Ethan Mollick and Azeem Azhar, thought leaders at the forefront of AI’s influence on work, education, and society, discuss the impact of AI at the individual level and what that means for the healthcare workforce and the organizations and systems in medicine.

The emergence of foundation models has sparked interest in applications to single-cell biology, but when tested in zero-shot settings, they underperform compared to simpler methods. Alex Lu shares insights on why more research on AI models is needed in biological applications.

Show notes

In this episode of Abstracts, Microsoft senior researchers Megan Stanley and Wessel Bruinsma join host Amber Tingle to discuss their groundbreaking work on environmental forecasting. Their new Nature publication, "A Foundation Model for the Earth System," features Aurora, an AI model that redefines weather prediction and extends its capabilities to other environmental domains such as tropical cyclones and ocean wave forecasting.

Read the paper: A Foundation Model for the Earth System

In this discussion, Matthew Lungren, Jonathan Carlson, Smitha Saligrama, Will Guyman, and Cameron Runde explore how teams across Microsoft are working together to generate advanced AI capabilities and solutions for developers and clinicians around the globe.

Peter Lee and his coauthors, Carey Goldberg and Dr. Zak Kohane, reflect on how generative AI is unfolding in real-world healthcare, drawing on earlier guest conversations to examine what’s working, what’s not, and what questions still remain.

Silicon has long borne the burden of heat transfer in electronics, but in a post-Moore’s Law world, researchers like Hongxia Hao and Bing Lv are using AI to discover and design next-generation materials that exceed the limits of silicon’s thermal conductivity.

Read the paper

New AI models aren’t just changing the world of research; they’re also poised to impact society. Xing Xie talks about Societal AI, a white paper that explores the changing landscape with an eye to future research and improved communication across disciplines.

Read the paper

Healthcare experts Laura Adams, Vardit Ravitsky, and Dr. Roxana Daneshjou discuss responsible AI implementation in medicine, examining governance approaches, shifting patient-provider relationships, and the identification of bias to ensure equitable deployment.