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Sort of feel bad for the ethics teams that get let go. When it comes to ethics or money, the corpos will always choose the money over the former.
Would you rather ethics be built into the process of everyone or would you rather keep it only as a team? Just because the team is gone, it doesn't mean that ethics is thrown out of the window.
> Members of the team told Platformer they believed they were let go because Microsoft had become more focused on getting its AI products shipped before the competition, and was less concerned with long-term, socially responsible thinking.
It might have just been a failed department and the layoffs might have given cover to purge it ahead of pursuing a more functional strategy.
Management and the product teams want to ship features. Research wants to work in cool new stuff. Nobody wants people from random other teams getting in their way and telling them to slow down. It’s hard enough getting meaningful work shipped in these huge companies. When the stars align to do somethin major and execs are pushing hard, nobody on teams actually doing the work give a damn what some rando on another team thinks about “ethics”.
Harsh but that’s the way it is. In this environment it can actually be more effective to distribute the function to be inside the actual product teams. Which it seems like they did. Sometimes it’s easier to have an impact from the inside. (Sometimes not.)
No connections to MS. I’ve just seen this movie before… a lot.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you rather ethics be built into the process of everyone or would you rather keep it only as a team? Just because the team is gone, it doesn't mean that ethics is thrown out of the window.
Judging from what happened when they fired all their qa people…
These sorts of adjunct, off-to-the-side "ethics" teams are always corporate window dressing, and when push comes to shove they always get jettisoned when competition demands an increase in speed. I don't mean to start a flame war, but this is a reason why I think "Chief Diversity Officers" are such an ill-conceived notion. It's not that I don't think diversity in corporate environments is extremely valuable, but it's…
These roles might not satisfy their ostensible purpose, but they satisfy what may be an even more important purpose for the organization. It’s a cost of doing business (of a certain type).
> Members of the team told Platformer they believed they were let go because Microsoft had become more focused on getting its AI products shipped before the competition, and was less concerned with long-term, socially responsible thinking.
Now, I can see them as a volunteer advisory group. That I'm for. But I loathe seeing all kinds of "industries" pop up that are essentially leaching from businesses. Most "training" kinds of curricula and outside experts take this form, from safety training, to AI ethics to social responsibility, etc., etc. They are there to line their own pockets and the longer they can prolong the issue the better. Oh, safety has not improved, you need to hire me again! Oh, you can't hire enough women, you need to hire me again!
If Microsoft and Google don’t release, some startup will beat them to it. Open source means raw AI will become widespread. It’s just math anyway, and you can’t stop progress.
No wonder we don't see aliens filling the universe. Intelligence is its own great filter.
If Microsoft and Google don’t release, some startup will beat them to it. Open source means raw AI will become widespread. It’s just math anyway, and you can’t stop progress.
"If I don't make the world eating machine, someone else might make the world eating machine first!" No wonder we don't see aliens filling the universe. Intelligence is its own great filter.
These sorts of adjunct, off-to-the-side "ethics" teams are always corporate window dressing, and when push comes to shove they always get jettisoned when competition demands an increase in speed. I don't mean to start a flame war, but this is a reason why I think "Chief Diversity Officers" are such an ill-conceived notion. It's not that I don't think diversity in corporate environments is extremely valuable, but it's…
People should understand AI safety != AI ethics. AI safety has two branches, AI ethics and AI alignment. Those two branches despise each other with intense passion.
The alignment branch (responsible for developing RLHF->ChatGPT) believes AI ethics is completely trivial, and distracts attention away from existential risks.
The ethics branch (responsible for all the media attention about racist AIs/bias etc) view alignment people as pie in the sky researchers whose results are irrelevant to society.
It seems increasingly that the concerns from the ethics branch have not come to pass at all. Stable diffusion does not default to creating black people (you have to insert black into the prompt), this has not caused mass social harm despite the tens of millions of users. Hence companies are unwilling to pay for these teams.
The other concerns, such as mass unemployment, or copyright of training material, are real, but they are better understood by economists, lawyers etc, rather than this awkward branch of AI ethics.
If Microsoft and Google don’t release, some startup will beat them to it. Open source means raw AI will become widespread. It’s just math anyway, and you can’t stop progress.
"If I don't make the world eating machine, someone else might make the world eating machine first!" No wonder we don't see aliens filling the universe. Intelligence is its own great filter.