Microsoft laid off its entire Responsible AI team

In mass layoffs, Microsoft laid off its entire team responsible for developing the ethics of responsible AI. Platformer reports.

The ethics and society division was small—after the October 2022 reorganisation it consisted of about seven people.

On 6 March 2023, Corporate Vice President of AI John Montgomery announced the final dissolution of the group.

Microsoft said it continues to support the Office of Responsible AI (ORA), which sets rules for responsible AI. However, employees say that it was the Ethics and Society team that played a decisive role in ensuring responsible AI in the company’s products.

People looked at the ORA principles and said, “I don’t know how this applies.” … Our job was to show them and create rules in areas where there weren’t any,” said one former employee.

Sources told Platformer that they also faced pressure from CTO Kevin Scott and CEO Satya Nadella. According to them, management wanted to deploy the latest OpenAI models in the company’s products as quickly as possible. заявляли that each 1% share of the market would bring in $2 billion in annual revenue.

In November 2022, Meta laid off its team of machine learning researchers in the infrastructure stack.

In April 2021, Google AI division cofounder Sami Bengio left the company. His departure was linked to the controversial dismissals of Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell — two leading AI ethics researchers.