AI and Microsoft Research
As a result of decades of work across the computing research community, AI is ubiquitous in the technologies that we use every day. Accelerating breakthroughs in large-scale AI are driving new waves of discovery and innovation.
Breakthroughs in large-scale AI have fundamentally transformed every product at Microsoft. But we believe that many further advances are both possible and needed to achieve the full potential of AI to benefit people, organizations, and society as whole.
We at Microsoft Research work as part of the global research community to advance AI with the aim to: enhance our understanding of artificial general intelligence, create new model architectures with novel emergent abilities, achieve societal benefit through the advancement of AI, transform scientific discovery, and extend human capabilities.
Where we are focusing our efforts
We invite you to explore this page to learn more about our ambitions for AI research at Microsoft. For a deeper dive into our published research, please visit our AI research archive.
Understanding general AI
AI Frontiers: The Physics of AI with Sebastien Bubeck and Ashley Llorens
The latest generation of large-scale AI models is exhibiting surprising emergent capabilities, such as the ability to explain their reasoning, to write code and poetry, or to understand concepts and translate them across domains – all seemingly due to learning at massive scale. The most challenging benchmarks created by the research community to test these new models are being solved faster than they can be created.
At Microsoft Research, we expect this phenomenon to accelerate with the development of future models, and are pursuing novel approaches to understanding the nature of this emergent form of intelligence. To do this, we are relying less on classical benchmarking, and instead taking inspiration from the study of human intelligence, and from the prediction and observation of natural phenomena.
Related reading
Driving model innovation
AI Frontiers: The future of scale with Ahmed Awadallah and Ashley Llorens
Textbooks Are All You Need II: phi-1.5 technical report
We aim to push beyond the current state of the art in large-scale AI models, in our pursuit of more powerful, capable and aligned forms of artificial intelligence.
Through our research, we envision and create AI models that can quickly adapt to new tasks and changing environments, that utilize long-term memory, can learn over time from experience, perceive and reason across text, images, audio and video, make fewer mistakes, and are more computationally efficient and sustainable.
Related reading
Ensuring societal benefit
AI Frontiers: Measuring and mitigating harms with Hanna Wallach
Research into fairness, accountability, transparency, and ethics in AI and machine learning has helped inform the use of AI in Microsoft products and services for years.
Health Futures
Medicine, biology, and technology are rapidly converging. The future of health will be data-driven, predictive, and precise. Microsoft Health Futures is focused on empowering every person on the planet to live a healthier future.
With accelerating progress in AI capabilities, and the deployment of AI technologies at scale, research must take a broader view of our responsibility to achieve benefits and mitigate risks.
We are building on our many years of research in responsible AI, with the aim to enhance our ability to align AI with human goals, ensure positive impact on jobs and the economy, and ensure equitable and safe employment in key sectors such as education and healthcare.
We are also developing new approaches to assurance in an era where general-purpose AI technologies are rapidly advanced and deployed at scale. All this work is aimed at ensuring that AI is trustworthy and supports human flourishing.
Related reading
Transforming scientific discovery
Announcing the DeepSpeed4Science Initiative: Enabling large-scale scientific discovery through sophisticated AI system technologies
Incorporating chemists’ insight with AI models for single-step retrosynthesis prediction
Recent progress in AI has shown the potential to transform the natural sciences by dramatically improving our ability to model, predict and gain insight into natural phenomena. This new paradigm of scientific discovery could dramatically accelerate advances in chemistry, physics, biology, astronomy, and many other fields.
Microsoft Research recently established AI4Science, a global organization of researchers and engineers, including leading experts in machine learning, quantum physics, computational chemistry, molecular biology, fluid dynamics, software engineering, and other disciplines. This group is researching some of today’s most pressing challenges in deep learning and artificial intelligence—and the potential of those technologies to transform scientific discovery and positively impact society.
Related reading
Extending human capabilities
AI Frontiers: AI in India and beyond with Sriram Rajamani
Sriram talks about how the lab’s work is being influenced by today’s rapidly advancing AI.
Research for Industry
The future of industry is data-driven and the related technological breakthroughs are key to addressing industry’s ability to leverage opportunities and overcome challenges.
General-purpose AI models are demonstrating unprecedented potential to amplify and extend human capabilities. To maximize this potential, we aim to thoughtfully design AI systems that bring out the best in the model, and in the person. We aim to deliver powerful and capable AI co-pilots across every field of human endeavor, and to empower every developer on the planet to do the same.
Additionally, we are exploring and incubating novel applications of AI in industries such as agriculture and healthcare, in order to accelerate the advancement of key beneficial technologies.