Microsoft fired artificial intelligence industry ethics team to focus on OpenAI

The cut is part of the massive layoffs that have affected more than 10,000 company employees.
Microsoft has laid off an entire team dedicated to driving artificial intelligence (AI) innovation to ethical, responsible and sustainable outcomes. As reported by Platformer , the team, which once had 30 members, ended its presence in the company’s plans with seven employees.

The elimination of the team was included among the more than 10,000 layoffs that the company led by Satya Nadella planned. And it comes as Microsoft invests more than $10 billion in its partnership with OpenAI, the startup behind art and text generation AI systems such as ChatGPT, which has been integrated into the Bing search engine.

Move quickly…
As the team’s role was to oversee whether Microsoft’s policies on AI were put into practice, the cut sparks an alert about how the company’s behavior will be at a time when it indicates it wants to accelerate the participation of technology in its products.

As Plataformer learned, there was pressure from Kevin Scott, Microsoft’s chief technology officer, and Satya Nadella to quickly adopt what was developed by OpenAI and deliver them to consumers.

Considering that OpenAI guarantees to have concerns about the ethics of its chatbot, Microsoft indicates that it will outsource, at least in parts, the work of guiding the behavior of the AIs.