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Forecasting space weather risks on power grids
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 .
OpenAI takes on Microsoft with the launch of what feels a whole lot like ChatGPT’s own office suite
OpenAI's newly announced suite of office features puts it into mor direct competition with more traditional software companies.
Introducing Quine: An AI research system designed for the complexity of biology
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…
One year in: How Microsoft Research Asia – Singapore is advancing research, partnership and talent for real-world impact
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 .
Automating Amazon Textract adapter lifecycle management across accounts
Learn how to operationalize Amazon Textract Custom Queries adapters for production: infrastructure as code with AWS CloudFormation and Terraform, a cross-account adapter promotion process, a pre-classification routing pattern for multiple form versions, and production security controls such as VPC endpoints, encryption, and least-privilege IAM.
The SaaSpocalypse that wasn’t, with Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes
Today, I’m talking with Mike Cannon-Brookes, who is cofounder and CEO of Atlassian. Atlassian is one of those companies that every other company runs on…
Re-derivability Decides What a Staged Agent Pipeline Recovers After an Upstream Fault
One variable sets what an upstream fault costs a staged pipeline of language-model agents: re-derivability, how much of what a stage needs it can rebuild from the original problem. Grounding an inspector agent in that problem is worth +0.608 [+0.517, +0.700] to +0.358 over a blind one on four open-weight backbones served with thinking disabled, and on the two Qwen backbones the blind inspector changes no item at all. That head-to-head is exploratory. One deterministic fault enters the first stage, and we re-expose the original problem to k = 0,,3 of the downstream stages with agents, items, fault and topology held fixed, on 120 gsm_hard items per arm at temperature zero. Accuracy under fault rises on four of four backbones, from +0.233 to +0.392, the largest Holm-adjusted p being 2.110^{-6}. A registered kill test rules out tokens. Blanking every word holds the word slots fixed, and retention tracks the visible fraction on four of four, climbing from 0.221 to 0.692 on the primary. Those two families are confirmatory and everything else here is exploratory. The interaction excludes zero on two of four backbones under the registered pipeline, four of four under a three-stage pipeline, and three of four under full message history, the primary at +0.317. On Llama-3.1-8B the fault carries no detectable cost at any dose, so the other three carry every claim about what a fault costs. Re-derivability also sets what the architecture costs, and no decomposition we measured reliably beats one direct call. With no fault injected the registered pipeline loses to that call by -0.267, -0.125 and -0.317, and on Phi-4 reads +0.058 at p = 0.118, which the test fails to separate from zero. The repair that works is cheap and front-loaded: the first re-grounded stage buys +0.394 of matched retention for +59.8 tokens per item on Qwen3-14B, and the stages after it buy nothing.
Softmax Reparameterization for Output-Head Quantization
Large vocabularies make output heads a substantial inference cost in small language models. We propose softmax reparameterization, a post-training method that selects a functionally equivalent output head before quantization. The method subtracts a scalar multiple of the vocabulary-row mean from every output row and selects the coefficient by validation KL separately for RTN, activation-weighted MSE, and full-Hessian GPTQ. This one-dimensional search includes the original head and fixed mean-centering, preserves the full-precision softmax distribution, and leaves the trained decoder unchanged; a rank-one correction handles nonlinear logit paths such as soft-capping. Across seven heads, W4 gains concentrate where baseline quantization substantially distorts predictions: on Phi-4-mini, AW-MSE KL falls from 0.936 to 0.256. The gains survive stronger GPTQ calibration and remain complementary to exact per-channel scaling and affine quantization. Across four heads and three W4 quantizers, frozen WikiText-selected coefficients also transfer to C4 and OpenWebMath, outperforming mean-centering in all 18 comparisons where the frozen coefficient differs from 1 and matching it in the remaining six. At W2, used as a compression stress test, benefits broaden across nearly the full model--quantizer matrix. Matched residual analysis shows that improved fidelity can accompany greater logit reconstruction error while reducing the residual's Fisher-weighted cost. For shift-compatible heads, reparameterization adds no inference operation and preserves packed W4 execution: with the decoder held in BF16, quantizing the Phi output head reduces batch-one generation latency by 10.8% relative to the BF16-head baseline.
Microsoft thinks its new Copilot ‘super app’ will be as influential as Office
After teasing its new Copilot "super app" last month, Microsoft is officially unveiling it today. The redesigned Copilot app bundles three AI capabilities into a…
Build a multi-account AI agent with AgentCore Gateway and MCP
Build a multi-account architecture that keeps each team's data in its own AWS account while giving AI agents a unified way to query across them. A central platform account runs the agent using Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Gateway and MCP, while line-of-business accounts expose their data as MCP servers with secure cross-account access and fine-grained authorization.
Aderant builds intelligent ticket triage with Amazon Nova
Learn how Aderant built an intelligent ticket triage system on Amazon Nova Lite through Amazon Bedrock, automating context gathering, classification, routing, and knowledge enrichment for its cloud operations team.
From portal-hopping to instant answers: HEMA’s journey with MCP and Amazon Bedrock
HEMA, a 100-year-old Dutch retailer, turned developer portal-hopping into instant answers by building HAL, an internal AI assistant on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore. Using Model Context Protocol (MCP), HAL delivers governed knowledge inside the tools teams already use, with no AWS credentials on the client and security anchored in Microsoft Entra ID.
Ema raises $77M as AI starts eating into enterprise software and services
Ema has raised $140 million to date and has more than 50 enterprise customers, including Google and Microsoft.
Measuring the Serving Stack Instead of the Model: Hidden Confounds in Local Tool-Use Evaluation
A coding agent must emit a valid tool call--a parseable invocation of a tool in the provided schema--before the harness can execute its chosen action. We study how local serving stacks affect this protocol step and show that measured outcomes can depend on the serving layer rather than model behavior alone. In Ollama, the default tools= request is gated per model by a static template flag: some models are accepted and return calls as text, some return native tool_calls, while Phi-3 and Gemma-3 are rejected before inference. In our harness, rejection and retry exhaustion are not preserved as structured failure metadata, so downstream analysis can misclassify them as model non-calls and naively report 0% fidelity. Adding a text tool list while retaining the native channel recovers much of the measured fidelity for accepted models, whereas a uniform text protocol reduces fidelity for Llama-3.2, which has native tool-call support. Cross-stack probes on Ollama, llama.cpp, vLLM, and SGLang show different handling of the same request. Constrained decoding removes parse failures but can induce non-termination, and turn-pooled versus per-instance estimates differ by up to about 55 points. We conclude with a checklist for treating serving behavior as part of the evaluation protocol.
Nscale’s IPO will test Wall Street’s appetite for concentrated AI bets once again
The British AI data center developer depends on tech giants Microsoft and Anthropic for most of its revenue.