Christopher Bishop has been at the forefront of Microsoft’s artificial intelligence applications for some time since he runs the company’s AI for Science research unit, which applies the powerful technology to the natural sciences.
Bishop sees the mission of the lab, which was founded in 2022, as accelerating scientific discovery using the technology. His team studies everything from how AI models can help discover new materials to how they can assist weather forecasting by predicting changes in the atmosphere.
In this conversation with the Financial Times’ AI editor Madhumita Murgia, he explains why he believes scientific discovery will prove to be the single most important application of the technology.