Microsoft Research Shuts Down Its AI Frontiers Group

John Langford, who headed up AI Frontiers, has posted news that his team has been disbanded. AI Frontiers was a ~50 person team based out of Microsoft Research (MSR), Microsoft’s research arm. Back in September, they were rolled up into Microsoft AI, which is a product group led by ex-Inflection (an AI startup) folks. According to Langford, the new combined team’s philosophy is “scaling, and aggressively not research” which is at odds with his own. Virtually all of the other founding leaders of the AI Frontiers team have also departed.

This story illustrates how difficult it is to pursue both a scalable and a research-based approach to AI within the same organization. Microsoft has absorbed their research team into a group run by ex-Inflection employees. Virtually all of the original leadership decided to move on instead of sticking around. This is a warning sign for big AI research groups: if you want to accelerate progress by centralizing your efforts, you may end up reducing the number of people working on novel approaches, even beyond just growing models.