One of the most popular open-source frameworks of 2023, which explored the application of AI agents and Multi-agent collaboration, has recently see...
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Hi @maximsaplin - I'm a MSFT employee, one of the architects of autogen 0.4, the article is a little inaccurate in a few ways, particularly the mention of "community maintenance". AutoGen is very much alive, very much still being invested in and maintained by a growing team at MSFT from across multiple divisions, is underlying agent systems in multiple 1p products including many announced yesterday, and yes will be converging with Semantic Kernel to offer a unified, scalable, distributed, xlang, standards based agent runtime. We are continuing to maintain the 0.2 branch but new features will show up in main. The differentiation for SK is around support, not stability, scale, etc.
Thanks for clarification! Quick question, would the below be an accurate update?
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Maintained by Community and Microsoft (moving to community only support in early 2025)
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Legacy Autogen 0.2
Maintained by Community
Not exactly.
AutoGen 0.4 - new event-driven actor model architecture, designed for scale, resilience, flexibility, forward looking feature development, driven by customer and community feedback, support x-lang agent communication, will be supported in Semantic Kernel as well. Built by dedicated teams at MSFT, continuing and growing investment, used in multiple MSFT products and services (not moving to maintained by community - not sure where that's coming from)
Semantic Kernel - a general purpose AI application SDK that will take a dependency on the Autogen runtime for multi agent. You can seek enterprise support for SK.
AutoGen 0.2 - the previous autogen arch, constrained to chat scenarios, synchronous, not scalable. still maintained by msft, but no new feature dev.
AG2 - unrelated to MSFT fork of autogen 0.2 made by a former employee - no significant new features or company behind it.
In your original comment you touched the question of support, Community vs Microsoft - that's where I can see possible inaccuracy. Any other parts? The rest of your comments seem to be expanding of what is already in the post, focusing on the MSFT side.
To be clear, I am not taking sides. There're currently 2 almost identical products: AG2 and AutoGen 0.2. And there's a lot of confusion due to uncoordinated and challenging split. There's no purpose (in my post) to make comparisons and tell how various derivatives/branches/variants of AutoGen are different - those interested can follow the links.
I just want to make it clear that Microsoft is going to continue to invest in (and grow) its investment in autogen 0.4, and is still involved in maintaining Autogen 0.2 - "community maintainance" implies it being abandoned, which is not the case. The distinction with SK is around Commercial Support, which is a feature available with SK.
and yes, uncoordinated and challenging are accurate in that the former employee is unilaterally implying that they are the official autogen project from Microsoft when it could have been easy to signal that it was indeed a distinct project.
My experience from last year/early this year (when I contributed to Autogen) was such that community (including independent contributors such as myself) drove a significant portion of changes, if not the major part. Folks from MS (as far as I remember) did extra mile.
Autogen might be one of a few OS projects that did see a lot of development from contributors not employed/assigned by companies sponsoring the development.
"Maintained by community" seemed to work fine (with the exception of, my personal opinion, code base becoming disorganised and not developer friendly). I suppose the momentum is still there and community support doesn't mean abandoned...
I see - so we were just each getting different meaning out of those words.
In the end the thing I wanted to land is that absent the confusion created by the announcement the project is going from strength to strength - there are plenty of msft teams that are really invested in it now and that guarantees a certain amount of ongoing growth and evolution, which we are excited about. The way in which the "AG2" project was announced seems intended to create doubt and FUD and that's too bad because the opportunity to contribute and work together has always been there, as you have observed. Looking forward to working with you on it further!
Hi I am second author of the AutoGen paper and a MSFT FTE -- AG2 is branched by a subset of the initial "creators". I've personally refrained from using such exclusionary language because from the very beginning the project has been very collaborative and used feedback/ideas from many many people and prior work. Many MSFT researchers and interns have worked on this project since 2023 and only one FTE since then has left the team to pursue other opportunities. It would be great if you can clarify your post.
What clarification do you propose?
Here's how Andrew Ng's newsletter described it.
deeplearning.ai/the-batch/issue-281/
"In late 2024, part of the Autogen team split off to build AG2 based on a fork of the code base."
This is accurate and doesn't minimize the contributions of many many folks, unlike "AG2 branched out by original creators".
Well-structured and detailed explanation of the current state of Autogen and its evolution into multiple iterations and projects. The breakdown of the four key versions and their respective links is especially helpful in navigating a complex topic. Well done!
Also for those interested in this topic you may find this useful too: sdh.global/blog/ai-ml/microsoft-au...