Microsoft
corporateMicrosoft Research (MSR), founded in 1991, is one of the world's largest industrial research labs with 1,000+ researchers across Redmond, Cambridge, Beijing, Bangalore, NYC, and Montreal. Microsoft is also OpenAI's largest investor (~27% equity) and integrates OpenAI models into Copilot products.
Microsoft's own model research focuses on small language models: the Phi series demonstrated that carefully curated synthetic data can make small models (1.3B–14B) competitive with models 10–100x larger. Phi-1 (2023, "Textbooks Are All You Need") launched the series, and Phi-4 (2024, 14B) surpasses its teacher model on STEM benchmarks.
MSR produced several foundational techniques: LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation, 2021) became the dominant parameter-efficient fine-tuning method, BitNet (2023) pioneered 1-bit Transformers, and DeepSpeed (42K stars) is critical distributed training infrastructure used to train BLOOM-176B and other frontier models.
People
- Eric Horvitz Google Scholar — Chief Scientific Officer & Technical Fellow (formerly AAAI President; Stanford MD + PhD)
- Sébastien Bubeck Google Scholar — Former VP GenAI (departed to OpenAI Oct 2024) (formerly Led Phi series; ENS Cachan + Lille PhD)
- Furu Wei Google Scholar — VP & Chief Scientist, MSR Asia (GenAI Group)
- Peter Lee — President, Microsoft Research (formerly CMU CS Dept Chair; DARPA)
News
- 2025-04-30 Phi-4 Reasoning Models Released with Chain-of-Thought — Microsoft
- 2024-12-12 Phi-4 Released: 14B SLM Specializing in Complex Reasoning — Microsoft Research
- 2023-01-23 Microsoft Extends Multibillion-Dollar OpenAI Partnership — Microsoft