The system discovered a new chemical compound in 200 hours instead of years

                                                                     AI Shortens Laboratory Work from Years to Hours

Microsoft Launches AI That Shortens Laboratory Work from Years to Hours

Microsoft launched a new enterprise platform that harnesses artificial intelligence to dramatically accelerate scientific research and development, potentially reducing years of lab work to weeks or even days.

The platform, called Microsoft Discovery, leverages specialized AI agents and high-performance computing to help scientists and engineers tackle complex research challenges without having to write any code.

The system has already proven its capabilities in Microsoft research, helping discover a new coolant for immersion cooling of data centers in about 200 hours, a process that typically takes months or even years, according to a report by VentureBeat, a technology news website, reviewed by Al Arabiya Business.

"What we're actually doing is exploring how advances in agent AI, computing, and then quantum computing can be applied to a very important area, which is science," Jason Zander, executive vice president of strategy and technologies at Microsoft, told VentureBeat. "In 200 hours of work using this framework, we were able to screen and sort through 367,000 potential compounds that we found," Zander explained, adding that they presented the results to a partner, who synthesized the compound.

The Microsoft Discovery platform represents an important step toward the universalization of advanced scientific tools, allowing researchers to interact with supercomputers and complex simulations using natural language rather than requiring specialized programming skills.

This platform addresses a key challenge in scientific research: the gap between domain expertise and computational skills. Previously, scientists needed to learn programming to take advantage of advanced computational tools, which was a barrier to the research process. This step toward generalizing these tools could be particularly valuable for smaller research institutions that lack the resources to hire computing specialists to support their scientific teams.

By allowing subject matter experts to directly query complex simulations and conduct experiments using natural language, Microsoft effectively lowers the barriers to using advanced research technologies.