Meta names four men to a new tech advisory council months after disbanding its Responsible AI division
As Big Tech continues to spend billions on AI, users and those in the industry worry about governance, data privacy, ethics, and safety risks.
Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images
- Meta has formed a product advisory council six months after disbanding its Responsible AI division.
- Four white male tech execs sit on the new council, which is called Meta Advisory Group.
- The council has come amid rising concerns about oversights in artificial intelligence.
Meta announced the formation of a product advisory council on Wednesday, six months after it disbanded its Responsible AI division.
The Meta Advisory Group will "periodically consult with" Meta's management team about new technologies and products, according to the group's website.
The group consists of four male executives: Patrick Collison, the CEO of the payment platform Stripe; former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman; Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke; and Charlie Songhurst, a former Microsoft executive.
A spokesperson for Meta told Bloomberg the members wouldn't be paid and would operate separately from the board of directors.
The announcement of the council came weeks after Meta's first-quarter earnings when CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company would continue to pour into massive artificial-intelligence investments, even if they took time to pay off.
As Big Tech continues to spend billions on AI, users and those in the industry worry about governance, data privacy, ethics, and safety risks, saying programs to keep AI in check haven't kept up with new innovations.
The new council is reminiscent of Meta's Responsible AI division, a group that was in charge of regulating the safety of the company's AI ventures as they were created and deployed. The group, which had about 40 employees, was axed in November following a series of cost-cutting measures, including prior layoffs for that team.
All four men on the new council are white and share similar tech-executive backgrounds, which has drawn attention to the lack of diversity in their gender, race, and professional history. Several tech investors on X highlighted the council's lack of representation.
Four of the company's 11 board members are women.
The company didn't respond to a request for comment from Business Insider about the new council, including about its all-male composition, sent outside standard business hours.
Meet the new advisory group:
AOP.Press/Corbis/Getty Images
Patrick Collison cofounded Stripe with his brother John Collison in 2010.
Their company builds software that businesses add to their websites and apps to instantly connect with credit-card and banking systems and receive payments. Meta began using Stripe in 2014 to facilitate its "buy" button, which allowed users to purchase items featured in ads or posts on the platform.
Stripe, which is privately held, is now valued at $65 billion.
Collison is also the cofounder of the Arc Institute, a biomedical-research nonprofit.
GitHub
Nat Friedman is a tech investor and the former CEO of GitHub, a platform owned by Microsoft that allows developers to store and share code. He served as CEO between 2018 and 2021.
After stepping down as CEO, Friedman cofounded California YIMBY, a platform to address California's housing shortage, and founded Nat.dev, a web interface for large language models. He also funds several startups in the AI space through a fund he cofounded named AI Grant.
He's a board member of Collison's Arc Institute.
Reuters/Lucas Jackson
Tobi Lütke is the founder and CEO of Shopify, the publicly traded e-commerce giant.
He's on the board of the cryptocurrency-trading platform Coinbase.
Last year, Lütke restricted Shopify employees' side hustles, saying the company required their "unshared attention."
LinkedIn/Charlie Songhurst
Charlie Songhurst is a tech investor and a former executive at Microsoft, where he was the general manager of global corporate strategy.
He's an angel investor and partner at several investment firms.
He has invested in 500 startups globally, according to Meta's website.