Microsoft

Introduction Last month I wrote Jev vs Laya, comparing TypeSafe AI’s closed-source decision model Jev with the community’s open-source Laya. Back then, “decision models” were a brand-new category: Jev launched on September 15, and Laya was open-sourced three days later. Just three weeks later, the field is crowded: on October 6, OpenAI opened its Decisions API built on GPT-6 Luna; companies such as Liquid AI and Inception have launched their own decision APIs; and the third-party leaderboard JevBench now ranks more than 140 open-weight systems. On October 9, Microsoft joined the race with Microsoft-Decision-1. ...

In my previous article, I migrated the OpenWebUI database to Azure Database for PostgreSQL. In my day-to-day use of OpenWebUI, I kept running into two problems: No access to the latest information: Models have a knowledge cutoff. When I ask about recent releases, news, or prices, they either can’t answer or get it wrong. Pasted links are never opened: When I paste the URL of an article, a document, or a GitHub page into the chat and ask the model to summarize, translate, or compare it, the model doesn’t read the link at all. Sometimes it even guesses content that “looks plausible” from the URL alone. Both problems can be solved with OpenWebUI’s web capabilities. In this article, I use Microsoft’s new Microsoft Web IQ as the web search engine, and let the model automatically detect URLs in messages and read the pages before answering. All it takes is creating a Web IQ resource in the Azure portal and then configuring OpenWebUI in its admin UI. No code to write and no extra services to deploy. ...

Microsoft Research recently released Fara-7B, an Agentic Small Language Model (SLM) designed specifically for Computer Use. Unlike traditional chat models, Fara-7B is designed to complete tasks by using a mouse and keyboard just like a human. What is Fara-7B? Fara-7B is a 7 billion parameter model built on Qwen2.5-VL-7B. Its key features include: Visual Perception: It operates by visually perceiving web pages (screenshots), without relying on Accessibility Trees or additional parsing models. Efficient and Compact: Despite having only 7B parameters, it achieves state-of-the-art performance in its class, even competing with larger models on certain benchmarks. On-Device Execution: Due to its small size, it can run locally on devices, reducing latency and improving privacy. ...

Large language models often encounter GPU memory bottlenecks during inference deployment: Model parameters (P) can reach hundreds of GB and must remain resident in GPU memory. Input/output data (D) changes dynamically with each request but is often coupled with parameters on the same device, leading to imbalanced memory usage and limited scalability. To solve this problem, we can leverage the vLLM framework to implement Parameter/Data (P/D) Separation, improving the flexibility and throughput of inference systems. ...

What is VibeVoice? VibeVoice is a research framework released by Microsoft Research for long-form, multi-speaker, conversational speech synthesis. Target scenarios include entire podcast episodes, audio dramas, or interviews: it can maintain speaker consistency within a single generation and handle natural turn-taking. The model family includes multiple scales (e.g., 1.5B, 7B, etc.) and is available on Hugging Face as microsoft/VibeVoice-1.5B, along with model cards, weights, installation guides, and responsible use notes. It addresses several pain points of traditional TTS systems, such as: ...

Azure is a cloud computing platform and service provided by Microsoft. It offers a range of infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS) solutions for building, deploying, and managing various types of applications and services. Overview Azure provides a wide range of features and services, including virtual machines, storage, databases, artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain, Internet of Things (IoT), containers, and serverless computing. It also offers a global network of data centers, enabling users to deploy and scale applications worldwide. ...