Microsoft AI scientist John Lafferty leaves: claims innovation is hard to implement, research not taken seriously

Microsoft AI scientist John Lafferty, co-founder of the AI Frontiers Lab, leaves due to a lack of practical application paths for his research results and difficulty in getting innovative ideas taken seriously. His team of about 50 people was merged into the Microsoft AI department, but there were disagreements on research direction, innovation implementation channels, and team restructuring methods. Lafferty opposes using the expansion of model scale as the only core, believing it squeezes the space for exploring new methods, and points out that his 'Full-Bandwidth Transformer' research is not valued.