Microsoft Research: 1,000 Synthetic Computers for Long-Horizon Agent Training
Microsoft Research has published "1,000 Synthetic Computers" — a dataset of 1,000 fully-provisioned virtual environments designed for long-horizon computer-use agent training. Each simulation provides approximately 8 hours of agent runtime and ~2,000 interaction turns, equivalent to roughly a month of compressed human work. The system is designed to scale to billions of synthetic worlds, providing a training data source for computer-use agents that does not depend on real user telemetry — the only approach that survives GDPR and EU AI Act privacy constraints on training data sourcing.
Why It Matters
Computer-use agents capable of operating general desktop environments need vastly more training data than task-specific benchmarks provide. A scalable synthetic environment generator that sidesteps privacy constraints is a foundational infrastructure contribution — analogous to what ImageNet was for computer vision.