Mims: The AI Boom That Could Make Google and Microsoft Even More Powerful

2023/02/14 Leave a comment

Good long read. Hard to be optimistic about how the technology will be used. And the regulators will likely be more than a few steps behind corporations:

Seeing the new artificial intelligence-powered chatbots touted in dueling announcements this past week by Microsoft and Googledrives home two major takeaways. First, the feeling of “wow, this definitely could change everything.” And second, the realization that for chat-based search and related AI technologies to have an impact, we’re going to have to put a lot of faith in them and the companies they come from.

When AI is delivering answers, and not just information for us to base decisions on, we’re going to have to trust it much more deeply than we have before. This new generation of chat-based search engines are better described as “answer engines” that can, in a sense, “show their work” by giving links to the webpages they deliver and summarize. But for an answer engine to have real utility, we’re going to have to trust it enough, most of the time, that we accept those answers at face value.

The same will be true of tools that help generate text, spreadsheets, code, images and anything else we create on our devices—some version of which both Microsoft MSFT -0.20%decrease; red down pointing triangle and Google have promised to offer within their existing productivity services, Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. 

These technologies, and chat-based search, are all based on the latest generation of “generative” AI, capable of creating verbal and visual content and not just processing it the way more established AI has done. And the added trust it will require is one of several ways in which this new generative AI technology is poised to shift even more power into the hands of the biggest tech companies. 

Generative AI in all its forms will insinuate technology more deeply into the way we live and work than it already is—not just answering our questions but writing our memos and speeches or even producing poetry and art. And because of the financial, intellectual and computational resources needed to develop and run the technology are so enormous, the companies that control these AI systems will be the largest, richest companies.

OpenAI, the creator of the ChatGPT chatbot and DALL-E 2 image generator AIs that have fueled much of the current hype, seemed like an exception to that: a relatively small startup that has driven major AI innovation. But it has leapt into the arms of Microsoft, which has made successive rounds of investment, in part because of the need to pay for the computing power needed to make its systems work. 

The greater concentration of power is all the more important because this technology is both incredibly powerful and inherently flawed: it has a tendency to confidently deliver incorrect information. This means that step one in making this technology mainstream is building it, and step two is minimizing the variety and number of mistakes it inevitably makes.

Trust in AI, in other words, will become the new moat that big technology companies will fight to defend. Lose the user’s trust often enough, and they might abandon your product. For example: In November, Meta made available to the public an AI chat-based search engine for scientific knowledge called Galactica. Perhaps it was in part the engine’s target audience—scientists—but the incorrect answers it sometimes offered inspired such withering criticism that Meta shut down public access to it after just three days, said Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun in a recent talk.

Galactica was “the output of a research project versus something intended for commercial use,” says a Meta spokeswoman. In a public statement, Joelle Pineau, managing director of fundamental AI research at Meta, wrote that “given the propensity of large language models such as Galactica to generate text that may appear authentic, but is inaccurate, and because it has moved beyond the research community, we chose to remove the demo from public availability.”

On the other hand, proving your AI more trustworthy could be a competitive advantage more powerful than being the biggest, best or fastest repository of answers. This seems to be Google’s bet, as the company has emphasized in recent announcements and a presentation on Wednesday that as it tests and rolls out its own chat-based and generative AI systems, it will strive for “Responsible AI,” as outlined in 2019 in its “AI Principles.”

My colleague Joanna Stern this past week provided a helpful description of what it’s like to use Microsoft’s Bing search engine and Edge web browser with ChatGPT incorporated. You can join a list to test the service—and Google says it will make its chatbot, named Bard, available at some point in the coming months.

But in the meantime, to see just why trust in these kinds of search engines is so tricky, you can visit other chat-based search engines that already exist. There’s You.com, which will answer your questions via a chatbot, or Andisearch.com, which will summarize any article it returns when you search for a topic on it.

Even these smaller services feel a little like magic. If you ask You.com’s chat module a question like “Please list the best chat AI-based search engines,” it can, under the right circumstances, give you a coherent and succinct answer that includes all the best-known startups in this space. But it can also, depending on small changes in how you phrase that question, add complete nonsense to its answer. 

In my experimentation, You.com would, more often than not, give a reasonably accurate answer, but then add to it the name of a search engine that doesn’t exist at all. Googling the made-up search engine names it threw in revealed that You.com seemed to be misconstruing the names of humans quoted in articles as the names of search engines.

Andi doesn’t return search results in a chat format, precisely because making sure that those answers are accurate is still so difficult, says Chief Executive Angela Hoover. “It’s been super exciting to see these big players validating that conversational search is the future, but nailing factual accuracy is hard to do,” she adds. As a result, for now, Andi offers search results in a conventional format, but offers to use AI to summarize any page it returns.

Andi currently has a team of fewer than 10 people, and has raised $2.5 million so far. It’s impressive what such a small team has accomplished, but it’s clear that making trustworthy AI will require enormous resources, probably on the scale of what companies like Microsoft and Google possess.

There are two reasons for this: The first is the enormous amount of computing infrastructure required, says Tinglong Dai, a professor of operations management at Johns Hopkins University who studies human-AI interaction. That means tens of thousands of computers in big technology companies’ current cloud infrastructures. Some of those computers are used to train the enormous “foundation” models that power generative AI systems. Others specialize in making the trained models available to users, which as the number of users grows can become a more taxing task than the original training.

The second reason, says Dr. Dai, is that it requires enormous human resources to continually test and tune these models, in order to make sure they’re not spouting an inordinate amount of nonsense or biased and offensive speech.

Google has said that it has called on every employee in the company to test its new chat-based search engine and flag any issues with the results it generates. Microsoft, which is already rolling out its chat-based search engine to the public on a limited basis, is doing that kind of testing in public. ChatGPT, on which Microsoft’s chat-based search engine is based, has already proved to be vulnerable to attempts to “jailbreak” it into producing inappropriate content. 

Big tech companies can probably overcome the issues arising from their rollout of AI—Google’s go-slow approach, ChatGPT’s sometimes-inaccurate results, and the incomplete or misleading answers chat-based Bing could offer—by experimenting with these systems on a large scale, as only they can.

“The only reason ChatGPT and other foundational models are so bad at bias and even fundamental facts is they are closed systems, and there is no opportunity for feedback,” says Dr. Dai. Big tech companies like Google have decades of practice at soliciting feedback to improve their algorithmically-generated results. Avenues for such feedback have, for example, long been a feature of both Google Search and Google Maps.

Dr. Dai says that one analogy for the future of trust in AI systems could be one of the least algorithmically-generated sites on the internet: Wikipedia. While the entirely human-written and human-edited encyclopedia isn’t as trustworthy as primary-source material, its users generally know that and find it useful anyway. Wikipedia shows that “social solutions” to problems like trust in the output of an algorithm—or trust in the output of human Wikipedia editors—are possible.

But the model of Wikipedia also shows that the kind of labor-intensive solutions for creating trustworthy AI—which companies like Meta and Google have already employed for years and at scale in their content moderation systems—are likely to entrench the power of existing big technology companies. Only they have not just the computing resources, but also the human resources, to deal with all the misleading, incomplete or biased information their AIs will be generating.

In other words, creating trust by moderating the content generated by AIs might not prove to be so different from creating trust by moderating the content generated by humans. And that is something the biggest technology companies have already shown is a difficult, time-consuming and resource-intensive task they can take on in a way that few other companies can.

The obvious and immediate utility of these new kinds of AIs, when integrated into a search engine or in their many other potential applications, is the reason for the current media, analyst and investor frenzy for AI. It’s clear that this could be a disruptive technology, resetting who is harvesting attention and where they’re directing it, threatening Google’s search monopoly and opening up new markets and new sources of revenue for Microsoft and others.

Based on the runaway success of the ChatGPT AI—perhaps the fastest service to reach 100 million users in history, according to a recent UBS report—it’s clear that being an aggressive first mover in this space could matter a great deal. It’s also clear that being a successful first-mover in this space will require the kinds of resources that only the biggest tech companies can muster.

Source: The AI Boom That Could Make Google and Microsoft Even More Powerful

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Diversity Heretics

2019/04/27 1 Comment

The contrary view on diversity that focusses on the individual and discounts or ignores broader systemic factors at play, although there is merit to considering other aspects of diversity. Diversity of thought, of course, is the hardest one to measure and manage, including the question of limits:

If recent controversies over diversity hiring practices at Google and Microsoft are any guide, internal company message boards are the new culture war battleground.

This week, Quartz published a story about disagreements over diversity policies among Microsoft employees that were being aired on the company’s internal chatroom, Yammer. One of the posts criticized Microsoft’s diversity initiatives as “discriminatory hiring,” and suggested, “women are less suited for engineering roles.” “Many women simply aren’t cut out for the corporate rat race, so to speak, and that’s not because of ‘the patriarchy,’ it’s because men and women aren’t identical,” the employee wrote.

Source: Diversity Heretics

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Microsoft might move jobs abroad due to US immigration policies

2018/07/14 Leave a comment

Part of the Canadian advantage, one that the government appears to be pursuing through PM and other senior meetings:

The company’s president and chief legal officer Brad Smith told CNBC that Microsoft doesn’t want to move jobs overseas, but may have to if it can’t hire the skilled immigrants it needs to fill positions. The Trump administration has made it harder for companies to hire skilled foreign workers and for international graduates in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics from U.S. universities to continue working as they apply for a work visa.

More changes to that program would mean there would be “hundreds of [Microsoft] employees who would lose their ability to work in the United States,” Smith said. Instead of simply abandoning those employees and replacing them, Smith said Microsoft would work to move them overseas to countries where they can continue working for the company.

“We’re not going to cut people loose. We’re going to stand behind them,” Smith said. “In the world of technology, you better stand behind your people because your people are your most valuable asset.”

Source: Microsoft might move jobs abroad due to US immigration policies

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Apple’s executive ranks are still overwhelmingly white and male – Recode

2016/11/23 Leave a comment

The latest diversity reports from Apple and Microsoft:

Even tech companies with a commitment to boosting the diversity of their workforce are finding gains hard to come by.

A case in point is Apple.

The iPhone maker released new data Monday night showing that the company’s highest ranks remain even more white and male than the company as a whole.

Just 20 of Apple’s top 107 executives are women, according to a government filing, while only five are from underrepresented minority groups (defined as black, Hispanic/Latino, Native American or Hawaiian/Pacific Islander). Another 14 executives are Asian, while the remaining 88 are white.

Those numbers are roughly unchanged from a year ago.

In the next layer of management, women made up 27 percent of the workforce. More than 65 percent of those managers and mid-level executives are white, 23 percent are Asian, with just 11 percent from underrepresented minority groups and 1 percent who define themselves as multiracial. As with the executive ranks, those numbers are little different than they were in 2015.

The data is included in a form known as the EEO-1, which companies must file with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Even while publicly sharing the data, Apple has said that the EEOC data doesn’t reflect how the company itself breaks down its workforce, and is not the way it measures its diversity progress.

In August, Apple released its last public numbers, noting that 32 percent of its workforce was female and 22 percent of employees were from underrepresented minorities. The numbers, which represented slight increases from 2015, reflect global hiring for women, and only the U.S. with regard to underrepresented minorities.
Apple HR executive Denise Young Smith, speaking with Recode's Ina FriedApple

In terms of new hires, Apple’s figures were higher than its workforce as a whole, with 37 percent being women and 27 percent being from underrepresented minorities. (The data used for both the EEOC and Apple’s companywide diversity report covers the same time period.)

But if Apple’s gains are small, at least it’s moving in the right direction.

Microsoft, by contrast, released figures last week showing that the overall number of women at the company dropped in 2016 for the second year in a row. Microsoft blamed layoffs in its phone unit for the decline. The total number of black and Latino employees at Microsoft did go up compared to last year, but just barely.

And at least Microsoft and Apple continue to share their data. While many tech companies started sharing diversity reports several years ago, many have yet to offer updates this year, and fewer still have shared this year’s EEO-1 filing.

The EEOC, meanwhile, has used aggregate data to highlight that whites, men and Asians are overrepresented in high-tech jobs, while women, blacks and Latinos are less present in the high-tech industry than in the workforce as a whole.

While Apple is ahead of many peers in its percentage of women, and a leader in terms of employing underrepresented minorities, it has not been immune to criticism. Earlier this year, reports from Mic and Gizmodo raised allegations that some corners of Apple were home to a significantly sexist culture.

In an exclusive interview with Recode, Apple HR chief Denise Young Smith said the incidents described in the articles didn’t reflect the Apple she knows, but that the company did investigate, adding that “commensurate actions have been taken.” Such actions can range from an informal conversation to dismissal, and Apple didn’t disclose what actions it took.

Source: Apple’s executive ranks are still overwhelmingly white and male – Recode

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Microsoft reminds us that Canada is still a branch-plant economy

2016/06/18 Leave a comment

Always interesting to see just how sophisticated and strategic large corporations can be:

Inside Microsoft, however, some staffers have been known to cheekily refer to the Vancouver operation as “Ellis Island,” after the historic U.S. immigration entry station. What Microsoft really wants is to import far more foreign workers to its home base in Washington State than it can under the United States’ incredibly restrictive immigration rules. So it uses Vancouver as a staging post.

Foreign workers temporarily migrate to Canada and work for Microsoft here long enough to qualify for an intracompany transfer to the United States, a far less restrictive immigration process. That doesn’t apply to everyone at the Vancouver centre – most of the roughly 425 “core” employees are Canadian. But another 140 or so “rotational” workers are foreign nationals who will be moved after 18 months, presumably to the United States.

Microsoft has been brazen about using Vancouver as a U.S. immigration back door. Then-chief executive Steve Ballmer said in 2007, when the company returned to Vancouver: “We opened a lab because we were having trouble getting visas for the best and the brightest.” Deputy general counsel Karen Jones told Bloomberg in 2014 that the restrictive U.S. rules “clearly did not meet our needs,” leaving the company about 750 foreign hires short of its desired U.S. intake. “We have to look to other places.” Expanding to Vancouver wasn’t “purely for immigration purposes,” she said, “but immigration is a factor.” Mr. Smith acknowledged “the more open immigration system of Canada does play a vital role in our ability to invest in a big way in the future of this kind of centre in B.C.”

More surprising is that our government thinks it’s smart for Canada to become a way station for U.S.-bound global talent (Microsoft isn’t the only U.S. company to do this) and has made it even easier for Microsoft to build Ellis Island Northwest.

In April, 2015, the federal Immigration Department, at the B.C. government’s request, exempted the Microsoft centre from undergoing onerous “labour market impact assessments” (LMIA) when seeking approval for inbound foreign employees, shaving months off the immigration process. Such exemptions are allowed under federal-provincial immigration deals for major projects that result in big investments and don’t displace local workers, among other criteria. Mr. Smith acknowledged the exemption was an “important” consideration in Microsoft’s decision where to locate the centre.

This would be easier to stomach if Microsoft was importing talent to remain in Canada or if the company placed leadership of key products or projects here (other than existing game studios, the new engineers will report to businesses managed elsewhere, such as Skype).

It would be more acceptable if the exemption was available to all tech companies. Canada is awash in fast-growing tech firms eager to import top talent from around the world. But they have to wait six to 12 months as a result of the prolonged immigration process, which submits fast-growing tech firms to the same drawn-out LMIA process as abusers of the temporary foreign-worker program. That is ridiculously long given that they are in a global race for highly coveted engineering and executive talent. Microsoft, a U.S. company hiring foreign workers to ultimately work in the United States, gets to skip all that.

This exemption places the needs of a foreign multinational above Canadian companies, which ultimately puts Canada at an economic disadvantage. “We need to correct these failed policies that unfairly advantage foreign multinationals and instead focus on growing our domestic scale-ups,” said Benjamin Bergen, executive director of the Council of Canadian Innovators, which represents Canada’s top emerging tech companies. “At the very least, Canadian tech companies should enjoy the same benefits and access to talent as foreign branch plants do here in Canada.”

An exemption for Microsoft is dubious policy, as is championing investments by foreign tech companies here that would likely melt away if the U.S. government simply freed up more visas for foreign workers. It makes us look like a branch-plant economy. So do the PM’s attempts to appear innovative by courting foreign tech giants Google, Ubisoft and Facebook, while ignoring Canada’s emerging homegrown tech companies. Don’t think he hasn’t been invited to visit them, too.

Source: Microsoft reminds us that Canada is still a branch-plant economy – The Globe and Mail

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Microsoft’s new B.C. workforce may consist mostly of foreigners: draft plan

2015/03/19 Leave a comment

Interesting reading:

The freedom of information documents, given to CBC News by a third party who works in the industry, reveal Microsoft Canada initially promised that only only 20 of those 400 new jobs — or five per cent — would go to Canadians. The documents also suggest that, through a variety of programs including the controversial Temporary Foreign Worker program (TFWP), the majority of the new workers would come from abroad.

The plans date from 2013 and 2014, and include letters and briefing notes from Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) and British Columbia’s Ministry of Jobs, Tourism and Skills Training. They show:

150 positions would be open to both Canadians and foreigners as “rotational employees” who would be brought in under the TFWP program with “no guaranteed number of Canadians.”

200 “core employees” would be brought in at the “executive [level], management or those with specialized knowledge,” but the company only committed that 10 per cent of those 200 core employees would be Canadian. The document states the number of Canadians “is likely to grow over time.”

50 positions would go to “foundry employees” — paid student interns from Canadian universities. But the document stipulates that some of those students could be international students, and do not have to be Canadians.

The documents also show that, in the planning stages, most of the 200 “core” employees at the Microsoft Centre of Excellence were expected to be foreign workers from three categories: intra-company transfers (people who have worked at least one year for Microsoft abroad); those brought in under the TFWP; and contract workers hired abroad who qualify to work in Canada under the North American Free Trade Agreement.

…In December, CIC told CBC News “most” of the 400 jobs would be held by Canadians.

However, in a written statement yesterday, Microsoft Canada made no such promise. Instead, the company said a majority of its current workforce in Vancouver is Canadian, but that may not last for long.

“[As] we hire staff for our new excellence centre, we will be recruiting talent from around the world (in addition to Canada), which may result in that balance shifting,” officials with the company wrote.

Despite requests from CBC News, neither Microsoft Canada nor B.C.’s jobs ministry provided any updated ratios of foreign to Canadian workers.

In an email, a spokesman for B.C. Jobs Minister Shirley Bond said the training centre will provide a “net benefit” by bringing in “at least $90 million annually for up to 10 years.”

Bond’s spokesman said no Canadians would be displaced from their jobs by the creation of the centre — although he would not say what proportion of the new positions would go to Canadians, calling that “proprietary information” belonging to Microsoft.

Seems like CIC may have exaggerated the initial job figures (doesn’t necessary mean that longer-term impact greater).

Microsoft’s new B.C. workforce may consist mostly of foreigners: draft plan – Politics – CBC News.

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