Microsoft

Microsoft 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.