Microsoft giving up OpenAI board observer seat won’t resolve concerns | Real Time Headlines

Microsoft Gave up observer seat on OpenAI board of directors. appleThe organization was reportedly expected to adopt a similar observer position, but according to the organization, it will no longer pursue that position. Financial Times. but whatever the clarity Changes this week Designed to provide, many of the same issues remain.

Regulators are not sitting idly by, and for those concerned about ethical issues AI, the same concerns – prioritizing profit over safety – remain. Amba Kak, co-executive director of the nonprofit AI Now Institute, described the announcement as a “ruse” designed to obscure the relationship between big tech companies and emerging players in artificial intelligence.

“The timing of this move is important,” Kak wrote in a message to CNBC. “This should be seen as a direct response to scrutiny by global regulators of these unconventional relationships.”

The close ties between Microsoft and OpenAI and the two companies’ outsized control of the artificial intelligence industry will continue to be scrutinized by the Federal Trade Commission, said a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named due to confidentiality issues.

At the same time, in the increasingly profitable artificial intelligence industry, a large number of artificial intelligence developers and researchers concerned about safety and ethical issues have remained indifferent. Current and former OpenAI employees Publish an open letter on June 4, describing concerns about the rapid development of artificial intelligence despite a lack of oversight and whistleblower protections.

“AI companies have strong financial incentives to avoid effective oversight, and we believe bespoke corporate governance structures are insufficient to change this,” the employees wrote in the letter. They added that AI companies “currently have only tenuous obligations with The government shares some of this information without sharing it with civil society” and cannot “rely on them to share this information voluntarily”.

Days after the letter was published, a source familiar with the situation confirmed to CNBC that the FTC and Department of Justice were investigating the matter. Antitrust investigation will be launched Enter OpenAI, Microsoft and Nvidiafocusing on the company’s behavior.

FTC Chairman Lina Khan describe Her agency’s action is to “conduct a market survey of investments and partnerships that are forming between artificial intelligence developers and major cloud service providers.” Kak told CNBC that regulators’ efforts are helping to find answers and provide transparency.

Microsoft made no mention of regulators at all in its statement explain Give up its observer seat on the Board of Directors. The software giant said it can exit now because it’s satisfied with the structure of the startup’s board of directors, which has been stagnant since an uprising led to brief dismissal CEO Sam Altman (Sam Altman) and threatened Microsoft’s huge investment in OpenAI.

Microsoft initially took a non-voting board seat at OpenAI in November following the Ultraman incident. New board members include former NSA Director Paul Nakasone, Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, former Salesforce co-executive Bret Taylor and Altman. besides new added From March: Dr. Sue Desmond-Hellmann, former CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Nicole Seligman, former executive vice president of Sony; and Fidji Simo, CEO Instant shopping cart.

Following Microsoft’s announcement this week, OpenAI said Axios The company is changing the way it works with “strategic partners.” Apple has yet to issue a statement. None of the three companies commented to CNBC for this article.

João Sedoc, assistant professor of technology at New York University’s Stern School of Business, said Microsoft’s latest move is positive for the artificial intelligence industry because of the company’s influence in OpenAI. He said it was “critical” for Microsoft to “step in and help stabilize” OpenAI after Altman was abruptly fired and quickly reinstated.

Sedoc said: “Microsoft’s presence does bring a mixture of conflicts of interest and competitive advantages. There is a strange relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI that is both synergistic and competitive.”

But the two companies are not entirely aligned. Earlier this year, Microsoft reportedly paid $650 million Licensing Inflection AI Technology It has hired key talent from across the company, most notably Chief Executive Mustafa Suleyman, a former co-founder of DeepMind, the artificial intelligence startup acquired by Google in 2014.

Ben Miller, CEO of investment platform Fundrise, said that after the Inflection deal, Microsoft “is now becoming a true competitor to OpenAI,” meaning it should not be on the startup’s board.

“Having a voice at the table is extremely influential for the company and provides Microsoft with a wealth of information about its business activities,” Miller said.

Sedoc told CNBC the spinoff represents the right precedent as big tech companies increasingly become large investors in artificial intelligence. He cited Amazon-backed artificial intelligence startups such as Anthropic and Hugging Face, whose investors include Google, Amazon, Nvidia and others.

Sedok said they were “probably looking at the downstream implications of what this means for the overall development of the industry.”

However, Sedoc said there could be issues with AI safety.

“I think Microsoft has a lot of expertise and a long history of thinking in a lot of different areas that OpenAI doesn’t have,” Sedoc said. “From that perspective, I think there will be some negative consequences for them not being in the talks. “

Artificial Intelligence Security Practices Are in my heart Altman’s differences with the early OpenAI board continued to create divisions within the company.

In May, OpenAI disbanded a team focused on the long-term risks of artificial intelligence, just a year after the company announced its launch. The news comes days after OpenAI co-founders Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike, two team leaders. announce departure from the company. In a post on

“Building machines that are smarter than humans is inherently dangerous work,” Lake writes. “OpenAI has a huge responsibility on behalf of all of humanity.”

When OpenAI announced the appointment of former NSA director Nakasone to its board of directors last month, it said he would join the recently formed Safety and Security Council. OpenAI said at the time that the group would spend 90 days evaluating the company’s processes and safeguards before making recommendations to the board and ultimately updating the public.

—CNBC’s Ryan Browne, Matt Clinch and Steve Kovach contributed reporting.

watch: OpenAI was hacked in April 2023 but was not disclosed to the public