SPECIAL NOTICE: As part of RAND's sponsorship, INFER will now be the RAND Forecasting Initiative (RFI). Rebranding will be in progress over the next couple days.
Possibly over-updated on the news that MSR were asking 10% of their R&D workforce to optionally leave China — I'm still factoring this in, but this seems like something they have done in the past before and even possibly part of a whole MSRA strategy of luring researchers from China to the west.
Since then:
It appears MSRA still have open positions for researchers in Beijing. It's possible that they just keep this open to disguise not-really-hiring, but I think it's (weak) evidence in favour of not closing
An ex-OpenAI worker published a report discussing US-China AI arms race. I have a suspicion however that this won't be particularly influential among the relevant decision-makers in US/China/Microsoft, and besides — Microsoft themselves do not seem to produce the frontier models that report pertains to
My general assessment of the level of AI progress in China has gone up slightly. This, to me, strengthens Microsoft's incentive to access the China researcher market
The Microsoft president has testified in front of congress regarding a recent hack, and MSRA was explicitly mentioned in the opening remarks. However, the hack doesn't really have much to do with MSRA and the concerns are not really specific, and it doesn't seem like it was discussed again.
My initial gut forecast was 3%, and I think once taking into account the 10% of researchers news and a bit of crowd deferral I should be at 6%.
Possibly over-updated on the news that MSR were asking 10% of their R&D workforce to optionally leave China — I'm still factoring this in, but this seems like something they have done in the past before and even possibly part of a whole MSRA strategy of luring researchers from China to the west.
Since then:
My initial gut forecast was 3%, and I think once taking into account the 10% of researchers news and a bit of crowd deferral I should be at 6%.