This collaboration will make Hugging Face’s state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) transformers and models available to AWS customers. It will therefore facilitate the development and deployment of AI applications.

By partnering with AWS, Hugging Face will be able to make its tools and expertise available to a wider audience.

The benefits are: faster training and scaling low-latency and high-throughput inference. Amazon EC2’s new Inf2 instances, powered by the latest generation of AWS Inferentia, are purpose-built to deploy the latest generation of large language and vision models and raise the performance of Inf1 by delivering up to 4x higher throughput and up to 10x lower latency.

Developers can use AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia through managed services such as Amazon SageMaker, a service with tools and workflows for ML. Or they can self-manage on
Amazon EC2.

With just a few lines of code, you can import, train, and fine-tune pre-trained NLP Transformers models such as BERT, GPT-2, RoBERTa, XLM, DistilBert, and deploy them on Amazon SageMaker.

Expectations for this partnership are mostly focused on the strong impact on the AI market, as it will enable more companies and developers to use state-of-the-art AI tools to generate unique custom solutions.

The behavior of Visual Studio in versions prior to Preview 3 would in some cases trigger a call to MSBuild, even if no code was changed. When Visual Studio needed to copy the artifacts of a linked project that had already been built to a source directory, it would call MSBuild to rebuild the project and copy the necessary files to the source directory. Additional builds were triggered even when no build was required, Infoq wrote on the topic.

In this pre-release, Visual Studio will avoid calling MSBuild when only copying the artifacts to the source directory is needed, and will instead copy them to the correct locations independently.

Accelerating builds can be enabled by adding the AccelerateBuildsInVisualStudio property to true in the Directory.Build.props file, or alternatively it can be enabled per project by adding the same key to the project file.

In a Reddit thread, some users discussed that adding additional proprietary features in Visual Studio instead of the .NET SDK is undesirable as it implies vendor lock-in. Reddit user Atulin voiced his concerns:

So one more thing is being added to the non-free VS instead of being added to the SDK? First the debugger, then the hot reload, and now performance improvements are being pushed into VS?

What’s next? Algebraic data types supported only by a dedicated VS compiler?

Adding this feature to Visual Studio for Mac is not out of the question, but it doesn’t seem to be planned at this time.

The latest preview version of Visual Studio can be downloaded from the official Microsoft site. Currently the latest preview version is Preview 6 was released on February 7.

“We will continue to cooperate with the anti-monopoly authorities to curb monopolies and actively deal with algorithm discrimination and other new forms of anti-competition behavior.” 

The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) will continue to strengthen the regulation of the payments sector and ask all financial services companies, including personal information businesses, to be licensed, Mr Yi said.

Mr Yi named three principles to guide the regulatory clean-up of fintech: financial businesses must be licensed to operate; firewalls must be set up between different parts of the business, such as insurance and wealth management, to prevent cross-sector risks; and the direct link between non-banks and banking information services must be cut.

The banking and insurance regulator has also told fintech platforms offering banking services that they must comply with the same capital requirements as those imposed on traditional lenders to curb risks.

Mr Yi said financial institutions should collect, use and store information in strict accordance with the law, and ensure they protect the personal privacy and rights of consumers. The central bank will look at defining data ownership in a more accurate manner, better facilitate data transactions and promote the fair use of data, he said.