After six months of internal pre-work, Microsoft will be launching a new, supercharged generative AI model for researchers — and the Princeton New Jersey AI Hub will be one of two locations to trial it.
This new model is called Microsoft Discovery — “A ChatGPT for scientists,” as Liat Krawczyk, Executive Director of the NJ AI Hub, told The Daily Princetonian.
“We are one of two sites in the world selected to have access to the platform before it’s released, and it’s really exciting,” Krawczyk said.
The program will serve as a backbone for researchers, enabling faster and more sophisticated analysis capabilities and increased data computation, according to Krawczyk and Marie Pryor, Community Manager for Microsoft’s TechSpark NJ. University researchers will be among the first to have the opportunity to use it, contingent on their engagement with the AI Hub.
There are high hopes. With Discovery, researchers will be able to “take on problems that maybe to this point have been too complex to be entertained, to be researched, to be touched,” Pryor wrote.
Krawczyk also said that the program will be able to analyze data that would otherwise “take humans a very long time” because of the scale of the datasets and the complexity of the processes required to analyze it.
This new model was launched in private preview in May, two months after the opening of the NJ AI Hub, located on Route 1. Princeton University and Microsoft are two of the founding partners of the AI Hub, joined by AI computing company Coreweave and the New Jersey Economic Development Authority.
After testing Discovery in Microsoft labs throughout the summer, and already yielding breakthroughs, such as a “novel sustainable coolant prototype for datacenter immersion cooling,” Microsoft is leaning into the University to continue pioneering breakthroughs with the new technology, Pryor wrote.
“It goes without saying Princeton has global prestige,” Pryor told the ‘Prince’ in an interview. “When you’re looking for top tier research, look no further in many cases, and so [Princeton] was an easy and obvious early partner to lean in with.”
Princeton and the NJ AI Hub will not be the only location for this new AI software. TitletownTech at the University of Wisconsin-Madison was selected as the second location where Discovery will be simultaneously launched.
Pryor said that she and her counterpart at Titletown serve as the “connective tissue” between the two locations — a connection that is expected to surge once the program has been actively launched.
“The rollouts will be on par with one another,” Pryor said. “Down the line, once it’s actively running, there would be shared learning, shared collaboration, perhaps even shared expertise across the two locations.”
Both locations were chosen as fountainheads for Discovery because of “the uniqueness of the [local] industry clusters,” Pryor explained. For New Jersey, these are the ones situated along the Route 1 corridor.
While both locations are pursuing similar goals of innovation, they differ in the type of industry they are promoting. Emphasizing that there is not a “hard split” between the two, Pryor explained that Microsoft is leaning towards New Jersey primarily for pharmaceutical, life sciences, and health industry-focused research, while leaning towards Wisconsin for the material sciences and manufacturing industry.
Both locations, however, are set to be crucial in “discovering new materials, new drugs, new cures, new treatments at record pace,” Pryor said.
The process to be chosen for Discovery access will be selective, according to Krawczyk. She explained that “the use cases that will be selected are the ones for which the platform is most ripe to help them” — cases that “make sense for the platform.”
Both Pyror and Krawczyk emphasized finding what Pyror called the “right stakeholders” and what Krawczyk called “trustworthy partners.”
“What criteria — what does that look like? What type of elements would be a desirable, successful project? Who has to be at the table? The readiness of the entities that we’re engaging with?” Pryor told the ‘Prince,’ regarding what factors were important in considering access to Discovery — or, as she put it, making a “match” with the proper industry partner.
“Assume that 100 percent of chemists have expertise in chemistry — maybe two percent of chemists are computational chemists,” Krawczyk added. “The question is: Can we take someone with deep expertise in their own domain and lend them computational capabilities and large data kinds of conclusions that would accelerate their research?”
Currently, Discovery seems more oriented towards larger, group-led projects. While Pyror emphasized that a “substantive” enough individually-led project would be considered for Discovery access, the program will primarily be concerned with adhering to the “collective brain trust” in New Jersey and “trying to bring the right groups, small groups, but the right groups of people together.”
Krawczyk added that she hopes the program includes not just “the Princeton community, but also other higher education communities everywhere, from students to faculty who are interested in AI” — communities that the AI Hub is “certainly open to partnerships” with, “to the extent that they make sense for [Discovery].”
Pryor also said that Microsoft hopes both the NJ AI Hub and Titletown will become “models that will draw other people to these locations, to be able to access this type of ecosystem for this level of scientific advancement.”
The rollout of Discovery is expected in the coming months. There are no current plans for extension to other locations, according to Pryor.
Luke Grippo is an assistant News editor and senior Research writer for the ‘Prince.’ He is from South Jersey, and typically covers University and town politics, on a national, regional, and local scale. He can be reached at lg5452[at]princeton.edu.
Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.
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