latency.
• Agent Factory – Part 5: Connecting agents using open standards like MCP (Model Context Protocol) and A2A (Agent-to-Agent protocol).
• Ask Ralph by Ralph Lauren: A retail example of agentic AI for conversational styling assistance, built on Azure OpenAI and Foundry’s agentic toolset.
• VS Code August Release: Brings auto-model selection, stronger safety guards for sensitive edits, and improved agent workflows through new agents.md support.

2. Spotlight – Open Source Models in Azure AI Foundry

Guest: Jeff Boudier, VP of Product at Hugging Face

Jeff showcased the deep integration between the Hugging Face community and Azure AI Foundry, where developers can access over 10 000 open-source models across multiple modalities—LLMs, speech recognition, computer vision, and even specialized domains like protein modeling and robotics.

Demo Highlights

• Discover models through Azure AI Foundry’s task-based catalog filters.
• Deploy directly from Hugging Face Hub to Azure with one-click deployment.
• Explore Use Cases such as multilingual speech recognition and vision-language-action models for robotics.

Jeff also highlighted notable models, including:

• SmoLM3 – a 3 B-parameter model with hybrid reasoning capabilities
• Qwen 3 Coder – a mixture-of-experts model optimized for coding tasks
• Parakeet ASR – multilingual speech recognition
• Microsoft Research protein-modeling collection
• MAGMA – a vision-language-action model for robotics
  Integration extends beyond deployment to programmatic access through the Azure CLI and Python SDKs, plus local development via new VS Code extensions.

3. Customer Story – DraftWise (BUILD 2025 Segment)

The finale featured a customer spotlight on DraftWise, where CEO James Ding shared how the company accelerates contract drafting with Azure AI Foundry.

Problem
Legal contract drafting is time-consuming and error-prone.

Solution
DraftWise uses Azure AI Foundry to fine-tune Hugging Face language models on legal data, generating contract drafts and redline suggestions.

Impact

• Faster drafting cycles and higher consistency
• Easy model management and deployment with Foundry’s secure workflows
• Transparent evaluation for legal compliance

4. Community Story – Hugging Face & Microsoft

The episode also celebrated the ongoing collaboration between Hugging Face and Microsoft and the impact of open-source AI on the global developer ecosystem.

Community Benefits

• Access to State-of-the-Art Models without licensing barriers
• Transparent Performance through public leaderboards and benchmarks
• Rapid Innovation as improvements and bug fixes spread quickly
• Education & Empowerment via tutorials, docs, and active forums
• Responsible AI Practices encouraged through community oversight

5. Key Takeaways

Open Source AI Is Here to Stay Azure AI Foundry and Hugging Face make deploying, fine-tuning, and benchmarking open models easier than ever.

• Community Drives Innovation: Collaboration accelerates progress, improves transparency, and makes AI accessible to everyone.
• Responsible AI and Transparency: Open-source models come with clear documentation, licensing, and community-driven best practices.
• Easy Deployment & Customization: Azure AI Foundry lets you deploy, automate, and customize open models from a single, unified platform.
• Learn, Build, Share: The open-model ecosystem is a great place for students, developers, and researchers to learn, build, and share their work.

Sharda's Tips: How I Wrote This Blog

For this final recap, I focused on capturing the energy of the open source AI movement and the practical impact of Hugging Face and Azure AI Foundry collaboration. I watched the livestream, took notes on the demos and interviews, and linked directly to official resources for models, docs, and community sites.

Here’s my Copilot prompt for this episode:

"Generate a technical blog post for Model Mondays S2E13 based on the transcript and episode details. Focus on open source models, Hugging Face, Azure AI Foundry, and community workflows. Include practical links and actionable insights for developers and students!

Learn & Connect

1. Explore Open Models in Azure AI Foundry
2. Hugging Face Leaderboard
3. Responsible AI in Azure Machine Learning
4. Llama-3 by Meta
5. Hugging Face Community
6. Azure AI Documentation

About Model Mondays

Model Mondays is your weekly Azure AI learning series:

5-Minute Highlights: Latest AI news and product updates
15-Minute Spotlight: Demos and deep dives with product teams
30-Minute AMA Fridays: Ask anything in Discord or the forum

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About Me

I'm Sharda, a Gold Microsoft Learn Student Ambassador focused on cloud and AI. Find me on GitHub, Dev.to, Tech Community, and LinkedIn. In this blog series, I share takeaways from each week’s Model Mondays livestream.