Microsoft wants to lead the race for artificial intelligence (AI), while laying off the workers who ensure these technologies are ethical, responsible and sustainable. As reported by Platformer, these cuts are part of a recent wave of layoffs affecting some 10,000 employees across the company.
The measure calls into question Microsoft’s commitment to developing AI products in line with the ethical principles it displays. “The work we are doing with OpenAI builds on our company’s years of effort to ensure our AI systems are responsible by design. We will continue to apply the full force of our responsible AI ecosystem, including researchers, engineers and policy experts, to develop new approaches to mitigate risk”, said Corporate Vice President Yusuf Mehdi, coinciding with the presentation of the ChatGPT integration in Bing. .
The ethics and society team was not very large before these cuts, according to this medium. After a reorganization in October there were only about seven people left, who had to oversee such important projects as ChatGPT and DALL-E 2.
These workers have been under significant pressure from CEOs, who want to get the new models developed by Open AI into the hands of customers as quickly as possible. That may be the case of GPT 4, the new version of ChatGPT will create videos from texts.
Members of this team told Platformer that they believed they had been fired because Microsoft was more concerned with leading the competition than long-term “socially responsible thinking.”
The technology company now believes that it can compete face to face with Google, after the integration of ChatGPT into its Bing search engine, which substantially improves search results. In addition, the economic returns would be very important: each 1% of the market share that it could obtain from Google would generate two billion dollars in annual revenue.
The multinational is also expected to deploy OpenAI technology and the Prometeo model in Office applications such as Word, PowerPoint and Outlook and in Teams, according to sources close to The Verge.
Indeed, the team had recently been working to identify the risks posed by Microsoft’s integration of OpenAI technology into its suite of products.
It is not only ChatGPT and the successive versions that may arrive. Microsoft is also very interested in DALL-E 2, another artificial intelligence-based OpenAI tool capable of generating images through natural language.
Despite the cuts in this department, Microsoft still maintains its Office for Responsible AI (ORA), which sets standards for responsible AI through government work and public policy. However, the employees are not at all optimistic for what is to come. According to Platformer, they were responsible for ensuring that AI principles were reflected in each of the projects.
