Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Oct. 25, according to foreign media citing people familiar with the matter, members of Microsoft's team responsible for developing the "Industrial Metasmology" Project Airsim on Monday received a "team update" notice and were told that the company would fire the entire team and terminate the project. Microsoft also confirmed that it would terminate the project on December 15 this year.

"We are proud of the impact of this incubation project on our customers, and we will continue to invest in Azure to provide computing platforms for virtual worlds in the industrial sector and various artificial intelligence projects within the company," Microsoft said in a statement. "We are working closely with customers to achieve this transformation."

Prior to this, Microsoft officially stopped supporting the Project Bonsai project on October 19. Project Bonsai is an artificial intelligence development platform for building automation systems for industrial applications. Both projects are considered to be part of Microsoft's Industrial Metasmology.

Microsoft acquired artificial intelligence start-up Bonsai in 2018, which was seen internally as Microsoft's response to Google's acquisition of Deepmind, according to people familiar with the matter. Project Airsim was first launched as an open source project in 2017 and has since shifted its focus to products for industrial customers.

Both Project Airsim and Project Bonsai were promoted by Kevin Scott, Microsoft's chief technology officer. He has brokered a partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI, which aims to enable industrial customers to use new products from Microsoft's cloud business.

When talking about Project Bonsai, Nadella mentioned Project Bonsai as part of Microsoft's future of artificial intelligence at staff meetings and public interviews in the way he talked about OpenAI today, according to people familiar with the project.

Although Microsoft initially saw these projects as a way to attract industrial application developers, helping Microsoft's Azure cloud compete with Amazon Web Service AWS, the person familiar with the matter said. But as Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI grows, Scott is less and less interested in these projects.

At the beginning of 2023, around the time Microsoft announced the expansion of its partnership with OpenAI, the company also began to promote the vision of the industrial meta-universe. But it didn't last long for the project. Microsoft terminated Project Bonsai this spring and laid off the team of 100 people in charge of the project, just a few months after Microsoft formed the team.

Microsoft retained Project Airsim because it believed the incubator had a large number of potential customers, the person familiar with the matter said.

Gurdeep Pall, a former vice president of Microsoft, was the head of product incubation and business artificial intelligence, responsible for Project Bonsai and, most recently, Project Airsim. Last month, he left Microsoft after 33 years of work.

Terminating Project Airsim is another example of Microsoft moving resources to OpenAI. Last month it was reported that Microsoft had abandoned experimental products such as Surface headphones to focus on investing in artificial intelligence.

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