We are excited to announce the launch of Azure AI Foundry Labs, a central hub where developers, startups, and enterprises can explore and leverage groundbreaking innovations born out of research at Microsoft.

Today, we are launching Azure AI Foundry Labs, a unified platform that brings together cutting-edge research and real-world applications. This convergence enables developers and creators across various industries to discover new possibilities, tackle complex problems, and share insights that will shape the future of AI.

One of Microsoft’s most recent AI breakthroughs is Muse, a pioneering World and Human Action Model (WHAM), now available in Azure AI Foundry. This represents the latest example of how Microsoft is bringing innovative research to its AI platform for customer use.

With Azure AI Foundry Labs, we are unveiling new assets for our latest research-driven projects. These projects, which include models and agentic frameworks, empower developers to explore, engage, and experiment with the latest advancements. Some of the notable projects include:

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

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

• Magentic-One: A multi-agent system that solves 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 that converts 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 transition from specialized, military-grade instruments to everyday consumer use. This shift, which occurred over several decades, seems sluggish compared to the rapid pace of innovation in AI today.

Recently, the pace of AI advancement has dramatically accelerated. We have seen 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, significantly boosting both research and commercialization. Moreover, the time-to-product from foundational research to full-scale product deployment has decreased from years to months.

At this velocity, ideas and prototypes must be iterated upon, validated, and deployed faster than ever before. This rapid evolution demands new strategies for bridging research and application.

Accelerating research to impact

Azure AI Foundry Labs showcases the long-term collaboration between research and engineering teams at Microsoft, providing a single access point for developers and the broader AI community to experiment with new models, explore the latest frameworks, and stay 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 accelerate 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 is designed to collapse this gap even further, ensuring that every breakthrough in AI research finds its way to the developers, creators, and innovators who can transform it into real-world impact.

This initiative is not 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.