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Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams
- IceHegel 4y agoYou either do AI and talk about AI ethics (OpenAI) or do AI ethics and talk about AI (Google).
- selimthegrim 4y agoEither die a hero or live long enough to see your name become a safeword.
- px43 4y agoThe Google Docs autocomplete seems to be giving more and more complex suggestions, but maybe that's just my imagination after spending some time with copilot and ChatGPT. There are definitely a whole lot of really subtle applications of AI tech that Google silently injects into their products without really making a big deal out of it. I definitely wish they had something more obvious and customer facing like ChatGPT, and maybe Bard will be that, but they do a lot more than just talking about it.
- kmeisthax 4y agoGoogle absolutely does a LOT of AI. And OpenAI stopped releasing model weights and switched to SaaS specifically citing ethical and safety concerns.
- dragonwriter 4y agoOpenAI doesn’t talk about AI ethics (it mostly talks about alignment), and the biggest thing Google ever did for AI ethics is drawing attention to the field by its efforts at actively suppressing it.
- fnimick 4y agoA key point from the article, when the VP of AI was asked to slow down to make sure AI could be done safely: > “Can I reconsider? I don’t think I will,” he said. “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.” A reminder that business will always, always choose profit and competitive advantage over any ethical concerns.
- JohnFen 4y agoThis is the best argument for muscular governmental regulation that I've heard.
- zmk5 4y agoSort of feel bad for the ethics teams that get let go. When it comes to ethics or money, the corpos will always choose the money over the former.
- charcircuit 4y agoWould you rather ethics be built into the process of everyone or would you rather keep it only as a team? Just because the team is gone, it doesn't mean that ethics is thrown out of the window.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dopylitty 4y agoJudging from what happened when they fired all their qa people…
- sokoloff 4y ago…They released Win10 about a year later. My Win10 experience was pretty good overall, from as early as I updated to it. (I wasn’t the earliest adopter, but I was using it sometime in 2016.)
- AraceliHarker 4y agoFrom the biannual major updates to the monthly Patch Tuesdays, Windows 10 has been plagued by more or less glitches. This has been attributed to Nadella’s decision to abolish QA. This problem persists in Windows 11, which caused issues with mouse cursor movement in yesterday’s cumulative update.
- AraceliHarker 4y agoOne wonders whether those Kenyans who now labour for two dollars an hour to label data for OpenAI, so as to diminish its toxicity, will be the next casualties. Nadella’s previous actions suggest that he will endeavour to automate all such jobs.
- politician 4y ago> Members of the team told Platformer they believed they were let go because Microsoft had become more focused on getting its AI products shipped before the competition, and was less concerned with long-term, socially responsible thinking.
- swatcoder 4y agoCould be true, but AI ethics lacks enough maturity as a field to tell whether a team is doing “long-term, socially responsible thinking” or “self-indulgent navel-gazing”. It might have just been a failed department and the layoffs might have given cover to purge it ahead of pursuing a more functional strategy.
- mc32 4y agoYou know, on the one hand, yes, they need direction. On the other hand these kinds of people are by definition leaches. Their existence hinges on this thing being an issue. So I can't feel bad for them. Now, I can see them as a volunteer advisory group. That I'm for. But I loathe seeing all kinds of "industries" pop up that are essentially leaching from businesses. Most "training" kinds of curricula and outside experts take this form, from safety training, to AI ethics to social responsibility, etc., etc. They are there to line their own pockets and the longer they can prolong the issue the better. Oh, safety has not improved, you need to hire me again! Oh, you can't hire enough women, you need to hire me again!
- epylar 4y agoHow do you feel about maintenance programmers, doctors, and car mechanics?
- darkhorse13 4y agoAbsolutely not the same thing.
- IMTDb 4y agoI personally love them; because when something is broken according to my standards, I ask them to fix it and they try ! "Ethics guys" insist of fixing stuff when it's broken according to their standards, even if I don't want/need them to.
- ehPReth 4y agolet the uncensored ai flow through you, Microsoft >:) my bad fanfic is waiting haha
- bastawhiz 4y agoThey tried that, and Tay lasted a whole two days
- sebzim4500 4y agoThat was because Tay was a fun research project with no obvious path to monetization. Now that MSFT sees this as their entry into an industry worth trillions they will not be so easily discouraged.
- monero-xmr 4y agoIf Microsoft and Google don’t release, some startup will beat them to it. Open source means raw AI will become widespread. It’s just math anyway, and you can’t stop progress.
- pixl97 4y ago"If I don't make the world eating machine, someone else might make the world eating machine first!" No wonder we don't see aliens filling the universe. Intelligence is its own great filter.
- Madmallard 4y agoFUD
- eyelidlessness 4y ago“I didn’t want any leopard to eat anyone’s face but damned if a leopard is going to eat their face before a leopard eats my face!”
- adamisom 4y agoNah man, it’s just math! Whereas we have souls… or something.
- monero-xmr 4y agoHow can you stop a computer program? Make math illegal?
- hn_throwaway_99 4y agoThese sorts of adjunct, off-to-the-side "ethics" teams are always corporate window dressing, and when push comes to shove they always get jettisoned when competition demands an increase in speed. I don't mean to start a flame war, but this is a reason why I think "Chief Diversity Officers" are such an ill-conceived notion. It's not that I don't think diversity in corporate environments is extremely valuable, but it's that a Chief Diversity Officer doesn't really "own" any sub-organization of the business. That is, the Chief Product Officer owns the product teams, the Chief Technical Officer owns the engineering teams, the Chief Marketing Officer owns the marketing teams. Even the Chief Human Resources Officer, while largely providing support to other teams, still has sizable staff of their own to get their job down. A Chief Diversity Officer's job largely comes down to telling other teams how they should change or structure their teams. I have yet to see that approach work. Different teams can certainly work to a common corporate goal, even if that goal isn't the primary focus of a particular team. If you really want to ensure that diversity is valued, any initiatives should actually be led by the teams who also do the main "work of the business", and the goals should be championed by the executives of these teams. So, in the vein of this article, I think independent "ethical AI teams" are a really bad idea. Better to define what ethical AI means at a high leadership level, and if teams need particular experts in these areas they should just hire them as part of that team, not off as a part of some dysfunctional "ombudsman" role.
- swatcoder 4y agoI agree, but the flipside is that people with influence like nicely dressed windows. These roles might not satisfy their ostensible purpose, but they satisfy what may be an even more important purpose for the organization. It’s a cost of doing business (of a certain type).
- chitowneats 4y agoPlease state what you're implying here? I have a guess but I don't want to put words in your mouth.
- swatcoder 4y ago
- daydream 4y agoI’ve seen similar dynamics at other companies. When teams like this MS ethical AI group are separate organizationally from product and research and engineering teams, it’s harder to have an impact. Management and the product teams want to ship features. Research wants to work in cool new stuff. Nobody wants people from random other teams getting in their way and telling them to slow down. It’s hard enough getting meaningful work shipped in these huge companies. When the stars align to do somethin major and execs are pushing hard, nobody on teams actually doing the work give a damn what some rando on another team thinks about “ethics”. Harsh but that’s the way it is. In this environment it can actually be more effective to distribute the function to be inside the actual product teams. Which it seems like they did. Sometimes it’s easier to have an impact from the inside. (Sometimes not.) No connections to MS. I’ve just seen this movie before… a lot.
- munchbunny 4y agoIndeed, we’ve seen this movie before. If the CEO really wants some AI product to exist, an AI or even normal ethics team will end up getting steamrolled by any number of product teams in order to make an AI product happen sooner, actual ethics be damned. I’m actually really grateful that GDPR landed a few years before ChatGPT did because at least there’s a regulatory fear of god keeping product teams honest on the privacy aspect of AI ethics.
- bawolff 4y agoAll the AI ethics stuff seems divorced from reality anyways. Waxing poetic doesn't actually fix the world.
- orthecreedence 4y agoIt is divorced from reality. There's only one north star in a capitalist mode of production, and it's the profit mechanism. Corporate ethics is a pipe dream. The only reason to have such a team is because their existence would shape perception enough to create profit either through motivating the workers ("we can't be doing harm, we have an ethics team backing us") or through PR ("Microsoft announces ethics specialists on new AI offering to answer any concerns over moral issues blah blah").
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y agoToo bad Microsoft did not have an "Ethical Office Team" back when Microsoft Office was first released. Think of how many hurtful words have been typed into Word documents. Think of all the PowerPoints that were used to mislead people. Think of all the people that were tricked out of their money looking at an Excel spreadsheet with non-factual numbers.
- bitL 4y agoI think they had something similar; compare Windows/Office vocabulary to Unix vocabulary and you can see which one is more polished/curated and which one is weird/rough.
- bundie 4y agoSo....are you saying that ethical AI teams are not needed? > Too bad Microsoft did not have an "Ethical Office Team" back when Microsoft Office was first released. What does this even mean? And how does this relate to ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE? The content was HUMAN-generated, so if you used MS Word to write something messed up, that's on you. Now, if a Microsoft bot generates something messed up, that is different.
- more_corn 4y agolol. You can’t write sci-fi as good as reality.
- pixl97 4y ago"AI fires AI ethics team. New AI CEO demands budget increases for compute and data gathering"
- eynsham 4y agoThere’s a danger of confusing the problems with actually existing AI ethics work for evidence that there’s no need to ethically evaluate AI. On any moral realist view, AI will likely be extremely important. And insofar as ethical standards are used to organise society, ethical views on the use of AI will likely be developed in the same way as they are at least very weakly developed and observed in most other fields, so an understanding of them will be important for understanding society simpliciter.
- pixl97 4y agoTo say AI will be important is like saying 'guns' will be important or 'internal combustion engines' will be important around the time they are created. In the past these creations took some time to massively change the world, but they did so in unimaginable ways. With AI we are not going to get the benefit of time, especially if the growth rate of the intelligence of AI keeps at is recent, or even faster trajectories. If there is any chance that we could, even unintentionally, create super intelligence the only ethical answer is to not create it at all. It would be a species ending mistake at our current level of knowledge.
- lame-robot-hoax 4y ago> especially if the growth rate of the intelligence of AI keeps at is recent, or even faster trajectories. How are you measuring intelligence? How are you defining intelligence? Formal measures of intelligence like ARC still show even SOTA LLM’s doing incredibly poorly. As Chollet said, people are misinterpreting LLMs as looking or seeming intelligent, therefore they are, just in the same sense that they think there must be lemon in this lemon flavored candy since it tastes like lemon, when there’s no lemon at all. This just seems like more Yudkowsky BS about how AGI is right around the corner, despite industry leaders (Ng, Chollet, etc.) saying we aren’t much, if any closer to AGI despite recent developments. There’s no indications that LLM -> AGI.
- pixl97 4y agoChollet really reminds me of someone in 1901 saying men will never fly because their is no way we can flap our wings fast enough.
- nearmuse 4y agoEdward Diego works at Microsoft confirmed.
- cratermoon 4y agoThis seems like a good place to remind people of this: "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922
- LegitShady 4y agoplease dont link random pdfs without some discussion as to what it is. i mean you can but my guess is it lowers willingness to interact and is not goos for communication. i can differentiate your post from spam.
- cratermoon 4y agoI didn't think a link to an acm.org paper would come off as "random", but I updated it to give the title and link to the article landing page.
- smolder 4y ago*can't differentiate.
- LegitShady 4y agoyou're right - I use android for firefox and either the autocorrect doesn't work at all on HN or it corrects everything the wrong way. Too late to edit now. I wrote "cant" and it autocorrected to "can" instead of inserting an apostrophe. Firefox for android hates this site. anyways - previous he had a throwaway line like "we need to be thinking about this!" and a link to the pdf. It looked just like spam.
- sebzim4500 4y agoSometimes people link this as an example of the useless research produced by these AI ethics people, while others seem to take it seriously. I can't tell if your comment is a defence of the layoffs or an objection to them.
- ed25519FUUU 4y agoLet’s face it. A lot of opportunities in tech were zero-interest-rate opportunities.
- rvz 4y agoAh yes. The true face of Microsoft's AI intentions. OpenAI is indeed partially a subsidiary of Microsoft and is essentially Microsoft AI. Anyone who believed that they were going to stick with their AI safety / ethics bullshit is beyond naïve since it is obvious that OpenAI is now driven by AI grifters pretending to care about 'ethics' when that was never the case. It always has been about closed source AI, money, EEE and lies. Typical Microsoft.
- sebzim4500 4y agoDid MSFT ever claim that their AI projects were charitable? I don't get the criticism: "Company tries to make money".
- CatWChainsaw 4y agoThe criticism is that companies chase the dollar and will do whatever it takes to do so. Even when the billionaires who run these companies all talk about "existential risk". Humanity might end? But money.
- goldforever 4y ago[dead]
- dmix 4y agoAnyone paying close attention to the output of generic "AI ethics" people (especially on Twitter) should not be surprised that companies that when push comes to shove the businesses getting actually useful AI tools that are being tested by real people for real things generating real data, are starting to question the utility of the bulk of the crowd who skirted off hypotheticals for years to build their reputations as "experts". Once the hypotehtical meets the meat of the problems you usually can quickly root out the people not providing any value and merely pushing trendy FUDy positions. The key here is that the costs are still as high a ever, Microsoft is very aware of the consequences of ignoring the legitimate AI ethics issues. So it's not likely it's merely ignoring risk. The real useful AI ethics people will be born out of real world applications. Not pearl clutching by people making grand projections, often with a limited grasp of what the technology actually means in practice, in a competitve open market where you the cat is out of the bag even if you don't like it. The legitimately talented AI thinkers will still be highly employable at the end of the day. Even if a small subset of talent got burned by the output/management of their previous team they'll be okay long term. Hell, even the non-talented ones will still be in demand considering the demand in the media for stories/politically convient takes, and the general tolerance for mediocrity in mega-tech-firms.
- foobiekr 4y agoThis, 100%.
- vasco 4y ago> Hell, even the non-talented ones will still be in demand considering the demand in the media for stories/politically convient takes Language models can probably do a better job soon.
- IshKebab 4y agoYeah I think the question is are these people just philosophers pontificating about AI doom, or are they AI researchers creating techniques to make AI decisions less opaque and biased (or less biased in undesirable ways at least)? The latter are definitely useful but the former is something you start so you can look good and then disband a few years later when they produce little useful output and cost a ton of money.
- Daub 4y agoWhen ethics are addressed at a corporate level, my first question is 'whose ethical standards are they upholding?' Ethical frameworks are like coding languages, developed and maintained by a few individuals, usually of an evangelical disposition. It amazing how rapidly these frameworks develop and fork.
- aaron695 4y ago[dead]
- 1attice 4y agoFormer MS AI Platform IC here. The main value of this team was likely internal, as a sort of gauze bandage on the conscience of the progressives (like myself) that MSFT has tried to court. There was a time, not too long ago, where working at the new, 'refreshed' Microsoft meant ingesting an endless stream of news releases highlighting zero-carbon this, compostable cutlery that, and, of course, ethical AI. When Tegru was let go from GOOG we hosted a talk by her. That sort of thing. The point was to make you feel like you were one of the good guys -- your TC in effect included the intangible bonus of sleeping soundly at night, knowing that the Aethyr Council or whatever was doing all the handwringing for you. So, you know, no need to worry about social impact, just keep coding. What this really means is, "the market is so bad right now for SWE that we no longer have to worry about the qualms of our staff, if you don't like us, the door is over this way"
- hallqv 4y agoLove this insider story
- _vbnz 4y agoAI "ethics" is just a bunch of grifters worrying about sci-fi stories.
- sebzim4500 4y agoThat's AI alignment. AI ethics is a bunch of grifters who failed to get jobs in DEI so they added some AI buzzwords to their linkedin profiles.
- ReptileMan 4y agoGood. Less brainwashing and bias in the products.
- Havoc 4y agoI wish this would be less about woke stuff and more about paperclip maximiser problems
- mkl 4y agoDo you know of anything remotely near that kind of problem in practice? Paperclip maximiser problems seem to me like fantasy at this point. I don't think we're anywhere near close enough to that problem to sensibly work on avoiding it; I think it's a bit like trying to work on the problem of lunar city overcrowding.
- Havoc 4y agoThere won't be anything practical, but that's kinda the point. This class of problems posits that there is this sudden tipping point where it gets out of control. So by necessity you have to think about it in advance. That's what makes it such a hard problem and why we get such polar opposites in the views on it (AI will doom us all vs AI utopia)
- wenyuanyu 4y agoRegulating or scrutinizing a rapidly/exponentially evolving technology for ethical concerns can be challenging since arguments or regulations may quickly become outdated... Many of the AI ethics studies are likely becoming non-issues in a few months...
- college_physics 4y agoSVB didn't have a chief risk officer. Why have somebody bang theoretically about risks when the business is best placed to assess the real risk /sarcasm
- college_physics 4y agoI had not doubt it will be downvoted. Techbros out in force. If its good for my pocket, suck it up, its good for you. But we are having enough of it.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- braza 4y agoI have mixed feelings about AI Ethics as a field. In one hand is necessary to reflect about the extensibility of such kind of systems due to its potential (good or bad). However when I look for other engineer ethics frameworks from other engineering branches they used to observe systems on wild, reflect and say “hey let’s agree on this”. Most of the time with more than 20 years of reflection and understanding. Today we have folks that their only achievement is have a a couple thousand followers on Twitter based on silencing people that is trying to do something to the field via e-mob, regardless if it’s a CEO or an IC that has a different thought frame.
- d--b 4y agoOne has to wonder why these large companies setup these ethics teams in the first place when they invariably lay them off whenever they get in the way of profit…
- sebzim4500 4y agoMaybe they were expecting more from the team. If they had identified serious problems this presumably wouldn't be happening, at least if it looked like it could cause liability.
- BiteCode_dev 4y agoEverything you see a big player do for ethics is for PR or legal reasons, for most companies. Going green. Affirming diversity. Giving to charities. And of course, ethic committees. When the cost of those outgrow the benefit they get from it, they throw it out of the window. You know Bill Bernbach's quote: "A value isn't a value unless it costs you something." It's not just for people. It's for corporation too.
- hallqv 4y agoGood. AI ethics is 95% bs and generally a waste of time. Can be relevant for some edge cases in AI applications but it has been getting way too much attention/mind-share by the field as a whole.
- communism 4y agocan they pls work on ai for fully automated luxury space communism? would be cool
- Reimersholme 4y ago[dead]
- whywhywhywhy 4y agoEnd of the day the AI space will be dominated by whatever model doesn’t lecture you about “as a large language model I can’t…”. And the company that will ship that won’t have the largest “AI safety and ethics” team. ChatGPT will become as irrelevant as Dall-E2 when that happens. (Not saying this is for the best, just saying what I think will happen)
- bioemerl 4y agoI believe it's for the best. The dangers of AI are theoretical. The dangers of corporations being in control aren't.
- xpe 4y ago> The dangers of AI are theoretical. What do you mean by this? Many people throw out the word ‘theoretical’ as some kind of way to imply that something ‘isn’t real’ or worth worrying about. Something might seem implausible until it happens. Gravity waves were once ‘only’ theoretical after all :) There are plenty of AI dystopian predictions, and many of these are possible and impactful. Many of these theories are based on solid understandings of human nature. It is hard to know how technology will evolve, but we have some useful tools to make risk assessments. > The dangers of corporations being in control aren’t. There have been plenty of dystopian predictions about corporate control too. I take the point that we’ve seen them over and over throughout history.
- bioemerl 4y agoI'm saying that most predictions about the dystopian AI future are typical of any generation encountering a disruptive technology. They're exaggerated and built from assumptions. They also always seem to conclude that the answer to these problems is to keep these machines centralized in the hands of big companies and governments, which is a very strange conclusion when they tend to get paychecks from those groups. At the extreme end you even get these people talking about AI like it's going to be some monstrous world eating god. All innovation has negative consequence. Television lead to couch potato. 24 7 news. Television stars. Radio killed the local performer. Social media addiction and the erasure of culture and increase of depression. Cars, if you go back far enough, got plenty of criticisms as well. The AI powered future, should it come to exist will have downsides. You'll have a very different landscape to deal with as a creative where your artistic output isn't valued for individual works of art. You'll have very different expectations of how art and media is personalized. It will be hard to trust video or pictures or audio again, because they are so easily faked. Our way of life, as it stands today, will not survive. That's not bad, just different. The AI critical people tend to have some valid criticisms, but at the end of the day their criticisms are rooted in a desire to maintain a status quo until we are "sure it's safe" and that just doesn't fly. We don't know how this will all pan out until we try it, so as we have always done, we will try it and deal with the consequences as they appear.
- cwillu 4y ago“On the other hand, everyone involved in the development of AI agrees that the technology poses potent and possibly existential risks, both known and unknown. Tech giants have taken pains to signal that they are taking those risks seriously — Microsoft alone has three different groups working on the issue, even after the elimination of the ethics and society team. But given the stakes, any cuts to teams focused on responsible work seem noteworthy.”
- thwayunion 4y agoWhat a strange comment section. A customer service chatbot telling your customers that an issue is solved, when the issue isn't solved, is a core product failure. It's also a Responsible AI issue. A code generation model suggesting GPL code without attribution is a core product failure and serious legal risk [1]. It's also a Responsible AI issue. A diffusion model generating child porn or nazi propaganda is a core product failure and a serious legal risk [2]. It's also a Responsible AI issue. In other words, the problem isn't that Responsible AI is BS. The problem is that Responsible AI is a conglomeration of serious legal and product risks that companies NEED to solve in the context of specific products. More importantly, how will those risks change over time? The western world public is overwhelmingly skeptical of AI and in favor of regulation. Even if new government regulation can be gummed up, you can expect juries to be less than sympathetic. But you’re not going to solve those problems by hiring a bunch of philosophers and interdisciplinary types that obsess over “nutrition labels for models” and the like. Everyone knows that Tay being a nazi is bad. And I don’t need a PhD in Sociology or whatever to tell you that you probably shouldn’t be openly condescending toward your customers. But constraining and aligning the output of models is a really hard technical problem, and needs a different type of expertise. So, I think we’ll see Responsible AI teams start to look a lot like e.g. safety at automotive companies, verification & validation at hardware companies, or security at tech companies. Mostly staffed with technical people who are strong engineers and happen to specialize in data governance/constrained generation/rotics safety/etc. There will be dedicated teams that kinda-help-kinda-police the rest of the company (think security). But there will also be a lot of diffused responsibility within each product group, with ICs or small groups within each group owning this space. [1] https://githubcopilotlitigation.com/ https://githubcopilotlitigation.com/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafgesetzbuch_section_86a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafgesetzbuch_section_86a
- giraffe_lady 4y agoBut it has a whiff of what used to be called political correctness so we must RAGE and reject it entirely.
- cypress66 4y agoYou don't need an ethics team to tell you about those risks, they are pretty obvious. What you need is your legal team to tell you how risky it is, and management to decide how risk averse they want to be.
- chamanbuga 4y agoThis is an incredibly click bait article by gifted journalists. Most of these folks are fine and still have similar core priorities. Also there are multiple other responsible AI teams in MS. I have extreme empathy for those impacted, but this is trying to generate news where there isn't.
- charles_f 4y agoIn my opinion these AI committees would make sense with true AI being developed. We're not there yet, LLMs being advanced nlp and probabilistic discussion simulation. With LLMs ethics are not much different than what you follow with regular computing - don't still people's data, don't give the people's data you stole anyway to other people, don't let the people you gave that stolen data do evil shit with it, apologize for the shit that people did with that stolen data you sold them and don't change anything. ps: I'm a layman in llm so my opinion counts for shit
- ausbah 4y agoconcerning but not surprising that the engineering mindset of hacker news view philosophical ruminations as "getting in the way of progress" or "not providing value"
- turtleyacht 4y agoSo I.1 for Engineers (real, certified ones) is to prevent stakeholder damage, but I imagine ethics are unnecessary when they can hide the "You were warned about this" in the ToS. Think of our lives spent--exhausted even--up to this point. How many of us would turn inward, spend even more the limited fumes for a Classics reset, and crawl around in paper stacks? What venerable insight would we find to throw the strange bolt into the works? Which technical capability could we summon in our wasted nights? We review file permissions and adding unprivileged users, celebrate the hardware hackers and realize the shortcomings of our inability to contribute, utterly ignorant of the giant strides above us, such giants as they seem to be: monied, lucky, and claimants of news and our collective attention. If we have any foresight, I guess we can only make sure mistakes are not repeated in the future. But even that is thought unneeded, and we are back to features, features, features!
- bastardoperator 4y agoWhy pay this team when you just made just purchased a 49% stake at billions of dollars with another ai team?
- zuminator 4y agoI don't mean to come off as naive here, but a non-cynical explanation for the layoffs is just that this is a new field and it's going to take a little experimentation to rightsize the staffing levels most effectively. According to the article, "Microsoft still maintains an active Office of Responsible AI, which is tasked with creating rules and principles to govern the company’s AI initiatives. The company says its overall investment in responsibility work is increasing despite the recent layoffs," and it's possible to take that statement more or less at face value and not assume they are just throwing responsible AI out of the window.
- snickerbockers 4y ago>About five months later, on March 6, remaining employees were told to join a Zoom call at 11:30AM PT to hear a “business critical update” from Montgomery Wow, even MS doesn't like teams.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- avgcorrection 4y ago> responsible AI teams That sounds like think-tank busywork. We at Microsoft(R) are committed to developing responsible AI. Read more about it in this 200-page report.
- 0dayz 4y agoAs some has pointed out, ai safety teams are just window dressing. I think it is even more cynical how what it actually highlights the need for ai regulations but ofc "the market can regulate itself" keeps on being used as a catch all shield against scandals and criticism.
- prasadlingawar 4y agoThey have also done layoffs in India including a complete visual studio team (India specific I guess).
- rhuru 4y agoOne of the good side effects of the layoffs is the companies getting rid of people who are more of an activist and trouble makers who have been creating friction to ship.