Microsoft Research Podcast

Trailer: The Shape of Things to Come 

March 3, 2026 | Doug Burger
Microsoft research lead Doug Burger introduces his new podcast series, "The Shape of Things to Come", an exploration into the fundamental truths about AI and how the technology will reshape the future.

Recent Podcasts

  1. AI Revolution podcast | Episode 0 - A brief introduction from Peter Lee | outline illustration of Peter Lee

    The AI Revolution in Medicine, Revisited: An Introduction 

    March 6, 2025 | Peter Lee

    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.

  2. Ideas podcast | illustration of Shan Lu

    Ideas: Bug hunting with Shan Lu 

    January 23, 2025 | Gretchen Huizinga and Shan Lu

    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.

  3. Illustrated image of Weizhu Chen.

    Abstracts: NeurIPS 2024 with Weizhu Chen 

    December 6, 2024 | Amber Tingle and Weizhu Chen

    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.

  4. Illustrated image of Dylan Foster for the Abstracts series on the Microsoft Research Podcast.

    Abstracts: NeurIPS 2024 with Dylan Foster 

    December 6, 2024 | Amber Tingle and Dylan Foster

    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.