Introducing Azure AI Foundry Labs: A hub for the latest AI research and experiments at Microsoft

Today we’re launching Azure AI Foundry Labs, a hub for developers, startups, and enterprises to explore groundbreaking innovations from research at 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 newest AI breakthrough—Muse, a first-of-its-kind World and Human Action Model (WHAM), available today in Azure AI Foundry—is the latest example of bringing cutting-edge research innovation to our AI platform for customers to use.

With Azure AI Foundry Labs, we’re excited to unveil new assets for our latest research-driven projects that empower developers to explore, engage, and experiment. Projects across models and agentic frameworks include:

• Aurora: A large-scale atmospheric model providing high-resolution weather forecasts and air pollution predictions, outperforming traditional tools. 

• ExACT: An open-source project enabling agents to learn from past interactions and improve search efficiency dynamically.

• Magentic-One: A multi-agent system solving complex problems by orchestrating multiple agents, built on the AutoGen framework. 

• MatterSim: A deep learning model for atomistic simulations, predicting material properties with high precision. 

• OmniParser v2: A vision-based module converting UI screenshots into structured elements, enhancing agents’ action generation. 

• TamGen: A generative AI model for drug design, using a GPT-like chemical language model for target-aware molecule generation and refinement. 

Then versus now

In the early days of global positioning systems (GPS) technology, it took roughly a decade for GPS to make its way from specialized, military-grade instruments into everyday consumer use. What started as a niche innovation in the 1970’s didn’t become truly mainstream until the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, when GPS receivers became standard features in cars, cell phones, and handheld devices. Ten years might sound like a reasonable adoption curve—until you look at how quickly innovations are moving in AI today.

In recent years, the pace of AI advancement has accelerated dramatically. We’ve witnessed a shift from unveiling a new model every 4–6 months to releasing breakthroughs every 4–6 days. The amount of compute used for training AI models has grown 10 times every 12 months, turbocharging both research and commercialization. And time-to-product from foundational research to full-scale product deployment has gone from years to months. 

At this velocity, ideas and prototypes need to be iterated upon, validated, and deployed faster than ever before. This rapid evolution demands new thinking in how we bridge research and application.

Accelerating research to impact

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. Developers can create prototypes using experimental research in Azure AI Foundry Labs, collaborate with researchers and engineering teams by sharing feedback, and help speed up the time to market for some of the most promising technologies. 

The next chapter 

The gap between breakthrough and impact has never been smaller. What once took years now takes weeks, and what was once confined to research labs now runs on devices in our pockets. Azure AI Foundry Labs exists to collapse this gap even further—to ensure that every breakthrough in AI research finds its way to the developers, creators, and innovators who can transform it into real-world impact. 

This isn’t just about sharing research—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. 

Visit Azure AI Foundry Labs to start building the future.

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