Yeah, I went down the rabbit hole scratching my head the whole time. This is about the group at Microsoft Research that was disbanded or reorged into what is now Microsoft Research.

To the author: 100% need this kind of thinking. It’s a balancing act. Historically though, dedicated labs haven’t had the best track record at commercializing their tech. The skillset differs vastly from running a product-focused business.

That said, even within this narrow scope - there are areas ripe for research.

Some of my particular interests include:

(1) Latent thinking/reasoning, which could arguably be more efficient but also opaque is one

(2) Separation of “intelligence” from knowledge - ie. keep the ability to reason like a frontier model and make tool calls (calling the ‘oracle’ or searching the web) but remove all parameters associated with niche knowledge/facts.

These are a couple off the top of my head that are very much aligned to scaling.

I see this playing the same way in the other big companies that have a pressure to deliver (cough *value for shareholders*)

> There is no end in sight to real AI frontiers.

That statement is broad enough to be unfalsifiable, but if you narrow it down just a bit to scaling LLMs, maybe there is an end in sight. At least financial markets are skeptical of there being no end in sight.

If scaling LLMs really was the road to God in a box, then compute demand would be infinite, and nobody building to meet that demand would have a junk debt rating. Did those money people just not get it?

Ok we'll use that above. Thanks!

The real news is "The End of Microsoft Research". Langford's group is just one of many that have been parted out over the last year or so. The division that was T&R under Kevin Scott was quietly dissolved about a year ago and MSR was reorged under Azure Security with the AzSec leader as hatchetman for the department. MSR itself doesn't have a future beyond a few years at most I reckon. I don't suspect Kevin Scott will be around much longer either since his department keeps getting reduced and is fully eligible for VEO.

Langford has been at MSR a very long time and has done amazing research doing that time. He's bounced around a bit at MSR during his tenure and it's a shame to lose him. AI Frontiers wasn't around that long.

Much of this is Microsoft performing a very large and uncommunicated strategy update. All updates of MSR reorgs are just that "MSR is becoming more lean and focused" when it's obvious this isn't the case. This gets into the conversation that many Microsoft employees tend to have these days which is "Why does culture no longer matter at Microsoft and why did Satya turn into another heartless CEO". I won't speculate there, but the place isn't nearly as fun as it used to be.

simply owning most of OpenAI via a convertible note on very cheap inference sold to it could turn out to be a bigger deal than the rest of what microsoft does.