Sarah Bird’s role at technology group Microsoft is to ensure the artificial intelligence ‘Copilot’ products it releases — and its collaborative work with OpenAI — can be used safely. That means ensuring they cannot cause harm, treat people unfairly, or be used to spread incorrect or fake content.
Her approach is to draw on customer feedback from dozens of pilot programmes, to understand the problems that might emerge and make the experience of using AI more engaging. Recent improvements include a real time system for detecting instances where an AI model is ‘hallucinating’ or generating fictional outputs.
Here, Bird tells the FT’s technology reporter Cristina Criddle why she believes generative AI has the power to lift people up — but artificial general intelligence still struggles with basic concepts, such as the physical world.