The end of Microsoft Research’s AI Frontiers group

In 2023 after the ChatGPT release, it was clear to me that research needed to be more organized to succeed than was typical within Microsoft Research. The amount of support and focus which other research groups were applying was great enough that even with a clever idea pursued by one person it was likely to arrive late and unconvincing because one person could not move fast enough and the baselines which one person could assemble just were not strong enough to really show that an idea was worth taking flight. Several other folks thought similarly and we organized to create the AI Frontiers sub-organization within MSR. In AI Frontiers, we actively tried to organize coherent research efforts. This was not precisely “top down” or “bottom up”, but rather mostly somewhere in the…