Full-Bandwidth Transformer

John Langford, a Microsoft AI scientist and co-founder of the AI Frontiers lab with over 14 years at the company, has left, citing that his cost-reduction research such as Full-Bandwidth Transformer was not seriously considered by Microsoft AI. The work showed a 1B-parameter model can approach the performance of a conventional model trained on ~1.5x more data, and ByteDance Seed's Recycler later adopted a similar hidden-state reuse approach to outperform models 2-3x larger. The departure highlights a strategic rift between scaling and exploring new methods.