5 ms·
I’ve seen similar dynamics at other companies. When teams like this MS ethical AI group are separate organizationally from product and research and engineering
by daydream 4y ago
I’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.