April 2025 Recap: Build Preparation and Platform Integration

April 2025 focused on Build 2025 preparation and AI platform integration. Here’s what we covered.

Key Topics This Month

Copilot and Windows AI

• Copilot extensibility patterns
• Windows AI features and NPU programming
• Phi-3 local deployment
• SLM vs LLM strategies

On-Device AI

• ONNX deployment patterns
• Edge AI architecture
• Mobile AI development (iOS/Android)
• Browser AI with WebGPU

Inference Optimization

• Efficient inference patterns
• Quantization techniques
• Speculative decoding
• Model routing for cost optimization

Vector Search and RAG

• Azure AI Search advanced features
• Cosmos DB vector search
• PostgreSQL with pgvector
• Multimodal RAG

Data Platform AI Integration

• Microsoft Fabric AI integration
• Power BI Copilot
• Azure Synapse AI
• Databricks AI
• Snowflake Cortex

Code Patterns to Remember

# April 2025 Essential Patterns

# 1. Model routing for cost optimization
def route_query(complexity: float) -> str:
    if complexity < 0.3:
        return "gpt-4o-mini"  # 20x cheaper
    return "gpt-4o"

# 2. Efficient batching
async def batch_inference(prompts: list, batch_size: int = 10):
    for batch in chunks(prompts, batch_size):
        results = await process_batch(batch)
        yield results

# 3. Local-first AI
def local_inference(query: str, local_model, cloud_client):
    # Try local first
    local_result = local_model.predict(query)
    if local_result.confidence > 0.9:
        return local_result
    # Fall back to cloud for complex queries
    return cloud_client.predict(query)

# 4. Cost tracking
def track_llm_cost(response, model: str) -> float:
    return (response.usage.prompt_tokens * input_price +
            response.usage.completion_tokens * output_price) / 1000

Key Takeaways

1. On-device AI is production-ready - NPUs and SLMs enable powerful local AI
2. Cost optimization is essential - Model routing and caching can reduce costs 50-80%
3. Platform integration deepens - Every major platform now has native AI capabilities
4. Multimodal becomes standard - Text, images, and documents handled together

Looking Ahead to May

May brings Microsoft Build 2025 with expected announcements on:

• Azure AI platform updates
• Copilot ecosystem expansion
• New model capabilities
• Developer tooling improvements

Stay tuned for Build coverage and deep dives into new features!