At the same time that tech behemoths are accelerating the development of AI products, perhaps the most important guardrail — ethics teams intended to oversee artificial-intelligence development with an eye toward its legal and societal effects — are being scaled back.
Microsoft Corp. MSFT , Alphabet Inc.’s GOOGL GOOG Google and Amazon.com Inc.’s AMZN Twitch are among the technology companies that are cutting their AI ethics teams. And Alphabet’s AI unit was among those restructured when the company made sweeping job cuts in January that eliminated 12,000 positions. On Thursday, Google merged its two primary AI units into a new unit called Google DeepMind.
Ethics teams typically slow the product-development process as they study and offer feedback over legal concerns and societal impact, said Andrew Strait, an associate director at the Ada Lovelace Institute, an independent research organization focused on AI. Two years ago, Google fired the co-leaders of its Ethical AI team after butting heads with them over the publication of an academic paper warning about the downsides of large language models, or LLMs, according to the Washington Post. And last summer, Google fired a researcher on its Responsible AI team who was convinced that one of its language models, LaMDA, was sentient, the Post reported.
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