Welcome to Research Focus, a series of blog posts that highlights notable publications, events, code/datasets, new hires and other milestones from across the research community at Microsoft. NEW RESEARCH In the same way that tools can help people complete tasks beyond their innate abilities, tools are essential for large language models (LLMs) to acquire up-to-date information and take consequential actions in external environments. Existing work on tool-augmented LLMs primarily focuses on the broad coverage of tools and the flexibility of […]

[MUSIC FADES] Let’s dive right in. We are undergoing a paradigm shift where AI models and systems are starting to exhibit characteristics that I and, of course, many others have described as more general intelligence. When I say general in this context, I think I mean systems with abilities like reasoning and problem-solving that can be applied to many different tasks, even tasks they were not explicitly trained to perform. Despite all of this, I think it’s also important to […]

AI systems like Bing and Microsoft Copilot (web) are as good as they are because they continuously learn and improve from people’s interactions. Since the early 2000s, user clicks on search result pages have fueled the continuous improvements of search engines. Recently, reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) brought step-function improvements to response quality of generative AI models. Bing has a rich history of success in improving its AI offerings by learning from user interactions. For example, Bing pioneered the […]