In the aftermath of Friday’s firing, Google’s head of AI, Jeff Dean, tried to repair relations with the company’s staff, saying at an all-hands meeting that he took “some responsibility” for the break in trust with researchers.
“I take some amount of responsibility and I feel like other leads in the organization also take responsibility,” Dean said during the meeting. “We know that the ethical AI team feels sort of aggrieved by the decision to ask some members of that team to retract the paper and other subsequent events.”
Earlier, Mitchell tweeted “I’m fired,” adding she was “in too much pain to articulate much of anything useful. Firing @timnitGebru created a domino effect of trauma for me and the rest of the team, and I believe we are being increasingly punished for that trauma.”