Shaping our culture at Microsoft AI is one of the most important responsibilities I have. Keeping our team lean and talent dense is critical to our success. It's something I've thought very carefully about over the years.
I thought I'd share a few of the principles we ask everyone in the team to sign up to.
Everything below flows from one conviction: a disciplined, evidence-based, careful methodology compounds faster than heroic and chaotic improvisation. We don't always get it right but this is what we strive for:
- Scientific rigor above all else. We set hypotheses, rigorously ablate, and make data-driven decisions.
- Constantly think simple. Simple methods scale best. No recipe changes unless deeply justified.
- Know your data. Data is our lifeblood. No data black boxes. Every person is responsible for every token they add to the model.
- Know your evals. No narratives without numbers. Production evals and trust internal metrics, over academic benchmarks.
- Don't celebrate results prematurely. Maintain healthy skepticism. Check for reward hacking. Never cherry pick results.
- Always document everything. Positive and negative results are equally critical. Label every plot and axes. Summarize hypotheses and conclusions. Don't use jargon.
- Be precise and use neutral language. Describe situations accurately without unnecessary emotional charge.
- Retrospectives drive everything. The culture and process flywheel is critical to our hill climbing machine. We constantly run Retros to iterate and improve.
- We’re an IC-first team. Management is a service, not the goal. We’re here to empower, unblock and accelerate the exceptional work of our world class ICs.
- User focus. We build our models for end users. Developing user empathy begins with us. We always strive to use our own models first so we can hill climb for our users.
- Take ownership for execution. Report issues, provide logs for debugging. First try to fix things yourself. And see it right through to completion.
The quality of our thinking determines the quality of our models.
We're hiring. Check out open roles here: https://microsoft.ai/careers
