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.