John Langford, a machine learning computer scientist formerly at Microsoft Research (MSR), has penned a blog detailing the end of that company’s AI Frontiers Group.

Langford has had a prestigious career in the industry, having worked at the IBM Watson Research Center, Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, Yahoo Research and, most recently, MSR. According to Langford, the release of ChatGPT shone a spotlight on the shortcomings of MSR’s approach to AI development. As a result, Langford and others formed the AI Frontiers subgroup within the organization.

The new group worked to push AI research further:

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 messy middle. There were disagreements of course, and resolving them was sometimes quite challenging. Compute availability was also an often-severe bottleneck.…