The annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems kicks off in San Diego this week at an odd time for AI research, as money, energy, and talent disappear into the private sector, where new research is increasingly kept secret.
Peter Lee, who heads Microsoft Research, weighed the dilemma facing company researchers in a wide-ranging interview. “If you are successful at creating an internal disruption, that actually harms our business. That’s the point of disruption. On the other hand, if you don’t do it and the competitor does it, you’ll get blamed for missing it,” he said.
Microsoft certainly hasn’t missed it. It oriented its company around AI, making a massive bet on OpenAI long before ChatGPT came out. But what’s next? And how does a company like Microsoft stay focused on the next disruptive idea in the lab while fighting for survival in the high-stakes AI race?
Quietly, the company has snuck into the final stage of DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, where the agency vets the scalability of different quantum ideas. If Microsoft’s Majorana quantum processor is successful or quantum computers can be built at scale, CEO Satya Nadella might be forced yet again to bet the future on something fresh out of the research lab. As Lee told me, “Stuff will change really rapidly.”