Elon Musk Fires Twitter’s Ethical AI Team, Fired Employees Confirm Layoffs
Elon Musk, the new head of Twitter, has been laying off employees from teams in global offices. The CEO of SpaceX recently fired the entire Ethical AI team, as confirmed by the fired employees in their tweets. The director of ML’s Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability team at Twitter, Rumman Chowdhury, shared a tweet earlier in the day announcing that he was being fired from the company. This was quickly followed by farewell messages from many other members of the group, confirming that they had been released under the layoffs announced by Musk on Thursday.
In a post confirming the news about the latest shooting, Rumman Chowdhury spoke of feeling “relief that you’re the one getting the answer to Thanos’snap”.
Imagine feeling relieved that you are the one who gets the thanos snap 🫰
– Rumman Chowdhury (@ruchowdh) October 4, 2022
He also shared a picture of his logged out account details, stating that his details had been changed.
According to Wired reportsChowdhury was quoted earlier this week as saying that his team’s work was on hold after Musk’s discovery. “We were told, in no uncertain terms, not to rock the boat,” he said.
Another employee from the Ethical AI team, former Senior Engineering Manager at META for Twitter, Joan Deitchman, sent a tweet thanking her team members for their “integrity.”
In a subsequent tweet, Deitchman confirmed that the entire team had been suspended. He also detailed the team’s current developments and their work in pushing “algorithmic visibility and algorithmic selection.”
🫡 Yes, the party is gone. A team that has been researching and pushing algorithmic transparency and algorithmic selection. The team was studying algorithmic amplification. A team that has been inventing and building AI tools and methodologies. All that is gone.
— Joan Deitchman (@JoanDeitchman) October 4, 2022
This isn’t the only group fired by Twitter’s new CEO under recent management changes. In India, Twitter has laid off most of its more than 200 employees as part of mass layoffs globally.
Sources said the layoffs are in the engineering, sales and marketing, and communications groups. It was also said that the entire marketing and communication department in India has been fired.
