At a time when the Windows giant is increasing its use of machine learning technology, Microsoft has eliminated its entire team that was in charge of ensuring the ethical use of AI software.
Microsoft’s 10,000 job cuts, which began in January and will continue into next year, include the decision to eliminate the ethics and society team within its artificial intelligence organization.
The damage to this particular unit may remove some safeguards designed to guarantee that Microsoft’s machine learning-enabled products meet the mega-corporation’s standards for ethical AI use. Additionally, it comes at a time when controversies surrounding artificial intelligence models are being debated.
Baking man-made intelligence morals into the entire business – as something for all workers to consider – appears to be somewhat similar to when Bill Entryways told his architects in 2002 to make security an association wide need, which clearly went all around well. You might think that having a dedicated team inside would be helpful.
The layoffs were first reported by Platformer, who cited anonymous current and former employees in the ethics and society group. As Redmond accelerated the integration of AI technologies into a variety of products, including Edge and Bing, Teams, Skype, and Azure cloud services, the group was tasked with providing advice to teams.
Microsoft’s Office of Responsible AI is still in place. It collaborates with the Aether Committee and the Responsible AI Strategy in Engineering (RAISE) to spread ethical work practices throughout the company’s operations. Having said that, employees told the newsletter that the ethics and society team was very important in making sure that those principles were directly reflected in the design of products.
The Register was informed by a Microsoft spokesperson that the perception that the tech giant was reducing its investment in responsible AI is incorrect. We were informed that the unit played a crucial role in fostering a culture of responsible innovation when Microsoft began its AI efforts several years ago. Now, Microsoft executives have adopted that culture and spread it throughout the company.
A Microsoft spokesperson stated, That initial work helped to spur the interdisciplinary way in which we work across research, policy, and engineering.
Since 2017, we have worked hard to institutionalize this work and adopt organizational structures and governance procedures that we know are effective in integrating ethical AI considerations into our engineering systems and processes.
Including net new, dedicated responsible AI teams that have since been established and grown significantly during this time, including the Office of Responsible AI, and a responsible AI team known as RAIL that is embedded in the engineering team responsible for our Azure OpenAI Service, they added, including net new, dedicated responsible AI teams that have since been established and grown significantly during this time.
On the other hand, the ethics and society team had fewer than ten people affected, and some of them were transferred to other parts of the business, such as the Office of Responsible AI and the RAIL unit.
Death by many cuts According to the Platformer report, in October 2022, a Microsoft reorganization resulted in the team’s reduction from 30 to seven members.
Recently, members of the team had been looking into the risks that could arise from Microsoft integrating OpenAI’s technologies throughout the organization. According to unidentified sources, CEO Satya Nadella and CTO Kevin Scott were eager to incorporate those technologies into products and make them available to users as soon as possible.
OpenAI is a startup that has received billions of dollars in funding. Its products include Dall-E2 for image generation, GPT for text generation (OpenAI released its most recent version, GPT-4), and Codex for developers. In contrast, OpenAI’s ChatGPT is a chatbot that responds to human prompts, such as Write a two-paragraph history of the Roman Empire, and is trained on mountains of data from the internet and other sources.
In addition, Microsoft is incorporating a brand-new large language model into its Edge browser and Bing search engine in an effort to challenge Google’s position as the market leader in search.
ChatGPT has become the fastest app to reach 100 million users since it was made available to the general public in November 2022. It reached that milestone in February. However, issues with the technology, as well as issues with similar AI apps like Google’s Bard, quickly surfaced. These issues included incorrect responses, obscene language, and gaslighting.
A larger debate about these large language model AI systems’ effects on society is being fueled by their rapid innovation and mainstreaming.
During an event on March 16 that will be covered by The Register and will be hosted by Nadella and titled The Future of Work with AI, Redmond will provide additional information regarding its ongoing AI strategy.
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