John Langford, the Microsoft Research scientist who helped found AI Frontiers, said he has left Microsoft AI after the group was absorbed in a Hunch post.
AI Frontiers is over.
Langford said AI Frontiers formed in 2023 after ChatGPT because one person could not move fast enough on baselines. The group built Autogen for orchestration and Fara for computer use. New York work included Next Latent, Dion3 as a Muon successor, and the Full Bandwidth Transformer which adds power through recursion, according to the Hunch post.
Langford said AI Frontiers shared a monorepo by default across Microsoft Research, including an edge scale pretraining pipeline from his COLM keynote. He said he knew of at least four model building efforts inside Microsoft, with only one shared, as of November 2026.
In early September Microsoft folded AI Frontiers into Microsoft AI, a much larger group led by ex-Inflection leadership. Langford said that leadership holds that bigger models are better models and that returns to scale beat returns to research. He called that scaling-only view misdirected and not fun.
That cost claim for the Full Bandwidth Transformer now has two external reference points. Langford cited ByteDance experiments suggesting a Full Bandwidth Transformer variant can match a model twice its size. A listing per Hugging Face says Full Bandwidth Transformers match standard transformers trained with roughly 1.5 times more tokens with negligible per-token decoding overhead and shorter reasoning traces at equal or better accuracy.
Jae Kwon, a commenter pitching startup gnosh.ai, said he is raising and will hire from the team. Langford said every other founding AI Frontiers leader reached a similar exit decision and that internships will not run next year. Who now pays for recursion work like the Full Bandwidth Transformer when scaling owns the budget?
