Microsoft lays off its entire responsible AI team: Report

While Microsoft still maintains an active Office of Responsible AI, the company is left without a dedicated team to ensure its AI principles

Microsoft laid off its entire ethics and society team as part of recent layoffs that affected 10,000 employees. | Photo Credit: Reuters

Microsoft laid off its entire ethics and society team as part of recent layoffs that affected 10,000 employees.

The move has left the company without a dedicated team to ensure its AI principles are closely tied to product design, a report from the Platformer said.

While Microsoft still maintains an active Office of Responsible AI, tasked with creating rules and principles for the company’s AI initiatives, the company says its overall investment in responsibility work is increasing despite the layoffs.

The team was also responsible for designing a role-playing game called Judgement Call that helped designers envision potential harms that could result from AI and discuss them during product development, the report said.

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In recent years the team, which was at its largest in 2020, has been working to identify the risks posed by Microsoft’s adoption of OpenAI technology. The team which had roughly 30 employees including engineers, designers, and philosophers was cut down to seven people as part of the reorganisation in October 2022.

At the time, John Montgomery, corporate vice president of AI, told the team was going to be moved to other areas of the organisation, however, when asked to reconsider, he declined.

In response to queries though, Montgomery said the team would not be eliminated, the report shared.

In March 2023, the remaining members of the team were told it was being eliminated after all.

While members of the ethics and society team said they generally tried to be supportive of product development, as Microsoft became focused on shipping AI tools more quickly than its rivals, the company’s leadership became less interested in the kind of long-term thinking that the team specialised in, the report said.

In 2020, Google also fired ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru after she published a paper critical of the large language models that would explode into popularity two years later. As a result of the backlash, several more top leaders within the department also left, diminishing the company’s credibility on responsible AI issues.