How do you teach an artificial intelligence and the developers working on it to behave responsibly and in a good sense humanely? That is, or rather was, essentially the central question asked by the AI ethics team. And that is certainly an unresolved or not fully resolved issue.
It is of course striking that the Redmond company has just now laid off its entire team for ethics and society. How The Verge reports, these job cuts are among the layoffs of around 10,000 employees announced a few weeks ago.
In concrete terms, this means that there is no longer a team that takes care of the fundamental principles of human existence and tries to teach them to artificial intelligence. However, a related department – the Office of Responsible AI – will largely take over the work of the ethics team.
In a statement, the Redmond-based company said: “Microsoft is committed to developing AI products and experiences in a safe and responsible manner. It does this by investing in people, processes and partnerships that prioritize this aspect.” It refers to the investments of the past six years and promises that this does not mean that AI ethics no longer play a role.
AIs should be published faster
Internally, however, this is obviously seen more critically, because current and former employees see the work of the “Ethics & Society” department as essential. “People looked at the principles that came out of the Office of Responsible AI and said, ‘I don’t know how that applies,'” said a former employee. “Our job was to show them and create rules in areas where there weren’t any.”
Another background for this special job cuts is obviously the internal pressure. The manager responsible for KIs, John Montgomery, told employees after the layoffs were announced that he had received instructions from the top to be faster: “The pressure from (CTO) Kevin (Scott) and (CEO) Satya (Nadella) is very, very high to take these latest OpenAI models and those that come after them and get them into the hands of customers at very high speed.”
See also:
ChatGPT, OpenAI
