Host Peter Lee, Microsoft Research president, discusses the motivation behind the new series and the GPT-4 encounter that helped him view the tech not only as a potential tool for improving healthcare but a chance to reexamine what it means to care for people.
Microsoft announced the creation of the first topoconductor and first QPU architecture with a topological core. Dr. Chetan Nayak, a technical fellow of Quantum Hardware at the company, discusses how the breakthroughs are redefining the field of quantum computing.
Advances in AI are driving meaningful real-world impact. Principal Researcher Akshay Nambi shares how his passion for tackling real-world challenges across various domains fuels his work in building reliable and robust AI systems.
Struggles with programming languages helped research manager Shan Lu find her calling as a bug hunter. She discusses one bug that really haunted her, the thousands she’s identified since, and how she’s turning to LLMs to help make software more reliable.
How do you generate and test materials that don’t exist yet? Researchers Tian Xie and Ziheng Lu share the story behind MatterGen and MatterSim, AI tools poised to transform materials discovery and help drive advances in energy, manufacturing, and sustainability.
As the “biggest election year in history” comes to an end, researchers Madeleine Daepp and Robert Osazuwa Ness and Democracy Forward GM Ginny Badanes discuss AI’s impact on democracy, including Daepp and Ness’s research into the tech’s use in Taiwan and India.
Just after his NeurIPS 2024 keynote on the co-evolution of systems and AI, Microsoft CVP Lidong Zhou joins the podcast to discuss how rapidly advancing AI impacts the systems supporting it and the opportunities to use AI to enhance systems engineering itself.
From the Microsoft Booth at NeurIPS 2024, Microsoft Research AI for Science Director Chris Bishop discusses how AI is changing approaches to scientific advancement—from drug discovery to weather forecasting—and the profound impact it can have on the world.
Researcher Jindong Wang and Associate Professor Steven Euijong Whang explore the NeurIPS 2024 work ERBench. ERBench leverages relational databases to create LLM benchmarks that can verify model rationale via keywords in addition to checking answer correctness.
Next-token prediction trains a language model on all tokens in a sequence. VP Weizhu Chen discusses his team’s 2024 NeurIPS paper on how distinguishing between useful and “noisy” tokens in pretraining can improve token efficiency and model performance.
Can existing algorithms designed for simple reinforcement learning problems be used to solve more complex RL problems? Researcher Dylan Foster discusses the modular approach he and his coauthors explored in their 2024 NeurIPS paper on RL under latent dynamics.
Pranjal Chitale discusses the 2024 NeurIPS work CVQA. Spanning 31 languages and the cultures of 30 countries, this VQA benchmark was created with native speakers and cultural experts to evaluate model performance across diverse linguistic and cultural contexts.
