Microsoft recently suspended the Artificial Intelligence Ethics Team, a team that played a key role in applying Microsoft's principles of embedded AI in its various services.
Microsoft launched ChatGPT's new AI-powered Bing search engine last month, and it seems to have caught the world's attention. Before confirming on Tuesday that the new Bing search engine is powered by OpenAI's recently released GPT-4.
And while Microsoft continues to develop its own artificial intelligence technologies, reports revealed that the American software giant has laid off the team responsible for the ethics of artificial intelligence in the company's various products.
Microsoft's AI ethics team laid off
The artificial intelligence ethics team was suspended from work last January, as part of a massive layoff campaign by Microsoft, in which it laid off nearly 10,000 employees.
Microsoft still has an AI office responsible for creating rules and principles for its AI technologies, but the job of the laid-off team was to make sure those rules and principles were implemented in actual products.
The team was also working on evaluating the risks resulting from integrating ChatGPT technology into various Microsoft products.
For its part, Microsoft has not commented on this news yet, but issued a diplomatic statement saying that it is committed to developing artificial intelligence products and experiences safely and responsibly.
“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, have a responsibility for ensuring that its AI principles are implemented,” the company said.
We appreciate the pioneering work that the Ethics and Community team has done to help us on our ongoing and responsible AI journey.”
It should be noted that Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in artificial intelligence technologies from OpenAI, and is constantly working to integrate the ChatGPT chatbot into its various products.
In this context, it was reported that part of these investments - estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars - was spent on building a supercomputer dedicated to ChatGPT technology.