In quick order: Are you familiar with wind speed and cruising speed and light speed? Well, we’re here to riff on another type of velocity. Let’s call it “AI speed.”
Our definition of AI speed – sure to soon grace your favorite digital dictionary 😉– is the brisk rate at which AI is racing from big-city research labs to distant places where small businesses, everyday entrepreneurs and biologists are rapidly adding it to their toolkits.
In this edition, we’ll show you how Microsoft’s AI tools have now reached:
✈ A tiny island off Ireland’s coast to help bolster an innkeeper’s bottom line.
✈ Brazil’s bustling financial markets to help individual investors make smart decisions.
✈ The Antarctic to help scientists in the field better understand microorganisms.
AI doesn’t always get it right, of course. So we’ll also tell you how Microsoft is leading the effort to detect and address AI “hallucinations” to ensure its AI systems are safer and more trustworthy.
Now, in the blink of an AI, let’s zoom into this month’s stories. To get us up to speed, we asked Microsoft Designer to create an image of the world’s fastest animal. It generated a hard-charging cheetah (which, some scientists say, can sprint up to 75 mph in short bursts).
Every single second, two machines seek to answer the biggest of all questions: Is there life beyond Earth? On Mars, where a rover explores a giant crater, and in deep space, where a telescope photographs remote galaxies, the hunt for extraterrestrial life continues.
Back on our little rock, a somewhat similar quest is underway. To date, scientists have mapped the genetic codes of just a tiny fraction of the trillions upon trillions of living species on this planet.
“That’s about five drops of water compared to the Atlantic Ocean of what we don’t know about life on Earth,” says Philipp Lorenz, a University of Oxford scientist.
That vast knowledge gap inspired the launch of Basecamp Research in London, where Lorenz works as the chief technology officer. The startup aims to build the world’s largest database of natural biodiversity – and use Microsoft AI tools to advance bioscience.
The team has partnered with nature parks on five continents to sequence genomic information from the world’s most understudied biomes. Basecamp Research is part of the Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub, which provides access to leading AI models and more.
The deep learning models used by Lorenz and team help guide the scientists on where to collect ground samples – from volcanic islands and deep oceans to jungles and the Antarctic.
Basecamp Research is part of a global surge of small businesses – from startups to mom-and-pop shops – harnessing machine learning and artificial intelligence, particularly generative AI, to create AI-powered tools and solutions to help them learn, create and solve problems.
On Inishbofin, an island of 170 permanent residents off Ireland’s west coast, innkeeper Andrew Murray runs a 22-room hotel perched on a cliff. He and several other island denizens took AI training courses developed by Microsoft to learn the capabilities of commercially available AI tools, including Microsoft Copilot.
Murray plans to use Copilot to help with hotel scheduling chores and to manage purchasing, budgeting and pricing.
Fellow Inishbofin resident Catherine O’Connor, a weaver, learned how Copilot can help her describe her scarves and table runners to better market them on her website.
In Brazil, an investment boom is luring scores of rookie stock buyers into the market. About half are millennials, with balances too small for financial advisers to take on. So Brazil’s stock exchange, B3, is offering a free, conversational AI assistant to explain bonds or how to find a broker.
The AI assistant, which runs on Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, generates simple answers based on B3’s financial education tools. It won’t pick stocks, but it will describe what they are.
Many organizations are building their own AI assistants. But occasionally, large language models have deviated from the data given to them, offering responses that fabricate the information. In the AI world, those are called “hallucinations.”
Microsoft researchers and collaborators devised a way to hinder those hallucinations. How? Ironically, they induced the models to respond with false information.
They created an information-retrieval task based on specific data then tracked and improved the model’s responses.
Their work yielded a fresh blueprint for curtailing AI hallucinations, all part of Microsoft’s efforts to develop AI in a safe, trustworthy and ethical way.
What can spider webs teach us about datacenter construction? A lot.
With AI usage spiking around the world, Microsoft’s datacenter fleet has grown to keep pace. It now spans 300-plus datacenters across more than 34 countries. The challenge: How can we meet the rising demand for cloud computing in a sustainable way? The answer: Learn from nature.
Some of our datacenter sites have turned stormwater retention ponds into man-made wetlands, creating natural habitats for local species.
Others are exploring the installation of special ultraviolet glass that mimics UV enzymes in spiderwebs. Through evolution, birds have learned to sense and avoid UV enzymes (and spider webs). As a result, UV glass may help birds detect the windows and not fly into them.
When it comes to your job, are you:
☐ Typically excited to start your day?
☐ Finding meaning in your role?
☐ Energized about opportunities in your work?
If you check those boxes, you are “thriving” in your work life – at least according to Microsoft leaders, who are focused on fostering a culture of thriving.
A recent Microsoft employee survey revealed one cornerstone to a thriving workforce: access to AI. Data showed that employees who find their work meaningful are 59% more likely to say they’re productive at work.
That means, of course, they’re spending less time on tasks that don’t feel meaningful. And that’s where AI assistants can help by generating rough drafts or sifting through data or acting as a brainstorming partner.
When they were kids, Jamie Teh and Mick Curran met at a music camp for the blind. They forged a friendship over mutual interests in computers and chord progressions.
In time, they both became software developers and musicians in Australia – where their lifelong bond fueled a tech breakthrough. Teh and Curran collaborated to build a screen reader known as NVDA, or NonVisual Desktop Access, for computers running on Windows.
Screen readers use a synthetic voice to communicate content and describe images on a screen. But they can cost as much or more than computers, making them too pricey for some people.
Teh and Curran sought to create an open-source, portable screen reader that was affordable for everyone. Today, NVDA, free to download, is used around the world by more than 250,000 people who are blind or have low vision, who rely on the product to find jobs, stay employed and navigate daily life.
Between issues, follow the Microsoft News and Stories LinkedIn page for the latest company news, or visit us at Microsoft Source to learn about people doing extraordinary things with technology.
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