When the story of how artificial intelligence took over and conquered the human race is written (possibly by ChatGPT chatbots) this will be the chapter no one believes really happened.
Just weeks before announcing that it will fuse the revolutionary AI tech from OpenAI with its search engine, Microsoft reportedly made deep cuts to the team focused on the ethics portion of the digital revolution.
Among the 10,000 Microsoft employees that were laid off in January, the entire ethics and society team was also let go, according to a report from Platformer.
While the company still has an Office of Responsible AI that sets "company-wide rules for responsible AI," the team that was let go was reportedly responsible for making sure those principles are actually reflected in the company's software products.
Microsoft for its part says that there isn't an issue.
"Over the past six years we have increased the number of people across our product teams and within the Office of Responsible AI who, along with all of us at Microsoft, are accountable for ensuring we put our AI principles into practice," the company told Platformer.
"We appreciate the trailblazing work the ethics and society team did to help us on our ongoing responsible AI journey."
Microsoft says it plans to spend billions of dollars on AI over the next few years as it expands its partnership with OpenAI. We can only hope that at least some of those dollars go into putting guardrails on the system.
