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Peter Lee's keynote address at the Microsoft Research Forum focused on three main points:
The significant advances in AI, particularly in the past year, and how these developments have fundamentally transformed the way Microsoft approaches research 1.
The comparison of the current state of AI and computer science research to the scientific disruption in biology in the 1700s. He highlighted how the discovery of cell division changed the infrastructure of research in biology and drew parallels to how machine learning and neural transformers are changing the infrastructure of computer science research today 1.
The impact of these changes on researchers, with many finding their previous work disrupted or even invalidated. Despite the challenges, he expressed excitement and joy at living through this rare and special period of disruption and transformation in the field of AI and computer science research 1.
Transcript - Keynote address: Research in the Era of AI Peter Lee, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Research and Incubations Peter Lee discusses how recent developments in AI have transformed the way Microsoft approaches research. Microsoft Research Forum, Jan. 30, 2024
PETER LEE: Hi. I'm really pleased and excited to be here for this first Microsoft Research Forum, a series that we have here out of Microsoft Research to carry out some important conversations with the research and scientific community. This past year has been quite a memorable one. Just some incredible advances, particularly in AI, and I'll spend a little bit of time talking about AI here to get us started. But before doing that, I thought I would try to at least share how I see what is happening in the broader context of scientific disruption. And to do that, I want to go all the way back to the 1700s and the emerging science of biology, the science of living things. Actually, in the 1700s, it was well understood by the end of that century that all living things were made up of cells —everything from trees and plants to bugs, animals, and human beings. But a fundamental scientific mystery that lingered for decades was, where do cells come from? And a prevailing theory of that was the concept of cell crystallization. It has been understood in other areas that sometimes hard materials would crystallize into existence from fluid materials. And so the thought was that out of living fluids, under just the right conditions, cells would crystallize into existence. And a lot of biological research of the time was centered around that theory. And in fact, quite a few important and useful things came out of that line of research, research that even has an impact medically today. Now, of course, there was an alternative theory, which I think is credited to Robert Remak, that in fact cells get created through a process of cell division. And we know that this is true today. But it was really considered an alternative theory until Rudolf Virchow was actually able to witness the mitosis of cells, the division of cells, and in fact, coined the aphorism that all cells come from other living cells. This had a very significant impact on Virchow’s research and his research into what is now known as pathology. Overnight, whole research legacies were rendered largely invalid because the whole concept of cell crystallization was then known to be invalid. But even the very foundational infrastructure of research at the time changed. In fact, after Virchow, to call yourself a researcher in biology, you had to have access to a new piece of research infrastructure called the microscope, and you had to be good at using it. And so while the researchers themselves of the time were not invalidated, they were disrupted in a really fundamental way. And of course, the discovery of mitosis really set biology research on the path ultimately to the discovery of DNA and the remarkable kinds of medical and biological advances we see in the field. Now I tell that story because when I think about that story —and I learned it first from the great biology researcher and medical scientist Sid Mukherjee at Columbia —I think about what we as computer scientists are going through today. We've now witnessed the incredible potential power
of machine learning systems at scale and of specific architectures like neural transformers. And there are many possibilities, there are many challenges, and there are many mysteries. Furthermore, the infrastructure of what we do as computer science researchers, particularly in areas related to artificial intelligence, has changed in the same way that biology researchers need access to new infrastructure like microscopes. At least that was the case in the mid-1800s when Virchow made his discovery. Today, for a large segment of the kinds of research that we do, we now realize we need new types of infrastructure, infrastructure such as large datasets, access to large-scale GPU computing, and even other training pipelines and foundations. And what we're seeing is that this is affecting virtually everything that we do today. And so as we work together as a research community in computer science, we are in this incredibly exciting stage, a stage of being disrupted personally as researchers —many of us as researchers finding large parts of what we had been working on being changed, disrupt ed, or even invalidated —and a whole new vista of possibilities in front of us. And we are just incredibly excited within Microsoft Research to be living through this. There are difficult moments, to be sure, but also a sense of joy, a joy that comes from the realization that we are now living through something very special and very rare.
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