Peter Lee - Episode 68

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, our special guest host Scott Hanselman (of The Hanselminutes Podcast) welcomes ACM Fellow Peter Lee, President of Microsoft Research. As leader of Microsoft Research, Peter incubates new research-powered products and lines of business in areas such as AI, computing foundations, health, and life sciences. Before Microsoft, he established a new technology office that created operational capabilities in ML, data science, and computational social science at DARPA, and before that he was head of the CS department at CMU. Peter served on President Obama’s Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity and has testified before both the US House Science and Technology Committee and the US Senate Commerce Committee. He coauthored the bestselling book The AI Revolution in Medicine: GPT-4 and Beyond. In 2024, he was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in health and life sciences. In the interview, Peter reflects on his 40+ years in computer science, from working on PDP-11s and Commodore Amigas to modern AI advancements. He highlights how modern technologies, built on decades of research, have become indispensable. He also talks about his healthcare journey, including work that earned him election to the National Academy of Medicine, and the potential (and limitations) of AI in medicine. Peter and Scott touch on the impact of LLMs, the lack of ethics education in traditional CS curricula, the challenges posed by growing AI complexity. Peter also highlights some important Microsoft Research work in AI for Science and Quantum Computing.