Microsoft just shut down Project Airsim, its AI-based drone simulation software that was part of its vision for an “industrial metaverse,” Insider has learned.
On Monday, the team behind Project Airsim received a “team update” calendar invite and was told in the meeting that the whole team will be laid off and the project will be discontinued, according to a person familiar with the matter. Microsoft confirmed it will discontinue the project on Dec. 15.
“We are proud of the impact this incubation created for our customers and we will continue to invest in both Azure as the computing platform that powers the industrial metaverse, and a wide range of AI projects within the company,” Microsoft said in a statement. “We are working closely with our customers on this transition.”
The news about Airsim came after Microsoft officially stopped supporting Project Bonsai on Oct. 19, after the company previously warned it would be shuttering it. Bonsai was an AI development platform for building autonomous systems for industrial use. Both projects were considered part of Microsoft’s “industrial metaverse.”
Microsoft bought AI startup Bonsai in 2018 and it was internally thought of as Microsoft’s answer to Google’s Deepmind acquisition, the person said. Project Airsim was originally launched as an open-source project in 2017, though it later shifted focus into a product for industrial customers.
Project Airsim and Project Bonsai were part of an effort under Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott, who brokered the company’s partnership with OpenAI, to incubate new products intended to get industrial customers to use Microsoft’s cloud
Nadella at one point spoke about Bonsai the way he talks about OpenAI today, according to the person familiar with the project, mentioning it at employee town halls and in public interviews as part of Microsoft’s AI future.
While Microsoft originally saw these projects as an means to woo industrial app developers to help Microsoft’s Azure cloud compete with market-leading Amazon Web Services, Scott grew less interested in the projects as Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI ramped up, the person said.
In early 2023, around the time Microsoft announced an extended partnership with OpenAI, it also began hyping its vision for the industrial metaverse. The effort was short-lived. By spring, Microsoft killed the project, and laid off the 100-person team responsible for it, only months after forming that team, as The Information previously reported.
Microsoft kept Project Airsim around because it believed there were large prospective customers for the product, the person said.
Gurdeep Pall, previously head of product incubations and business AI who at one point ran Project Bonsai and most recently ran Project Airsim, left last month after 33 years with the company.
This is another example of how Microsoft has been shifting resources to lean into its OpenAI strategy. Last month, Insider reported that the company killed experimental products like its Surface headphones to focus on investing in AI.
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