AI news for builders and product teamsUpdated Sep 30, 2026, 20:01 UTC
Microsoft Research
First-party releases and research from Microsoft Research. Headlines and excerpts link to the original articles.
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Extreme space-weather events can damage power systems on Earth and degrade GPS accuracy and satellite operations. A new machine learning system can predict where damage is likely to occur 30-60 minutes before a storm arrives. The post Forecasting space weather risks on power grids appeared first on Microsoft Research .
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Biology doesn't operate in silos, and neither should the AI representation of it. Quine is an early-stage research effort to create a multimodal world model of biology. By connecting insights across biological scales and modalities, Quine helps scientists computationally search a space far larger than intuition allows and prioritize hypotheses before they reach the lab. Experimental results provide important feedback, helping researchers sharpen future research directions. The post Introducing Quine: An AI research
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Since launching a year ago, the Microsoft Research Asia — Singapore lab has established a strong foundation, deepened collaboration across government, academia, and industry, and explored how frontier AI research can create real-world value. The post One year in: How Microsoft Research Asia – Singapore is advancing research, partnership and talent for real-world impact appeared first on Microsoft Research .
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Robots are getting smarter, but how can their hardware match that growth? New Microsoft Research findings show that moving AI inference beyond the robot can improve task success, boost efficiency, and support more advanced physical AI workloads. The post Offloaded inference for real-world physical AI robotics appeared first on Microsoft Research .
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Custom-made molecules are advancing medicine, materials, and agriculture, but producing them is slow and expensive. A new Nature paper highlights RetroChimera, a predictive model that helps accelerate chemical synthesis, helping researchers explore a wide range of molecules. The post Improving synthesis prediction of small molecules at scale with RetroChimera appeared first on Microsoft Research .
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What if pathology foundation models could do more with less? GigaPath-Flash and GigaTIME-Flash cut computational demands while maintaining strong performance, opening the door to larger studies and broader exploration. The post GigaPath-Flash and GigaTIME-Flash: Toward population-scale discovery with efficient pathology foundation models appeared first on Microsoft Research .
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Skala 1.1, the updated deep-learning exchange-correlation functional from Microsoft Research, provides greater accuracy, expanded accessibility across the computational chemistry ecosystem, and a living benchmark to track computational performance. The post Broadening access to Skala creates a faster path to predictive DFT appeared first on Microsoft Research .
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A path, a fence, a knot. MindTopo sets a new benchmark for testing how AI understands topological relationships and highlights new opportunities to strengthen spatial reasoning and planning. The post MindTopo reveals VLMs’ spatial reasoning abilities appeared first on Microsoft Research .
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Radiology AI is evolving beyond report generation. CARE-X explores a unified approach that combines flexible reasoning, calibrated predictions, and measurement-based tools for chest X-ray interpretation. The post Introducing CARE-X: Towards Clinically Useful Radiology VLMs with Auxiliary Supervision, Reward-Aligned Learning, and Tool-Augmented Measurement appeared first on Microsoft Research .
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Orchard is an open-source framework for the research community to train and evaluate AI agents across task types. It reduces complexity while supporting strong performance from smaller models by enabling researchers to reuse the same infrastructure. The post Orchard: An open framework for scalable agentic AI appeared first on Microsoft Research .