Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams
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 that a Chief Diversity Officer doesn't really "own" any sub-organization of the business. That is, the Chief Product Officer owns the product teams, the Chief Technical Officer owns the engineering teams, the Chief Marketing Officer owns the marketing teams. Even the Chief Human Resources Officer, while largely providing support to other teams, still has sizable staff of their own to get their job down. A Chief Diversity Officer's job largely comes down to telling other teams how they should change or structure their teams. I have yet to see that approach work.Different teams can certainly work to a common corporate goal, even if that goal isn't the primary focus of a particular team. If you really want to ensure that diversity is valued, any initiatives should actually be led by the teams who also do the main "work of the business", and the goals should be championed by the executives of these teams.So, in the vein of this article, I think independent "ethical AI teams" are a really bad idea. Better to define what ethical AI means at a high leadership level, and if teams need particular experts in these areas they should just hire them as part of that team, not off as a part of some dysfunctional "ombudsman" role.