Microsoft Launches the Azure AI Foundry Labs to Shorten the Gap "Between Breakthrough and Impact"
New site provides access to a range of Microsoft Research projects, including the Muse WHAM model.
Microsoft has announced the launch of Azure AI Foundry Labs, through which it hopes to give developers and companies the ability to experiment with the company's research in artificial intelligence (AI) — including Muse, which it describes as a "World and Human Action Model" or WHAM.
"Microsoft. Foundry Labs unites cutting-edge research with real-world applications, to enable developers and creators across industries to discover new possibilities, solve complex problems, and share insights to shape the future of AI," Microsoft's Asha Sharma and Ashley Llorens wrote in a joint announcement. "Azure AI Foundry Labs highlights the long-term collaboration between research and engineering teams at Microsoft and provides a single access point for developers and the broader AI community to experiment with new models, explore the latest frameworks, and be at the forefront of innovation."
The idea behind Azure AI Foundry Labs is simple: providing developers with a way to build prototypes using experimental research projects more quickly than would otherwise the case — reducing, Sharma and Llorens claim, "the gap between breakthrough and impact" and bringing real-world implementations of AI technology to market more quickly, for good or ill.
"This isn’t just about sharing research," the pair say, "it's about accelerating the cycle of innovation itself. Whether you’re a developer, researcher, startup founder, or enterprise builder, Azure AI Foundry Labs gives you direct access to the bleeding edge of AI advancement. The tools and models available today are just the beginning."
Those models include Muse, which Microsoft claims is a "first-of-its-kind" model dubbed a World and Human Action Model (WHAM) — a generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) model that is able to generate game visuals or controller inputs, or both, on-the-fly, and which Microsoft's Katja Hofmann says is designed to "effectively support human creatives" rather than replace them.
Other models include the Aurora weather forecasting model, the Magnetic-One multi-agent problem-solving system, the MatterSim atomistic simulation model, OmniParser v2 vision-based model for structuring user interface (UI) screenshots, and the TamGen model for drug design, alongside ExACT, an open source project which gives AI agents the ability to take past interactions into account.
More information is available on the Azure AI Foundry Labs website.
