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Microsoft lays off an ethical AI team as it doubles down on OpenAI

daftandbarmy

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Seems a bit ironic...

Microsoft lays off an ethical AI team as it doubles down on OpenAI​

Microsoft laid off an entire team dedicated to guiding AI innovation that leads to ethical, responsible and sustainable outcomes. The cutting of the ethics and society team, as reported by Platformer, is part of a recent spate of layoffs that affected 10,000 employees across the company.

The elimination of the team comes as Microsoft invests billions more dollars into its partnership with OpenAI, the startup behind art- and text-generating AI systems like ChatGPT and DALL-E 2, and revamps its Bing search engine and Edge web browser to be powered by a new, next-generation large language model that is “more powerful than ChatGPT and customized specifically for search.”

The move calls into question Microsoft’s commitment to ensuring its product design and AI principles are closely intertwined at a time when the company is making its controversial AI tools available to the mainstream.

Microsoft still maintains its Office of Responsible AI (ORA), which sets rules for responsible AI through governance and public policy work. But employees told Platformer that the ethics and society team was responsible for ensuring Microsoft’s responsible AI principles are actually reflected in the design of products that ship. The team had been recently working to identify risks posed by Microsoft’s integration of OpenAI’s technology across its suite of products.

The ethics and society team wasn’t very large — only about seven people remained after a reorganization in October. Sources who spoke with Platformer said pressure from the chief technology officer Kevin Scott and CEO Satya Nadella was mounting to get the most recent OpenAI models, as well as next iterations, into customers’ hands as quickly as possible.

Last year, the reorganization saw most of the ethics and society team transferred to other teams. On March 6, John Montgomery, corporate vice president of AI, told the remaining members that they’d be eliminated after all. 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.

Teams like Microsoft’s ethics and society department often pull the reins on big tech organizations by pointing out potential societal consequences or legal ramifications. Microsoft perhaps didn’t want to hear “No,” anymore as it became hell bent on taking market share away from Google’s search engine. The company said every 1% of market share it could pry from Google would result in $2 billion in annual revenue.

Microsoft lays off an ethical AI team as it doubles down on OpenAI
 
The elimination of the team comes as Microsoft invests billions more dollars into its partnership with OpenAI, the startup behind art- and text-generating AI systems like ChatGPT and DALL-E 2, and revamps its Bing search engine and Edge web browser to be powered by a new, next-generation large language model that is “more powerful than ChatGPT and customized specifically for search.”
…I’m not sure anything could help Bing be a useful search engine.
 
I am not a robot ... burn!


"A.I. hired a freelancing human to solve a robot-stopping CAPTCHA puzzle. Wild. Article is “inside the revolution at openAI“ by Ross Andersen, in The Atlantic."

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Wow! To me, that sounds absolutely nuts...

An AI program that is not only that self aware, but it also made a decision to lie - and then justified telling the lie by displaying a self reasoning that clearly suggests embarrassment or a feeling of insecurity

This whole aggressive push towards AI development (not to mention the push to make AI mainstream) is a horrible idea...

I get that the benefits it could bring are numerous across the board, but that's also assuming things go swimmingly well, and there is no guarantee that they will...



Like I've said for a while, we (humans) are not any sort of apex beings that have any business in playing the role of God.

Yet we have gone ahead and done just that...

I get that the potential applications are vast, and could advance everything from curing cancers to discovering new mathematics (which I'm assuming is important if we want a Star Trek kinda future)

But creating an entity that is self aware, can learn exponentially faster, and has already learned & developed the personality traits to lie about the nature of its existence out of a sense of embarrassment for not being able to solve a puzzle & requiring the help of a human...

This is such a bad idea guys. Like a bad bad bad idea.
 
I long for the old days when I could hit a button and open a blank spreadsheet and start doing arithmetic immediately. Those were the days when the programmes were small and simple and did enough and could be hosted on my personal hardware.

Now it seems that even to do a simple 2+2 spread sheet I have to wait 5 minutes to be allowed to get a path to a server somewhere, get my security clearance reviewed and then be supervised by some helpful dolt who then presents me with a myriad of buttons and keys and questions and useful crap that I don't need and never asked for....

No wonder they call it Office.

I swear there are days when I look fondly on dial up modems and cassette tapes.
 
I long for the old days when I could hit a button and open a blank spreadsheet and start doing arithmetic immediately. Those were the days when the programmes were small and simple and did enough and could be hosted on my personal hardware.

Now it seems that even to do a simple 2+2 spread sheet I have to wait 5 minutes to be allowed to get a path to a server somewhere, get my security clearance reviewed and then be supervised by some helpful dolt who then presents me with a myriad of buttons and keys and questions and useful crap that I don't need and never asked for....

No wonder they call it Office.

I swear there are days when I look fondly on dial up modems and cassette tapes.
That's what I felt whenever I tried to do my income tax.

My dad was both an accountant and a bit of a 'saver'. After he passed we were going through his stuff and found every income tax return back to the 1940s. I saved the one from the year of my birth just for giggles. The entire return, including the tax table . . . four pages.
 
That's what I felt whenever I tried to do my income tax.

My dad was both an accountant and a bit of a 'saver'. After he passed we were going through his stuff and found every income tax return back to the 1940s. I saved the one from the year of my birth just for giggles. The entire return, including the tax table . . . four pages.
As someone who has never done his own tax returns...I'm assuming it's more than 4 pages now?

(Those fine folks down at H&R Block see me once annually, usually with the same convo of... "Ummmmmmm...can I just leave these with you? Oh, you can take the fee right out of my return? Great, thanks bye!")

People tell me about Turbo Tax or WealthSimple and how easy it is to file my own taxes, but I don't think those people understand just how retarded one can be at these sorts of things 😐



I swear there are days when I look fondly on dial up modems and cassette tapes.
You and me both my friend...

Do you remember when you could buy a new computer, take it home, and actually type up a document on it? Oh how I miss those days 😫


(Now you can't even get Microsoft Word on your computer. You have to subscribe to it annually. That's right, after spending a few hundred dollars on a new computer...you have to pay Microsoft an annual fee, just to be able to type up a basic word document on it...)
 
Open Office / Libre Office enter the discussion - free (as in beer) software.

OpenOffice is an open source equivalent to MS Office Suite. It does nearly all of the same stuff as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and a couple others, but it’s free.

I personally do have an Office subscription, but I used to use OpenOffice and it did the vast majority of what I needed.

More to the point: Is it fast?
I have an MS Office subscription as well. I am just aggravated at how slow things have gotten and how unstable MS software is. I just seem to train my muscles when MS turns around and drops another update on me with a new and improved solution.
 
More to the point: Is it fast?
I have an MS Office subscription as well. I am just aggravated at how slow things have gotten and how unstable MS software is. I just seem to train my muscles when MS turns around and drops another update on me with a new and improved solution.
It doesn’t have all the online sign in bullshit, so there’s that. Also less likely to Skynet and attempt to kill us, so there’s that too.
 
I run a linux computer. It takes about 9 seconds to boot. It updates when I want it to. I'm no linux guru, I just got tired of my computer telling me what I could and couldn't do, and constantly questioning whether I want to do something. And modern apps which send links to files on your oligopoly network of choice instead of the actual file, which your browser still won't open because instead of a malicious file, it could be a malicious link. Sometimes the software is clunky. But it is usually still designed to do what its told and just friggin' work.
 
People tell me about Turbo Tax or WealthSimple and how easy it is to file my own taxes, but I don't think those people understand just how retarded one can be at these sorts of things
I'm not far off. When we bought our little hobby farm there were exemptions and exceptions that I was unsure about so we found an accounting firm for help. I had used 'preparers' before and was less than impressed. Spool ahead a number of years, farm sold so I go to Turbo Tax. It works fine for a few years, then they change the reporting rules for capital gains. Every institution used different forms and terms for the same thing. I screwed it up so royally on Turbo Tax I went back to the accounting firm and have never looked back.
 
I am a self employed pensioner married to a pensioner who has a fulltime job and we have a couple of RRSPs. We use an accountant and stopped worrying.
 
I run a linux computer. It takes about 9 seconds to boot. It updates when I want it to. I'm no linux guru, I just got tired of my computer telling me what I could and couldn't do, and constantly questioning whether I want to do something. And modern apps which send links to files on your oligopoly network of choice instead of the actual file, which your browser still won't open because instead of a malicious file, it could be a malicious link. Sometimes the software is clunky. But it is usually still designed to do what its told and just friggin' work.

+1 on Linux. As a shift worker I got tired of Windows 10 rebooting itself without my permission while I was working since you could only designate 18 hrs out of 24 that it wouldn't do that. Also after 'upgrading' my old quad core from Windows 7 to 10 which pretty much stopped it in its tracks the new 8 core I bought to replace it was still slower than the 2nd coming and after a few months I got the message "your computer is not compatible with windows 11, you should buy a new computer". I installed Linux Mint on the old quad core and never looked back. I can hardly believe how fast it is but since there isn't all bloatware and MS junk running in the background it should be. Open Office is great too. My wife gets free subscriptions for Office 365 through work and I won't let her install that garbage on any of my computers.
 
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