Microsoft Corporation is an American public corporation registered in the United States, headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, the company became globally renowned for its Windows operating system and Azure cloud platform. However, Microsoft is known not only for its software products—it is rightfully considered one of the key players in the artificial intelligence market.
Microsoft actively conducts fundamental research in AI, which has significantly influenced the development of the entire industry. Among its most notable innovations are DeepSpeed/ZeRO (2019–2020)—a revolutionary technology for optimizing distributed training that enabled efficient training of models with billions of parameters by eliminating memory redundancy and setting a new standard for model scaling. Equally important is the company’s contribution to parameter-efficient fine-tuning through LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation, 2021), which has become the de facto industry standard for adapting large models. In 2024, Microsoft introduced GraphRAG—an innovative approach to Retrieval-Augmented Generation that constructs knowledge graphs over text corpora to deliver more comprehensive and coherent responses to complex queries. These developments represent only a portion of Microsoft’s extensive research portfolio.
In the commercial segment, Microsoft offers the integrated AI system Copilot, available in Windows, Microsoft 365, web services, and certain developer tools. Meanwhile, in the realm of open-source solutions, the company has gained widespread recognition through its Phi model family (Phi-3, Phi-4)—compact yet high-performance language models released under the MIT license, demonstrating exceptional reasoning capabilities and multimodal functionality despite their relatively small size. The efficiency of the Phi models stems from a unique approach to training data curation: developers prioritize data quality over sheer volume. Also well known is the Florence model series, designed to address a broad spectrum of computer vision tasks. It is precisely these projects that have established Microsoft as a prominent figure in the open AI model ecosystem.