Local time on June 1, Google said it would not renew Maven project in cooperation with the US Department of Defense. Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene (Diane Greene) announced the news to employees in the Google cloud regular meeting every Friday. She said that currently the Maven contract signed between Google and the US military will expire in 2019. By then, Google will no longer seek to renew the contract.
In addition, Greene also said at the meeting that Google will no longer promote the Maven project because feedback from the project has had a bad influence on the company. She also added that the company plans to introduce the use of artificial intelligence (AI) next week. New arrival principle.
In April of last year, the U.S. military proposed the Maven project. Maven's goal is to "speed up the Ministry of Defense to integrate big data and machine learning," and the US Department of Defense called the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team (AWCFT). The primary task of the Maven project is to help the U.S. Department of Defense to effectively process massive amounts of video data from all over the world. The U.S. Department of Defense collects a large amount of drone flight pictures every day, but human image analysts are far behind the number of videos. Growth. Therefore, the Department of Defense hopes to use machine learning to identify vehicles and other objects in drone footage, thereby reducing the burden on analysts. In the absence of its own resources, the Department of Defense has turned to academic and industrial artificial intelligence experts. Cooperation.
In this project, Google provided the TensorFlow API interface for machine learning applications to the U.S. Department of Defense to help military analysts detect objects in the image. But to what extent cooperation has not been disclosed to the outside world.
The cooperation between Google and the U.S. military initially caused dissatisfaction within the company. Google's internal employees believe that this cooperation affects reputation and corporate culture. It also concerns the moral issues of machine learning development and use. In April of this year, Google had internal More than 3,000 employees wrote open letters to Google executives and demanded that they stop cooperation with the US military. By May, Google had more than a dozen employees formally resigned from Google for this project.
On the other hand, the outside world has also given Google a huge amount of public opinion pressure. There are 364 artificial intelligence professionals in the academic community who also jointly write books against Google.
For internal resignation tides and external public pressure, Google once chose 'cold treatment'. When Google discussed the matter internally in September last year, Google cloud chief scientist and vice president Li Feifei strongly suggested in the email that both sides Avoid the word 'AI' (artificial intelligence) in the contract.
'No matter what price you pay, you must avoid mentioning or using the word AI. Weaponed AI may be the most sensitive topic in the AI world. There is no one. For the media, this is simply red meat (red). () meat) They will find all ways to destroy Google. "The scholar from the artificial intelligence laboratory at Stanford University said in an email.
'I don't know if the media began to discuss what Google is secretly building AI weapons or AI technology, and what will happen to the defense industry. ' Li Feifei said, so she hopes to portray the project as Google Cloud Platform when it announces the contract. Major victory. Li Feifei has always believed in the human-centered artificial intelligence that can benefit humanity in a positive and charitable way. She also said that any project research on the weaponization of artificial intelligence will violate her principles.
However, Google ultimately chose not to make the Maven project known to the public. Only when opposing employees started protesting through Google's internal communication platform, Google’s role as a subcontractor for the Maven project drew public attention.
In April this year, the voice of opposition grew stronger. Google held a conference internally to introduce its employees to what Google was doing. Google’s current CEO, Sundar Pichai, also said at the meeting. Google will develop a set of principles to guide its artificial intelligence business in defense and intelligence contracts, how to cross the ethical minefield. Google also told the outside world, the new principle will avoid artificial intelligence development toward weapons.
At an earlier Google Weekly company-wide TGIF (Thanks God, it's Friday) meeting, Green was also trying to dispel employees' worries. She said at the meeting that the Maven project was not for attack purposes, both parties' contracts The value is rather small, only 9 million US dollars. And, Google executives believe that this project is conducive to the expansion of Google Cloud and the government, the military cooperation.
However, according to “Connected” on May 29th, the Maven project will begin to expand into new areas by 2018, including the use of development tools to drive hard drives more efficiently. In addition, the funding for the Maven project this year is expected to expand to 131 million. The US Pentagon also plans to establish a joint artificial intelligence center with Silicon Valley that may follow the Maven project to support the U.S. military and provide services to intelligence agencies. This makes the controversy caused by the Maven project likely to increase in the coming months.
This situation also caused Google to compromise. Although it did not want to lose the military's contract, under pressure from public opinion, Google chose 'not to do evil'.