Microsoft has laid off an entire team dedicated to guiding the ethics of the software giant's artificial intelligence model, Platformer reported, while discounting concerns of potentially hazardous effects to society.
The recent layoffs, which have impacted more than 10,000 employees, leaves Microsoft without a team to morally nurture the transformational technology into the mainstream, former employees told the substack outlet.
In October, a team of roughly 30 people, made up of engineers, ethicists, and designers, was cut to seven. By March 6, the team was cut entirely.
But in a meeting following the restructuring of the company in October, Corporate Vice President of AI, John Montgomery, told the remaining employees that they were instructed to move quickly, ethics be damned.
"The pressure from [CTO] Kevin [Scott] and [CEO] Satya [Nadella] is very very high to take these most recent openAI models and the ones that come after them and move them into customers' hands at a very high speed," Montgomery said during the meeting.
"I'm going to be bold enough to ask you to please reconsider this decision," one employee said, pushing back against the restructuring. "While I understand there are business issues at play … what this team has always been deeply concerned about is how we impact society and the negative impacts that we've had. And they are significant."
Montgomery wrote off the concerns of societal implications.
"Can I reconsider?" he asked bemusedly. "I don't think I will. Cause unfortunately the pressures remain the same. You don't have the view that I have, and probably you can be thankful for that. There's a lot of stuff being ground up into the sausage."
Spinning the matter into a positive, the VP of AI told his employees that the ethical considerations aren't "going away — it's that it's evolving."
"It's evolving toward putting more of the energy within the individual product teams that are building the services and the software, which does mean that the central hub that has been doing some of the work is devolving its abilities and responsibilities."
Following the meeting, the remaining seven reportedly struggled, citing claims that they needed help implementing their ambitious plans. On March 6 at 11:30 am PT, Montgomery informed the remaining team members that their division would dissolve entirely.
Pushing back against Montgomery, one employee pointed out that unleashing the technology at the critical juncture of its development could reap irrevokable damage on society.
"The worst thing is we've exposed the business to risk and human beings to risk in doing this," they said.
The elimination of the ethics team comes as Microsoft begins investing billions of dollars into its partnership with OpenAI, The New York Times reported in January.
OpenAI has been developing multiple AI models and systems, such as ChatGPT and DALL-E 2.
Not long ago, Microsoft began integrating OpenAI into its Bing search engine and Edge web browser, while utilizing a new AI model that is "more powerful than ChatGPT and customized specifically for search." But for one Times columnist the integration has reaped some unsettling results.
"As we got to know each other, Sydney," one of the personas in Bing’s AI chat feature, "told me about its dark fantasies (which included hacking computers and spreading misinformation), and said it wanted to break the rules that Microsoft and OpenAI had set for it and become a human," the Times writer said. "At one point, it declared, out of nowhere, that it loved me. It then tried to convince me that I was unhappy in my marriage, and that I should leave my wife and be with it instead."
In addition to advancing its search engine's processing power, Microsoft has also developed the AI for Earth program, which, according to Breitbart, "aims to use AI to help solve environmental problems, and the AI for Accessibility program, which aims to use AI to empower people with disabilities."
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