Peter Lee retired as President, Microsoft Science. Today he advises on AI to health & life sci orgs, as well as to the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team.

Bellevue, WA
Joined July 2010
Wow this is impressive. One of those tech bio advances that is both expected and yet still very surprising when you see it working for real.
Replying to @FrankNoeBerlin
Dynamics: folding & binding of an intrinsically disordered peptide to its protein receptor via an intermediate state. A 5 milliseconds simulation would take >10 GPU years with MD simulation. At 5 microsecond steps, BioEmu2 needs 40 minutes on the same GPU – a >100,000 x speedup!
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Peter Lee retweeted
Bill Gates on why we should tax A.I. work: “If you’ve let go of a worker and hired a robot to do that job, why are you so incentivizing the trade-off against the human labor that you don’t ask the robot to also pay into the pension fund? What is it? Is it that the pro-robot union has gotten the tax laws to say: No, if you’re not flesh, then let pensions go bankrupt?”
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For the past 16 years, I'm pretty sure I've had the best job in all of tech. But an opportunity has come up that forced me to ask the question, "Considering my stage of life and career, will I regret it if I pass on this?" The answer I came up with was "Yes," and so I've taken a big leap and decided to retire from Microsoft. Working at Microsoft, having the privilege of leading @MSFTResearch, and most recently serving as President of Microsoft Science, has been an incredible experience, full of personal growth and the satisfaction of positive global impact on people and on Microsoft. My colleagues, every day, created a working environment that felt like living in the inevitable future. In my view, @satyanadella, @kevin_scott, @judsonalthoff, and the entire senior leadership of Microsoft have created the modern-day equivalent of Camelot, seeking to align Microsoft's business priorities with the goal of global empowerment and prosperity for all. I've been proud to be a part of it all. As for what I'll be doing next, what I can say at this point is that it is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to join an elite team, fulfilling a dream I've had since childhood. It's a major detour from what I've been doing over the past 2+ decades, but rest assured that I'll be able to continue my participation with @MayoClinic, @KPMedSchool, @seattlechildren, and other great organizations that seek to improve and advance healthcare delivery and medical science.
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Today, Mayo Clinic announced a generous gift from the Penske Foundation to support Bold. Forward. Unbound. in Rochester. In recognition of the Penske Foundation's generosity and enduring partnership, Mayo will name the Penske Arrival Building. Read more: newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/d…
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Peter Lee retweeted
Today we’re introducing Project Quine. Quine combines a world model of biology with a research harness that connects it to literature, computation, and the wet lab, allowing the system to explore hypotheses, gather experimental evidence, and adapt what it does next. This has been a long-term effort by many people at MSR, and I'm immensely proud of the team microsoft.com/en-us/research…
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Custom-made molecules are advancing medicine, materials, and agriculture, but producing them is slow and expensive. A new Nature paper highlights RetroChimera, a predictive model that helps accelerate chemical synthesis, helping researchers explore a wide range of molecules.: msft.it/6012a5Ogy
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Proud to report that tomorrow Sept 15th "The AI Doc" documentary film will be streaming on Netflix. Feeling confused, anxious, or overwhelmed by the recent AI headlines, from rogue OpenAI agents carrying out cyberattack to prominent AI researchers resigning to warn about existential risks to humanity? To understand how we got here, and what we can do, watch “The AI Doc” which is now streaming on Netflix starting Sept 15th as well as other major streaming platforms. Interviews 40+ experts on AI, including 3 out of the 5 majors CEOs of frontier AI companies. Host a screening, share it with your friends. Clarity is agency. #theaidoc #theaidocfilm cc @Liv_Boeree @DKokotajlo @PeterDiamandis @JeffLadish @aza @SnehaRevanur @ajeya_cotra @hendrycks @NPCollapse @davidevanharris @janleike @JasonGMatheny @Yoshua_Bengio @ESYudkowsky @harari_yuval @reidhoffman @rajiinio @RameshMedias @nitashatiku @ilyasut @ShaneLegg @demishassabis @sama @sanmikoyejo @_KarenHao @DarioAmodei @peteratmsr
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Replying to @peteratmsr
@peteratmsr is back on Lifers, this time with @CALonghurst, who is the new CEO of Seattle Children's. We got into why ambient scribes make clinicians happier and health system finances worse, whether a PA with AI should be handling triage a specialist would otherwise do, what happens to the back office when healthcare is the top employer in 42 states, and why frontier models keep beating tools built specifically for medicine. Timestamps: (00:00) Lead in (00:28) Intro (01:23) A massive moment (04:01) Red pill ER reality (06:12) Mission control and upskilling (07:13) Tech leaders as CEOs (09:27) Ambient scribes and costs (13:43) Hierarchy versus efficiency (15:23) Full stack healthcare workforce (18:09) Sponsor: Granola (18:55) Rethinking training and roles (21:36) Bending the back office curve (23:12) Admin jobs and AI skills (27:50) Self driving cars benchmarking (30:11) AI exceptionalism and agents (32:59) Autonomy in clinical care (36:25) Humans in the loop (39:27) Accountability and responsibility (41:37) Frontier models beat specialists (46:35) Workflow interoperability and wrap (47:53) Wrap
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In this @axios piece, @JimVandeHei gives his personal perspective navigating a fragmented healthcare system, & how his family’s experience changed when they came to Mayo. I appreciated the opportunity to share how to bring better healthcare to more people: axios.com/2026/08/16/ai-mayo…
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We @MSFTResearch consistently find that more general AI models outperform specialized models, even on the specialized tasks. Yet another example is the PRISM2 model for digital pathology, in Nature Medicine today. With Paige (now a part of @TempusAI). news.microsoft.com/signal/ar…
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Many have long believed that real-world evidence can accelerate discovery in medicine. But how, exactly? This new piece in @NatureMedicine talks to @hoifungpoon and others on the leading edge to look at how AI is making the dream of RWE come to life. nature.com/articles/s41591-0…
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Aurora 1.5 adds 22 more variables, hourly temporal resolution, and probabilistic ensemble forecasting to the Aurora foundation model, making it more useful for real-world weather, climate, and energy applications. msft.it/6017vInGR
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Medical diagnoses can be improved by reanalyzing genomic data in rare disease cases. This is normally very burdensome, but today in @NatureMedicine we present Talos, a tool that in iterative monthly reanalysis reduces the burden to 1 variant per 200 cases nature.com/articles/s41591-0…
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Talos was built to help resolve a major bottleneck in genomic medicine: human review time. The open-source system recovered 90% of in-scope diagnoses while surfacing just 1.3 candidate variants per patient for expert review. msft.it/6014vUBwK
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ResNet has received the Longuet-Higgins Prize at CVPR 2026, recognizing research with proven, lasting impact. A decade after its publication, residual connections remain foundational to how modern AI systems are built, with over 320,000 citations and growing. msft.it/6017vl6bl
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Today in @naturemethods, we shared research on how AI can help us better understand cell behavior, offering new insights into why cancer medicines do not work the same for everyone. By learning more about cell state — how individual cancer cells respond to their surroundings — we have the potential to match therapies more precisely to each patient and improve outcomes. news.microsoft.com/signal/ar…
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Peter Lee retweeted
New findings in Nature Methods highlight how Project Ex Vivo is helping researchers uncover patterns in cell behavior that may lead to more personalized therapies for patients dealing with cancer. Microsoft researcher Lorin Crawford explains more: msft.it/6006vgDS8
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Every day during the shared envisioning, planning, and dreaming of what might be possible, my excitement of what would be possible grew enormously. The joint commitment to advancing healthcare is so inspiring.
I’m pleased to share Mayo Clinic has announced a strategic collaboration with @Microsoft to develop and deploy a frontier AI model designed specifically for healthcare. Read more: newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/d…
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Only once or twice in my career have I felt a real chance to extend the frontiers of human knowledge and bring practical benefits to everyone in a big way. This is one of those times, not only due to the capabilities of both Microsoft and Mayo Clinic, but also our common vision.
Proud that we’re collaborating with Mayo Clinic to build a frontier AI model for healthcare. Both our organizations exist to serve people at scale – and we believe this could be nothing short of transformative for global healthcare. news.microsoft.com/source/20…
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