The 10,000 layoffs the company announced include the entire team responsible for ensuring that AI products are developed ethically—a strange move when Microsoft puts extra effort into artificial intelligence.
About a month ago, Microsoft announced it would cut about 10,000 jobs. The layoffs include the entire team for ethics and society within the AI department, writes tech site Platformer. The move comes at an odd time, as Microsoft is firmly committed to being a forerunner in artificial intelligence. It is also working to build AI-generated responses and chatbots into many of its products.
Microsoft still has an active “Office of Responsible AI” that sets the general rules the company’s AI products must meet. The team now being fired was responsible for translating those rules into effective development principles.
The move comes when Microsoft pulls out all the stops to roll out AI quickly. The company invested $11 billion in a partnership with OpenAI to quickly embed ChatGPT into many of its products, hoping to steal market share from competitor Google. That speed also seems to mean one should not overthink AI’s impact and possible risks.
Generative algorithms such as ChatGPT and Dall-E are criticized for making mistakes or generating images that copy existing artists’ work without their permission. For example, an image service such as Getty Images has already taken the generator Stable Diffusion to court for stealing work. The job of the dismissed team was to investigate those risks and formulate solutions for them, preferably before the product was shipped.
The impact that AI can have, especially now that Microsoft wants to roll it out worldwide, is significant and can affect political sensitivities and copyright, not to mention diversity issues. But thinking about that and building the correct principles takes some time, and it doesn’t seem like Microsoft wants to take it right now.
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