On 6 November, John Langford explained on his blog Machine Learning (Theory) why he left Microsoft and why the AI Frontiers group no longer exists. The post is his own account of events.

After ChatGPT was released in 2023, it was clear to Langford that research at Microsoft Research (MSR) needed to be organised more cohesively than usual. A single researcher could no longer keep pace with other research groups, he wrote. With colleagues, he founded AI Frontiers (AIF) within MSR.

Much of the roughly 50-person group’s work dealt with how to make AI agents work. Examples include the Autogen orchestration framework and Fara, a computer-use agent. In New York, part of the group developed new foundational methods such as the Full Bandwidth Transformer. Langford said it uses recursion to make a model effectively much more capable.

In early September, AIF was moved into Microsoft AI (MAI), Microsoft’s much larger AI organisation. MAI’s leadership, who came from Inflection, pursue scaling, meaning making models bigger, and aggressively reject research, Langford wrote. In scaling, he said, most of the work is acquiring, generating and refining data. Langford also said he saw many signs that AIF’s people were not wanted at MAI.

Langford acknowledges that larger models predict better and that returns on scaling are more predictable for business than returns on research. Even so, he believes scaling alone leads in the wrong direction. As evidence, he cites experiments by ByteDance, which he said suggest that a variant of the Full Bandwidth Transformer might be comparable to a model twice the size. Investment in the field is approaching $1 trillion, Langford wrote, and he asks how valuable it would be to halve the costs of training and inference, that is, of running a finished model.

Langford found new positions for his group’s members as best he could and left. Other members of AIF’s founding leadership also appear to have reached a similar conclusion, he said.

Returning to MSR did not appeal to him for two reasons. Langford does not want to work at a company where his research cannot be put to use. Because he could not get new solutions adopted at MAI, or even seriously considered, he judges his chances at MSR to be slim. He also wrote that MSR’s basic principle, that good work leads to good things, no longer holds, because the group was moved without its consent. AIF’s researchers will not take on interns in the coming year.