JONATHAN CARLSON: From the beginning, healthcare stood out to us as an important opportunity for general reasoners to improve the lives and experiences of patients and providers. Indeed, in the past two years, there’s been an explosion of scientific papers looking at the application first of text reasoners and medicine, then multi-modal reasoners that can interpret medical images, and now, most recently, healthcare agents that can reason with each other. But even more impressive than the pace of research has […]

Modern productivity is rooted in the web—from searching for information and filling in forms to navigating dashboards. Yet, many of these tasks remain manual and repetitive. Today, we are introducing Magentic-UI, a new open-source research prototype of a human-centered agent that is meant to help researchers study open questions on human-in-the-loop approaches and oversight mechanisms for AI agents. This prototype collaborates with users on web-based tasks and operates in real time  

[THEME MUSIC FADES]   The passage I read at the top is from the book’s prologue.    When Carey, Zak, and I wrote the book, we could only speculate how generative AI would be used in healthcare because GPT-4 hadn’t yet been released. It wasn’t yet available to the very people we thought would be most affected by it. And while we felt strongly that this new form of AI would have the potential to transform medicine, it was such a different […]

HONGXIA HAO: Nice to be here. BING LV: Nice to be here, too. HUIZINGA: So Hongxia, let’s start with you and a brief overview of this paper. In just a few sentences. Tell us about the problem your research addresses and more importantly, why we should care about it. HAO: Let me start with a very simple yet profound question. What’s the fastest the heat can travel through a solid material? This is not just an academic curiosity, but it’s […]

In this issue: New research on compound AI systems and causal verification of the Confidential Consortium Framework; release of Phi-4-reasoning; enriching tabular data with semantic structure, and more. NEW RESEARCH Towards Resource-Efficient Compound AI Systems

The pursuit of nuclear fusion as a limitless, clean energy source has long been one of humanity’s most ambitious scientific goals. Research labs and companies worldwide are working to replicate the fusion process that occurs at the sun’s core, where isotopes of hydrogen combine to form helium, releasing vast amounts of energy. While scalable fusion energy is still years away, researchers are now exploring how AI can help accelerate fusion research  

XING XIE: Thank you for having me.  HUIZINGA: So let’s start with a brief overview of the background for this white paper on Societal AI. In just a few sentences, tell us how the idea came about and what key principles drove the work.  XIE: The idea for this white paper emerged in response to the shift we are witnessing in the AI landscape. Particularly since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, these models didn’t just change the pace […]

In October 2022, Microsoft Research Asia hosted a workshop that brought together experts in computer science, psychology, sociology, and law as part of Microsoft’s commitment to responsible AI (opens in new tab). The event led to ongoing collaborations exploring AI’s societal implications, including the

[THEME MUSIC FADES]  The passage I read at the top there is from Chapter 9, “Safety First.”  One needs only to look at examples such as laws mandating seatbelts in cars and, more recently, internet regulation to know that policy and oversight are often playing catch-up with emerging technologies. When we were writing our book, Carey, Zak, and I didn’t claim that putting frameworks in place to allow for innovation and adoption while prioritizing inclusiveness and protecting patients from hallucination […]