3/28/23, 10:51 PM What is Microsoft's Approach to AI?

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February 17, 2023

What is Microsoft’s
approach to AI?

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At Microsoft, we believe artificial intelligence (AI) is the defining

technology of our time.

We have been on the forefront of cutting-edge research in AI and

integrating these powerful, innovative AI technologies into our
products and services to help customers do more. Microsoft AI,
powered by Azure, provides billions of intelligent experiences

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every day in Windows, Xbox, Microsoft 365, Teams, Azure AI, Power
Platform, Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Defender.

Our AI tools and technologies are designed to benefit everyone at

every level in every organization. They are used in workplaces,
home offices, academic institutions, research labs and
manufacturing facilities around the world, and they are helping
everyone from scientists and salespeople to farmers, software
developers and security practitioners.

We have made huge investments in AI because we are optimistic

about what it can do to help people, industry and society, and
because we’re committed to bringing technology and people
together to realize the promises of AI responsibly.

To learn more about Microsoft’s work with AI, read about:

Our approach to using AI responsibly

Our approach to AI research

Our approach to AI infrastructure

Our approach to using AI for social good

What is Microsoft's approach to AI?

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Our approach to using AI

responsibly
Microsoft believes that when you create powerful technologies,
you also must ensure that the technology is developed and used
responsibly. We are committed to a practice of responsible AI by
design, guided by a core set of principles: fairness, reliability and
safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency and
accountability.

Microsoft is putting these principles into practice across the

company to develop and deploy AI that will have a positive impact
on society.

“With the right guardrails, cutting-edge technology can be safely

introduced to the world to help people be more productive and go
on to solve some of our most pressing societal problems,” says
Natasha Crampton, the chief responsible AI officer at Microsoft.

AI systems are the product of many different decisions made by

those who develop and deploy them. From system purpose to how
people interact with AI systems, we need to guide these decisions
toward beneficial and equitable outcomes.

“That’s what our practice of responsible AI by design is all about,”

Crampton says. “We ensure that responsible AI considerations are
addressed at the earliest stages of system design and then
throughout the whole lifecycle, so that the appropriate controls
and mitigations are baked into the system being built, not bolted
on at the end.”

This approach does not eliminate all risks, and a commitment to

listening, learning and improving is paramount. But it does
encourage developers to be clear about any limitations, account
for intended uses and potential misuses, and think expansively

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about how to secure the benefits of a system and guard against its
risks.

We believe proactive, self-regulatory efforts by responsible

companies help pave the way for these new laws, but we recognize
that not all organizations will adopt responsible practices
voluntarily.

Microsoft President, Brad Smith, recently outlined the importance

of the company stepping up to meet the current AI moment,
including calling for thoughtful policy.

“Countries and communities will need to use democratic law-

making processes to engage in whole-of-society conversations
about where the lines should be drawn to ensure that people have
protection under the law,” Smith wrote.

“Effective AI regulations should center on the highest risk

applications and be outcomes-focused and durable in the face of
rapidly advancing technologies and changing societal
expectations. To spread the benefits of AI as broadly as possible,
regulatory approaches around the globe will need to be
interoperable and adaptive, just like AI itself,” he added.

Microsoft believes democratic, law-making processes are a vital

part of a global dialogue with industry, academia and civil society
to create principled and actionable norms that ensure
organizations develop and deploy AI responsibly.

As part of this process, we are committed to publicly sharing the

company’s learnings and best practices, along with the tools that
guide our efforts. This includes our Responsible AI Standard, a
framework for translating our high-level principles into actionable
guidance for our engineering teams.

Like all transformative technologies, we are aware that AI has its

risks. Some people will use this technology to exploit the flaws in
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human nature, target people with false information, undermine

democracy and cause harm. We need to plan for and mitigate
these risks.

Microsoft has been working on its cross-company, cross-

discipline, responsible AI effort for more than six years, creating a
strong foundation upon which to keep building for the future. We
are clear-eyed about the need to continue moving forward with
urgency to keep pace with the rapid evolution of technology and
changing societal expectations.

“Fundamentally, our AI work is grounded in our company mission

to help every person and organization on the planet to achieve
more,” says Crampton, “and it is undergirded by our steadfast
commitment to the responsible development and use of AI.”

How Microsoft drives responsible AI

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Our approach to AI research

For more than 30 years, Microsoft Research has been advancing
the foundations of computing and translating new scientific
understanding into innovative technologies to create value for our
customers and broad benefit to society.  

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Our researchers collaborate across disciplines, institutions and

geographies to deliver cutting-edge advances in vision, speech,
language, decision-making and machine learning. They have
pioneered AI breakthroughs in conversational speech recognition,
machine translation, image captioning, natural language
understanding and commonsense question answering. 

Recent efforts have focused on developing large-scale models that

can process information in increasingly sophisticated ways while
also becoming more natural and intuitive to use. Advances in deep
learning, coupled with internet-scale datasets and Microsoft
Azure’s increasingly powerful AI supercomputing resources, have
made it possible to create AI models that perform a broad range of
tasks across many different applications.   

“Large-scale AI is shifting the landscape of computing research,”

says Ashley Llorens, vice president and managing director at
Microsoft Research. “As we orient around that shift, you’ll see new
frontiers that advance our understanding of human and machine
intelligence and how they can intersect and reinforce each other in
profound new ways.” 

Our research has played a key role in evolving model architectures

and creating AI technology that is more efficient and more
adaptable across an even broader range of tasks.

Microsoft researchers have been working on these problems for

years, developing expertise in areas like parallel computation that
allows people to more quickly train machine learning models at
unprecedented scale. This has led to innovations like DeepSpeed,
an open-source, deep learning optimization library for distributed
training that was developed by Microsoft Research and now is
used by the broader computing community.  

We also are focused on delivering value and solving real-world

problems through Microsoft products and services. Project

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FarmVibes, for example, merges AI and data to offer open-source

tools that can help farmers adopt sustainable agriculture practices.
And the Microsoft Climate Research Initiative provides our
research and computing capabilities to a team of multidisciplinary
scientists working together to address climate change.   

Our new AI4Science organization is focused on applying deep

learning to the natural sciences to model and predict natural
phenomena and help address critical issues such as climate
change, green energy and pharmaceutical discovery. Our project
teams, which include a global collective of researchers and
engineers, are exploring a new approach to machine learning,
generating training data by simulating natural phenomena from
fundamental equations rather than using datasets from the
internet.   

This could enable researchers to understand and predict natural

phenomena at scales ranging from quantum to galactic and, in
turn, drive breakthroughs such as the discovery of new materials
that can remove carbon from the atmosphere, Llorens says.    

“At the end of the day, we’re focused on pushing the frontiers in
ways that enhance the human experience and positively impact
society as a whole,” he says.   

“To achieve this, we’ll need to engage as part of the global research
community and continually challenge our assumptions about what
is possible. That’s what will produce the future advancements we
need.”   

Our approach to AI infrastructure 

With growing confidence in AI and businesses aiming to do more
with less, customers are looking for a trusted partner to streamline
adoption and rapidly apply intelligence across workloads to
improve operations, drive efficiencies and reduce costs. More than
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a decade ago, we forecast this exponential growth in demand for

AI systems and started to build special computing infrastructure to
handle it.   

Today, Microsoft’s AI platform, Azure AI, offers infrastructure

optimized and purposely built for running large AI models that are
ushering in a new era of productivity and creativity. Thanks to our
investments, we’re able to deliver a wide range of AI-powered
products that fit the needs of our customers and also deliver best-
in-class performance and scale for the most compute-intensive AI
training and inference workloads.   

Our unique architecture design combines the fastest graphics

processing units, or GPUs, available in the market along with a
network architecture that chains together thousands of GPUs to
enable AI model training and inference at scale.  

“Having thousands of GPUs with high-bandwidth interconnect

enables everything else from there,” says Eric Boyd, Microsoft
corporate vice president for AI Platform.  

Organizations large and small are developing Azure AI solutions

because they can achieve more at scale, more easily, with the
proper enterprise-level privacy, security and responsible AI
protections that Azure offers.  

We have committed to building Azure into an AI supercomputer

for the world, serving as the foundation of our vision to
democratize AI as a platform. Microsoft pushed the frontier of
cloud supercomputing technology, announcing our first top-5
supercomputer in 2020, and subsequently constructing multiple AI
supercomputing systems at massive scale.  

 We also fine-tuned our purpose-built, AI-optimized infrastructure

capability in partnership with OpenAI to train and deploy OpenAI’s
family of models for research advancement and developer

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production. This infrastructure is now available to all Azure

customers.  

“When other people come to us, we can literally give them the
same style of infrastructure that we used for OpenAI, because
that’s now the standard way that we do it,” Boyd says.  

Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service provides businesses and

developers with high-performance AI models, such as GPT-3.5,
Codex and DALL∙E 2, at production scale with industry-leading
uptime. This is the same production service we use to power AI
models in our own products, including GitHub Copilot, Power
Platform, and the recently announced Microsoft Designer and AI-
powered search in Bing and Edge.

We continue to evolve our AI infrastructure based on feedback and

insights from training and serving AI models at scale. Our teams
work in lockstep with industry partners on the design of GPUs,
networks and datacenters that are optimized for AI workloads.   

“Microsoft continues to be on the cutting edge, and customers get

to take advantage of all the benefits of that,” says Boyd. “They’re
getting the best training infrastructure, the best software, the best
networking – all of these things combined give the best
experience.”  

Our approach to using AI for social

good
Microsoft believes AI can help people tackle some of society’s
biggest global challenges. Our AI for Good initiative provides
funding, technology and expertise to help individuals and
nonprofits accelerate progress in fields, such as accessibility,
digital literacy and equity, sustainability and climate change,

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human rights and resilience, health disparities, food insecurity,

cybersecurity and others.

“There are problems where AI is uniquely positioned to help, where

AI is not just another solution but is the only solution,” says Juan
Lavista Ferres, Microsoft’s chief data scientist and the director of
the AI for Good Lab.

One such project, for instance, involves mapping all the places
where humans live in order to better understand natural disaster
risks and guide preparedness efforts. Another includes mapping
rooftops of buildings in India, noting the materials the structures
are made of to help disaster teams prioritize those that are more
likely to fail in certain types of disasters. Yet another is mapping all
the renewable energy installations around the world to help show
the impact of solar and wind farms.

“A person would spend 400 years looking at satellite imagery and

understanding if humans live there or not, but AI can do this in an
hour,” Lavista Ferres says. “These AI models make it easier for
people to get all the information in one place, and from there the
humans can make the necessary decisions.”

Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab is an applied research and data

visualization laboratory that harnesses the power of big data and
Azure’s cloud technology. Its team of data scientists works with
strategic partners and experts from academia, nonprofits and
governments to not only help address critical global concerns but
also to better measure the progress of efforts underway and to
identify gaps where aid might be helpful.

The projects are as varied as the problems and combine

Microsoft’s efforts with those of our partners.

For example, the AI for Health program invests in research led by

institutions such as Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, IRIS,

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the Novartis Foundation and Seattle Children’s Research Institute.

These efforts are making healthcare more affordable, especially in
places where doctors are few and medical needs are great.

Though we see great potential for AI’s assistance to help solve

some of the world’s most pressing issues, we also recognize the
limitations of the technology. It’s important to work through moral
and ethical questions for every project, Lavista Ferres says,
especially to make sure the models are getting enough data from
enough places and aren’t leaving anyone out — for example,
making sure all skin colors are represented for an app that detects
skin cancer.

“When you train an AI model, it will be able to generalize from the

data you have, but not from the data you don’t have, so any bias
can generate problems,” he says. “Having humans in the loop is the
key element. We are looking for solutions that can benefit
everyone, not just particular cohorts of the population.”

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