I racked my brain and couldn’t think of a single example of something released by Microsoft Research offhand, so I proceeded to visit their website. It can be found at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/
I found exactly zero things that they have provided to the world. Literally none, and I really came in with an open mind. All I found was marketer drivel telling me how I should feel about the impact of the marketing copy I was currently reading. No concrete examples after fanning out 3 links deep into every article posted on that site. I must be missing something so can you point me to at least one example of work that’s come out of Microsoft Research on the same scale as Meta’s LLM models or ReactJS?
This is a surprisingly negative take, you should look a little further. Microsoft Research has done an incredible amount of high quality research. I've mostly read papers from them on programming languages, they have or did employ leading researchers behind C#, F#, Typescript (of course), as well as Haskell (Simon Peyton Jones and Simon Marlow spent a long time there), F*, and Lean (built by Leonardo de Moura while at MSR). MSR's scope has been much broader than just languages, of course.
I've heard in interviews that MSR's culture is not what it used to be (like Bell Labs, maybe), but over time they've funded a ton of highly influential research.
Leslie Lamport's TLA+ comes from MSR. You have likely directly benefited from this project, since it's been used to prove the correctness of many distributed systems, including pieces of AWS.
Z3 is a very popular open source SMT solver, also originating from MSR.
There's probably dozens of similar examples. You might not know about some of the work coming out of MSR, but it's probably impacting you indirectly.
It's similar to how we indirectly benefit from fundamental nuclear physics. Places like CERN have to solve engineering issues and those solutions trickle down to everyone.
That page is written for marketing. My experience with industry research labs is that just like many places with somewhat misplaced incentive structures, a lot of the good research does not get marketed properly. e.g., the research marketing people will likely extoll more of the recent GenAI advances given that's more eyeball catching.
(Also on top of my head DeepSpeed is by MSR, which is used a lot in large scale ML training.)
I found exactly zero things that they have provided to the world. Literally none, and I really came in with an open mind. All I found was marketer drivel telling me how I should feel about the impact of the marketing copy I was currently reading. No concrete examples after fanning out 3 links deep into every article posted on that site. I must be missing something so can you point me to at least one example of work that’s come out of Microsoft Research on the same scale as Meta’s LLM models or ReactJS?