Timnit Gebru | |
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![]() Gebru in 2018 | |
Born | 1982 or 1983 (age 40–41)[1] |
Alma mater | Stanford University |
Known for | |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Computer science |
Institutions | |
Doctoral advisor | Fei-Fei Li |
Timnit Gebru (Amharic and Tigrinya: ትምኒት ገብሩ; 1982/1983) is an Eritrean Ethiopian-born computer scientist who works in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI), algorithmic bias and data mining.[3] She is a co-founder of Black in AI, an advocacy group that has pushed for more Black roles in AI development and research.[3] She is the founder of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR).
In December 2020, public controversy erupted over the nature of Gebru's departure from Google, where she was technical co-lead of the Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team. Together with five co-authors, four of whom were also from Google, Gebru had authored a paper on the risks of large language models (LLMs) acting as stochastic parrots and submitted it for publication. Google management requested that Gebru either withdraw the paper or remove the names of all the authors employed by Google, claiming that the paper ignored recent research. Gebru requested an explanation and stated that if Google refused she would talk to her manager about "a last date". Google terminated her employment immediately, stating that they were accepting her resignation. Gebru maintained that she had not formally offered to resign, and only threatened to.
Gebru has been recognized widely for her expertise in the ethics of artificial intelligence. She was named one of the World's 50 Greatest Leaders by Fortune and one of Nature's ten people who shaped science in 2021, and in 2022, one of Time's most influential people.
After she and the other researchers submitted the paper to an academic conference, Dr. Gebru said, a Google manager demanded that she either retract the paper from the conference or remove her name and the names of the other Google employees. She refused to do so without further discussion and, in the email sent Tuesday evening, said she would resign after an appropriate amount of time if the company could not explain why it wanted her to retract the paper and answer other concerns. The company responded to her email, she said, by saying it could not meet her demands and that her resignation was accepted immediately. Her access to company email and other services was immediately revoked. In his note to employees, Mr. Dean said Google respected "her decision to resign". Mr. Dean also said that the paper did not acknowledge recent research showing ways of mitigating bias in such systems.
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