Microsoft cuts ethical AI team
After integrating AI across its operations
Microsoft, which is investing heavily in generative AI software for Bing and Windows 11, has allegedly terminated its entire team responsible for ensuring ethical and sustainable results in AI development.
The move is part of recent layoffs that affected 10,000 employees worldwide.
The termination of the Ethics and Society (E&S) team means Microsoft no longer has a specialised group dedicated to ensuring its AI principles - closely tied to product design - are being upheld, according to Platformer.
However, Microsoft has retained its Office of Responsible AI operational. This office is in charge of creating the policies and guidelines to govern the company's AI projects.
The company justifies cutting the E&S team by saying its total investment in responsible work is rising.
"Microsoft is committed to developing AI products and experiences safely and responsibly, and does so by investing in people, processes, and partnerships that prioritise this.
"Over the past six years we have increased the number of people across our product teams and within the Office of Responsible AI who, along with all of us at Microsoft, are accountable for ensuring we put our AI principles into practice. […] We appreciate the trailblazing work the ethics and society team did to help us on our ongoing responsible AI journey."
Former employees told Platformer the E&S team played a "critical role" in ensuring Microsoft's products reflected the company's principles.
The team also developed a role-playing game called Judgement Day, which was intended to help designers and other team members understand the potential harm that AI products can cause.
More recently, the team was focused on identifying potential risks associated with Microsoft's use of OpenAI's GPT-3 technology in its products, including Microsoft Edge, Bing and Windows 11.
The E&S team was already down to only about seven members, after a reorganisation last year.
Some members of the E&S team believe they were laid off because Microsoft placed a higher priority on bringing its AI products to market in the short term, rather than prioritising long-term social responsibility.
Sources told Platformer that Microsoft's leadership, including CEO Satya Nadella, was eager to release the latest OpenAI models to customers as quickly as possible.
Last year, Microsoft employees raised concerns to senior members about the harm that AI tools like Dall-E could have on artists' livelihoods.
Employees also raised similar concerns about the impact of Bing AI, which Microsoft has now integrated with ChatGPT.
To date, Microsoft has invested $11 billion into OpenAI and is working to build the company's technology into all of its operations.
Microsoft recently announced that Bing has reached 100 million daily active users, with one-third of those being new since the relaunch of the search engine with OpenAI's technology.
"This is a surprisingly notable figure, and yet we are fully aware we remain a small, low, single-digit share player. That said, it feels good to be at the dance," Microsoft's consumer chief marketing officer Yusuf Mehdi wrote in a blog post.
"We see this appeal of the new Bing as a validation of our view that search is due for a reinvention and of the unique value proposition of combining Search and Answers and Chat and Creation in one experience."
OpenAI is set to unveil GPT-4, the fourth generation of its large language model, this week.
Media reports suggest that GPT-4 will introduce new features such as multimodality, video processing and the ability to create AI-generated videos from basic text prompts.
At present, ChatGPT and other technologies powered by GPT-3.5 can only provide responses in text form.