Microsoft and Amazon have cut their AI ethics teams as Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak call for a moratorium on tech companies’ ‘out-of-control race’

Tech leaders and public figures who have stepped forward to urge companies to take a more cautious approach to artificial intelligence may have been disappointed Wednesday after reports emerged that the technology giants locked in the battle for A.I. domination are laser-focused on moving fast and winning the race, even if it means chipping away at their own A.I. ethics teams.
$Alphabet-C (GOOG.US)$ $Alphabet-A (GOOGL.US)$ and $Microsoft (MSFT.US)$ are racing ahead of the pack in the A.I. arms race, but their fellow Silicon Valley giants are no slouches either. $Amazon (AMZN.US)$ is tapping machine learning to improve its cloud computing Web Services branch, while social media behemoths $Meta Platforms (META.US)$ and $Twitter (Delisted) (TWTR.US)$ have doubled down on their own A.I. research too. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg signaled A.I. would be a cornerstone of Meta’s new efficiency push during the company’s earnings call earlier this year, while $Tesla (TSLA.US)$ 's Elon Musk is reportedly attracting talent to develop Twitter’s own version of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s wildly successful A.I.-powered chatbot released late last year.
But as the A.I. race heats up in a murky economic environment that has forced tech companies to lay off more than 300,000 employees since last year, developers are reportedly cutting back on the ethics teams charged with ensuring A.I. is developed safely and responsibly. Amid larger waves of layoffs, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and others have downsized their “responsible A.I. teams” in recent months, the Financial Times reported Wednesday, a development that is unlikely to please critics who were already unhappy with the current direction tech companies were going. Many of the layoffs the newspaper included in its roundup had first been reported by other publications.
Also on Wednesday, several technologists and independent A.I. researchers signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause on advanced A.I. research beyond currently available systems, saying more attention should be paid to the potential effects and consequences of A.I. before companies roll out products. Among the letter’s signatories were $Apple (AAPL.US)$ cofounder Steve Wozniak and Elon Musk, whose widespread layoffs at Twitter since taking over last year included the social media company’s ethical A.I. team, per the FT report.
The open letter cited an A.I governance framework established in 2017 known as the Asilomar A.I. Principles, which state that given the potentially monumental impact A.I. could have on humanity, the technology should be “planned for and managed with commensurate care and resources.” But the letter criticized tech companies leading the race for A.I. of failing to abide by these principles.