We live in a rapidly changing world.
Demographic shifts, climate change, political dynamics, and many other forces are creating urgent challenges in critical areas like global health and scientific discovery, environmental sustainability, food security, and societal resilience.
In this new AI era, technology is changing even faster than before, and the transition from research to reality, from concept to solution, now takes days or weeks rather than months or years.
“Today we are seeing so much AI research happening at the speed of conversation, to the point where even our top researchers feel that their heads are spinning, but working together, providing openness, providing greater access, we can see that we’ve made tremendous progress.”
– Peter Lee, President, Microsoft Research
In 2024, Microsoft Research continued its foundational research (opens in new tab) to expand the capabilities of large language models, but we also explored more deeply how smaller models (opens in new tab) can be trained for specific tasks. We discovered that by using smaller datasets and fewer compute resources, some small language models can demonstrate enhanced reasoning and other complex capabilities that were once considered the exclusive province of large-scale models.
Microsoft Research and its external collaborators used AI to enable earlier detection and treatment of esophageal cancer, which could lead to dramatically improved survival rates, and to accelerate the discovery of new drugs needed to treat infectious diseases that kill millions of people every year. And we continued to use AI to develop new tools for scientific discovery so that we and others in the scientific community can confront some of humanity’s most important challenges.
One team of Microsoft researchers created the world’s first large-scale model of the atmosphere, which could transform weather forecasting and our ability to predict and mitigate the effects of extreme weather events. Another team worked with global experts to create a generative AI tool that empowers non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to fight human trafficking.
We also opened a new research lab in Tokyo this year. It joins our other labs in Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America. And we launched a series of quarterly Research Forums to help update the global research community about some of the pivotal work we’re doing at Microsoft Research. Register for future episodes, view presentations from previous forums, and explore our briefing book content.
This post highlights some of the work that Microsoft Research has done in 2024, along with academic and industry colleagues, to help drive real-world benefits for people worldwide.
AI for Business Transformation: Multimodal Models
GHDDI and Microsoft Research use AI to achieve progress in new drug discovery for global infectious diseases
The joint team designed several chemical compounds that are effective in inhibiting these pathogens’ essential target proteins, accelerating the structure-based drug discovery process.
-
Blog
Recipients of the AFMR Minority Serving Institutions grant
Microsoft announced the 10 inaugural grant recipients through the Accelerate Foundation Models Research Minority Serving Institutions grant program.
-
Event
Microsoft Research Forum | Episode 1
Leading researchers at Microsoft explored the latest breakthroughs in AI models, new applications of AI to important scientific challenges, novel approaches to model evaluation and understanding, and other key research topics.
-
Podcast
Improving Reasoning in Language Models with Layer-Selective Rank Reduction (LASER)
The work shows that the removal of certain parameters not only maintains model performance like some existing parameter-reduction methods but can actually improve it—no additional training necessary.
GraphRAG: Unlocking LLM discovery on narrative private data
GraphRAG is a significant advance in enhancing the capability of LLMs and enables us to answer important classes of questions that we cannot attempt with baseline RAG alone.
