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.
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- Meta formed a product advisory council six months after disbanding its Responsible AI division.
- Four white male tech execs sit on the new council, called Meta Advisory Group.
- The council comes amid rising concerns over artificial intelligence oversight.
Meta announced the formation of a product advisory council on Wednesday, six months after it disbanded its Responsible AI division.
The council consists of four men, who will "periodically consult with" Meta's management team about new technologies and products, according to the group's website.
The Meta Advisory Group consists of four executives: payment platform Stripe CEO Patrick Collison, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke, and former Microsoft executive Charlie Songhurst.
The members will not be paid and operate separately from the board of directors, a spokesperson for Meta told Bloomberg.
The council's announcement comes weeks after Meta's first quarter earnings when CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the company will continue to pour into massive AI investments, even if they take 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 that 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 in charge of regulating the safety of the company's artificial intelligence 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 did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, sent outside standard business hours, about the new council, including about its all-male composition.
Meet the new advisory group:
AOP.Press/Corbis/Getty Images
Patrick Collison co-founded 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.
Privately-held Stripe 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 Microsoft-owned GitHub, a platform 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 called AI Grant.
He is 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 is on the board of cryptocurrency trading platform Coinbase.
Last year, Lütke restricted Shopify employees' side hustles, saying that the company requires 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 is an angel investor and partner at several investment firms.
He has invested in 500 startups globally, according to Meta's website.