We now know that Microsoft, in planning its latest layoff, included among the 10,000 affected employees the entire ‘ethics and society’ team of its AI Office: a small group of people (only 7 people, although in 2020 they became a multidisciplinary team of 30 philosophers, engineers and designers) whose job was, in the words of one of its former members: “create rules in areas where none existed” when the rest of the company’s employees consulted them about how the guidelines of the Office were applied at the moment of truth.
“We appreciate the pioneering work the Ethics & Society team has done to help us on our continued journey of responsible AI,” Microsoft announced in a statement. However, when apparently their work has finally become essential within the companywith Microsoft surprising in recent months to Google in the integration of chatbots in search engines (with the ‘new Bing’) or in the launch of cloud computing offers with AI in Azure, It has been the moment chosen by the company to get rid of all of them.
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Commercial pressures against long-term approaches
The seven team members left behind from the latest headcount shakeup late last year met shortly after it with John Montgomery, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of AI. Someone recorded said meeting, and what was said there has been revealed by The Platformer: Montgomery stated that the CEO and CTO of the company they were putting pressure on him to launch products faster:
“Kevin’s pressure [Scott] and from Satya [Nadella] It’s very, very high to take the latest OpenAI models and those that will come after them and get them into the hands of customers at a very high speed.”
The Ethics and Society team had already signed a report criticizing the launch of Bing Image Creator, a DALL-E based tool that was only released in a handful of countries last October. They considered that its potential to plagiarize pre-existing images could end up having a negative impact on the company’s image.
Only five months after that and after I made it clear to them that the team “would not disappear, it would only evolve”and with Microsoft already grabbing headlines thanks to its use of OpenAI technology, the team was called into a Zoom meeting where they it was announced to them that it was going to disappear, after all.
According to Platformer, the seven fired members claim that as Microsoft increasingly focused on releasing AI tools faster than its rivals, company managers began to pay less attention to the long-term approach that his team specialized in.
Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, identified as one of those interested in accelerating the development of AI regardless of the opinion of the Ethics and Society team. (Image: via Microsoft)
When Microsoft launched its new Bing with chatbot, the company told investors that every 1% of search market presence they managed to wrest from Google could generate $2 billion in annual revenue. For now, it is clear that it has helped give a notable boost to a search engine that until now remained ultra-minority.
Microsoft’s evolution with AI has altered markedly in recent times: for practical purposes, Microsoft treats OpenAI more and more as an AI development subsidiary, talking in first person about the launch of the new OpenAI productslike GPT-4.
So, for practical purposes, the technological advances of this company are also those of Microsoft…and shareholders wouldn’t understand trying to put the brakes on the AI race now when there are so many competitors running after Microsoft/OpenAI.
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