The end of Microsoft Research's AI Frontiers group

Microsoft Research's AI Frontiers group was dissolved due to the difficulty of coordinating research efforts among a small team of 50 people, leading to slow progress and lack of convincing results. The group had made some pioneering efforts, including developing the Autogen orchestration framework and the Fara computer use agent, but was hindered by compute availability and disagreements among team members. Meanwhile, a subset of researchers in NYC were working on new fundamental capabilities, including the Next Latent objective, Dion3, and the Full Bandwidth Transformer. The group also shared their work with the rest of Microsoft Research, including a monorepo with a pretraining codebase.