Timin Gabru, one of Google’s top artificial intelligence researchers, says the company fired him suddenly yesterday. The technical co-leader of Google’s Ethical Artificial Intelligence team claims that managers were annoyed with the emails she sent to colleagues.
The email, which was sent to the brainwashed woman and fellow envoy, expressed frustration that managers were trying to get Gabru to withdraw the research paper. The full text was first published Platform. “A week before you go out on vacation, you see a meeting on your calendar calendar at 4:30 p.m. PST,” he reads. “Then in that meeting your manager tells you ‘it’s decided’ that you need to withdraw this paper next week … you don’t deserve to talk about this, because you are not someone’s humanity (loneliness) Let it come) This company is accredited or recognized by journalists, governments, scientists, civic organizations, such as the Electronic Frontiers Foundation, etc.). ”
After the email came out, Gabru told managers that certain conditions had to be met in order to stay in the company. Otherwise, he will have to work on a transition plan.
Megan Kacholia, vice president of engineering at Google Research, said she could not meet the conditions and, as a result, accepted Gabru’s resignation. OneZero. Kacholiya added, “However, we believe that your employment should end faster than your email because some aspects of the email you sent last night to the non-management employees of the brain group reflect behavior that is inconsistent with Google’s expectations.” Manager, ”according to Gabru. On Twitter, he claimed The decision to fire him was eventually made by Google’s AI chief, Jeff Dean.
Apparently my manager sent me an email on my direct reports that he accepted my resignation. I did not resign – I first asked for easy situations and said I would answer when I came back from vacation. But I guess she made the decision for me 🙂 That’s the lawyer’s thing.
– Timnit Gabru (@ StemnitJabru) December 3, 2020
Dean sent an email to Google staff on Thursday morning explaining his opinion on Gabru’s departure, which was first received and published by Platform.
The email reads, ‘Timnit co-wrote a paper with four fellow googlers as well as some external collaborators who needed to go through our review process (as are all externally submitted papers),’ the email reads. “Unfortunately, this particular paper was only shared with one day’s notice before its deadline – we need two weeks for this type of review – and then instead of waiting for a review response, it was approved and submitted for submission.” . A cross-functional team then reviewed the paper as part of our regular process and informed the authors that it did not meet our bar for publication and why there was a response about it … We acknowledge that the authors were very disappointed with this decision. Megan and I finally made it, especially since they would have already submitted the paper. “
Gabru is especially famous in facial recognition techniques for his work on algorithmic bias. In 2018, she wrote a paper with Joy Bulamwini showing that the error rate for identifying dark-skinned people was much higher than the error rate for identifying white-skinned people, partly because the datasets used to train the algorithms were too Were just white.
News of Gabru’s alleged firing via Twitter yesterday, promoting support from colleagues and associates. “I have your back because you always had me,” Bulamwini tweeted. “You are brilliant and respected. You hear those who will easily ignore. You ask tough questions not to advance yourself but to uplift the communities on which we are our foundation. I am proud to call you a leader, guide, friend and sister. ”
Hours earlier, news broke that the National Labor Relations Board had filed a complaint against Google for firing two workers last year following employee planning efforts. At the time, Google said employees of Lawrence Burland and Catherine Spyres had violated security policies and internal systems. But the NLRB found the rules to be in violation of labor laws and the alleged Burland and Spiers did nothing wrong.
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment Edge.
Update EST on December 3rd, 3:20 pm: This article has been updated to include Jeff Dean email sent to Google staff.
