AI is getting a lot of attention right now in the tech industry. Recently, OpenAI’s ChatGPT became the app that grew the fastest in history. Google and other big tech companies are taking steps to add AI to their core products.
With AI growing so quickly, it will be especially important to have safeguards and ethical rules to protect users. As companies experiment with AI, they shouldn’t let user safety fall by the wayside.
This is why hearing news like this is scary. As Platformer first reported earlier this week, Microsoft’s most recent round of layoffs included the entire AI ethics and social team. 10,000 people were let go from the company as a whole. It’s hard to understand why Microsoft, which may have put more money into AI than any other big tech company, made this choice.
The computer giant has already put AI-powered chatbots and assistants into many of its products, such as Bing, the Edge web browser, and its suite of Microsoft 365 products, which includes Word, Powerpoint, and Outlook.
Elon Musk, who runs Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter, is a well-known person who questioned Microsoft’s decision. Musk tweeted, “Microsoft fired their AI safety team?,” with a link to Ars Technica’s report on the news.
Microsoft fired their AI safety team?https://t.co/bp5vde1clm
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 16, 2023
Musk has been quite vocal about how AI is doing right now, so his post doesn’t come as a complete shock.
Elon Musk tweeted in December –
“There is no regulatory oversight of AI, which is a major problem.”
“I’ve been calling for AI safety regulation for over a decade!”
Musk said in another tweet, referencing his time with OpenAI in its early days –
“OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it “Open” AI), non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google.”
“But now it has become a closed source, the maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft.”
But what’s interesting is that Musk fired Twitter’s own AI safety team himself in November, just days after he bought the company. Wired talked to members of Twitter’s ML Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability team soon after Musk’s first round of layoffs at the company.
Another former team member tweeted at the time that everyone but one had been fired. After Musk fired a bunch more people from the company, it’s not clear if that one person still works there.
The team worked on projects and did research that was important to how the company uses AI. For example, in 2020, a lot of Twitter users started to notice that the way the platform cropped photos showed racial bias. When trimming how a photo was shown in the feed, Twitter’s algorithm automatically put white faces in the middle.
The ethical AI team at Twitter looked into what had happened, shared what they found with everyone, and started offering a bug bounty to users to help fix this problem.
Platformer says that Microsoft’s Office of Responsible AI is still running. But the team that was let go was said to have “played a key role in making sure that the company’s responsible AI principles are reflected in the design of the products that ship.”
Elon Musk is right to say that it’s not clear why Microsoft let that team go. But that raises the question of why Musk fired a team at Twitter that was doing the same job. Also, that seems like a questionable choice.