Microsoft Autogen Has Split in 2... Wait 3... No, 4 Parts

One of the most popular open-source frameworks of 2023, which explored the application of AI agents and Multi-agent collaboration, has recently seen team separation and the formation of new products.

Back in September, a few original creators of Autogen parted their way with Microsoft creating a fork of the original project. Eventually, in November they settled on creating a new AG2 GitHub Org and new (not forked) repo while inheriting PiPy autogen and pyautogen packages (that's where they push their updates) and Discord channel.

At the same time, Microsoft has introduced a complete rewrite called Autogen 0.4 which is available at the master branch of the original repo. Yet there's a legacy 0.2 version maintained by the community and available in a separate branch of the original repo. Both versions are available in a new PiPy repo called autogen-agentchat.

Recently Microsoft announced that they are planning on merging Autogen's 0.4 multi-agent runtime into Semantic Kernel, essentially branching out the 4th reincarnation of Autogen. Starting in early 2025 they intend to maintain Autogen as part of SK repo while leaving the maintenance of the original repo to the community.

That's quite a mouthful, here's my attempt to order the links:

1. Complete rewrite, Autogen 0.4 with different architecture
- Developed in the master branch on the original Microsoft repo: https://github.com/microsoft/autogen
- Available as autogen-agentchat==0.4.0.dev6 PiPy package (marked as Pre-Release version)
- Not backward compatible

2. Legacy Autogen 0.2
- Developed in 0.2 branch on the original Microsoft repo https://github.com/microsoft/autogen/tree/0.2
- Backward compatible
- Maintained by community
- Available as autogen-agentchat~=0.2 PiPy package (marked as Release version, currently at version 0.2.38)

3. AG2 branched out by original creators:

• New repo: https://github.com/ag2ai/ag2
• Available as ag2, autogen, and pyautogen PiPy package (pointing to identical code)
• Currently at v0.3.2 and no breaking changes are planned for 0.4.x
• Community Discord: https://ag2ai.github.io/ag2/

4. Semantic Kernel that will eventually merge parts of Autogen 0.4

• Repo: https://github.com/microsoft/semantic-kernel