AI is both a boon and a bane – a notion that Microsoft proved once more with its recent round of company-wide layoffs. It is said that Microsoft fired the very employees who were training a generative AI chatbot to do their job.
In essence, the engineers were replaced by the same AI chatbot that they helped to train. Talk of misuse of AI.
Microsoft had recently laid off approximately 6,000 employees across the company. However, 40 per cent of those employees were primarily from the software development team and some of them were found to be replaced by the very product they had trained earlier.
Microsoft replaces more humans with AI
The Information recently did a story revealing the internal breakdown of the layoff and how AI played a key role in kicking some software engineers out. Jeff Hulse, a Microsoft VP heading 400 engineers, had apparently asked employees a few months ago to increase their reliance on AI-based coding. Hulse had instructed the team to involve up to 50 per cent of code from AI tools while the other half was supposed to be done by humans.
Compared to the previous allowance of 20-30 per cent usage of AI in coding, this was a welcome move as software engineers could now use OpenAI’s chatbot to get their work done faster.
A few weeks later, it was found that Hulse’s team had let go of the very people who were helping the AI chatbot train to write code. The layoff did not just target junior members but also people from product management, technical program management roles, and workers assigned to other AI projects.
Although Microsoft says that the layoff was done purely for restructuring purposes and to remove management layers, it was found that only 17 per cent of the laid-off people were managers. The rest involved personnel from software development teams. Industry insiders say that cost-cutting and investments in AI projects were the primary reasons Microsoft decided to let go of its resources.
This isn’t the only case of trouble involving Microsoft and AI. A few days ago, Microsoft received flak from its employees after proof was allegedly discovered, unmasking Microsoft’s role in the Israel-Gaza conflict. Although Microsoft’s investigation denied any such happenings, the employees and protest groups have been demanding a more thorough investigation.