John Langford leaves Microsoft, says AI Frontiers is over after reorg into scaling-focused Microsoft AI

Machine learning researcher John Langford has left Microsoft and says its AI Frontiers group is over, he wrote on his blog. AI Frontiers, a roughly 50-person group set up within Microsoft Research in 2023, worked on making agents work, including the Autogen orchestration framework and the Fara computer use agent.

In early September the group was moved into Microsoft AI. Langford wrote that the core philosophy of Microsoft AI's ex-Inflection leadership "is scaling, and aggressively not research," and called the scaling-only focus "both misdirected and not fun." He said he could not get innovation into use, or even seriously considered, while in Microsoft AI.

"So I situated my folks as best I could and left," Langford wrote, adding that every other founding member of the group's leadership team seems to have reached a similar conclusion. He decided against returning to Microsoft Research, saying he was not comfortable at a company where his research has no path to real use, and that there will be no internships with the group in the coming year.

The departure points to a wider split inside Microsoft over research priorities, The420 reported.