Thank You, Microsoft
Five years across Microsoft Research and Core AI.
I recently left Microsoft after five years. Below is the short message I shared with the team.
Working at Microsoft has been a fulfilling experience (see what I wrote on my 3 year mark). As I leave, the most salient emotion I have is gratitude. Lots and lots of it.
To Saleema Amershi: thank you for creating the Human-AI eXperiences (HAX) lab at MSR, and for taking a chance on me as a founding member. It set the stage for everything that followed, including the GitHub Copilot work. To Ece Kamar and Ahmed Awadallah: thank you for your leadership at Microsoft Research, and for being great mentors along the way.
To Adam Fourney, Gagan Bansal, Chi Wang, Eric Zhu, Jack Gerrits, and the Semantic Kernel team: thank you for the collaboration on AutoGen (and its successor Microsoft Agent Framework), and for the work of growing a project that ended up defining a category.
To Tina Schuchman, Atul Agarwal, Maria Naggaga Nakanwagi, Caitie Mccaffrey, Vivek Bhaduaria, Avinav Jami, and the other leaders at Core AI: thank you for the support and the space to build Agent Optimizer.
And to the many collaborators across Microsoft Research and Core AI, the friends, mentors, and colleagues I have not named here: thank you. I will be cheering you on and keeping up with what you build next.
For now, I am taking a bit of a break. Time with family, reading a little more, writing a little more, and preparing for what comes next ( I will still be working in the AI agent space!).
With lots of gratitude,
Victor.