Advances in platform models—large-scale models that can serve as foundations across applications—have significantly improved the ability of computers to process natural language. But natural language processing (NLP) models are still far from perfect, sometimes failing in embarrassing ways, like translating “Eu não recomendo este prato”…
It’s a well-known challenge that large language models (LLMs)—growing in popularity thanks to their adaptability across a variety of applications—carry risks. Because they’re trained on large amounts of data from across the internet, they’re capable of generating inappropriate and harmful language based on similar language…
Federated learning has become a major area of machine learning (ML) research in recent years due to its versatility in training complex models over massive amounts of data without the need to share that data with a centralized entity. However, despite this flexibility and the…
Technological innovation that enables scaling of quantum computing underpins the Microsoft Azure Quantum (opens in new tab) program. In March of this year, we announced (opens in new tab) our demonstration of the underlying physics required to create a topological qubit—qubits that are theorized to…
Drug discovery has come a long way from its roots in serendipity. It is now an increasingly rational process, in which one important phase, called lead optimization, is the stepwise search for promising drug candidate compounds in the lab. In this phase, expert medicinal chemists…
Picture a person walking in a park by a pond. The surrounding environment contains a number of moving objects that change the quality of the environment: clouds moving to hide the sun, altering the quality of light; ducks gliding across the pond, causing its surface…
Edge computing has come of age, with deployments enabling many applications that process data from IoT sensors and cameras. In 2017, we identified the symbiotic relationship between edge computing and video analytics in an article (opens in new tab), noting that live video analytics is…
Large pre-trained language models such as GPT-3, Codex, and others can be tuned to generate code from natural language specifications of programmer intent. Such automated models have the potential to improve productivity for every programmer in the world. But since the models can struggle to…
Cloud computing is powering a new age of data and AI by democratizing access to scalable compute, storage, and networking infrastructure and services. Thanks to the cloud, organizations can now collect data at an unprecedented scale and use it to train complex models and generate…
Translator, a Microsoft Azure Cognitive Service, is adopting Z-code Mixture of Experts models, a breakthrough AI technology that significantly improves the quality of production translation models. As a component of Microsoft’s larger XYZ-code initiative to combine AI models for text, vision, audio, and language, Z-code…
Quantum computing promises to help us solve some of humanity’s greatest challenges. Yet as an industry, we are still in the early days of discovering what’s possible. Today’s quantum computers are enabling researchers to do interesting work. However, these researchers often find themselves limited by…
For children born blind, social interaction can be particularly challenging. A child may have difficulty aiming their voice at the person they’re talking to and put their head on their desk instead. Linguistically advanced young people may struggle with maintaining a topic of conversation, talking…
