Microsoft dismisses its ethical AI team while promoting OpenAI

At Microsoft, it was the job of a whole team to guide AI innovation toward moral, responsible, and sustainable results.According to Platformer, the elimination of the ethics and society team was part of a recent round of layoffs that affected 10,000 workers throughout the company.

Microsoft has recently redesigned its Bing search engine and Edge web browser to be powered by a new, next-generation large language model that is “more powerful than ChatGPT and tailored specifically for search.” It has also invested billions more in its partnership with OpenAI, the company that makes AI systems like ChatGPT and DALL-E 2 that generate art and text.At the same time, Microsoft has also invested billions more in its research and development efforts.

At a time when the business is making its contentious AI capabilities accessible to the general public, the decision puts into question Microsoft’s dedication to making sure that its product design and AI concepts are closely connected.

The Microsoft Office of Responsible AI (ORA), which sets rules for responsible AI through governance and public policy initiatives, is still running.Yet, staff members told Platformer that it was the ethics and society team’s job to make sure that Microsoft’s responsible AI concepts were actually incorporated into the creation of products that were shipped. a, and…..

The ethics and society team wasn’t particularly big; after a restructure in October, only roughly seven members were left. Sources told Platformer that CEO Satya Nadella and CTO Kevin Scott were putting more pressure on vendors to give clients the latest OpenAI models and updates as soon as possible.

The majority of the ethics and society team’s members were moved to other teams after the reorganization last year. AI’s vice president of business, John Montgomery, told the remaining candidates that they would be fired on March 6.Members of the team told Platformer they thought they were fired because Microsoft was less concerned with long-term, socially responsible thinking and more concerned with releasing its AI products ahead of the competition.

Organizations like Microsoft’s ethics and society division often keep big tech companies in check by pointing out possible social or legal consequences.Microsoft got adamant about stealing market share from Google’s search engine, so perhaps it didn’t want to hear “no” anymore. According to the business, every 1% of market share it could wrest away from Google would generate $2 billion in yearly revenue.