Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai sent an internal memo on Wednesday pledging to further investigate a recent controversy involving the departure of one of the company s top artificial intelligence ethicists, Timnit Gebru.
In early December, Gebru – who had previously collaborated with MIT Media Lab researchers on bias in facial recognition software – posted on Twitter that she had been fired from Google. The company says that it accepted her resignation after she gave them conditions for her continued employment that it could not fulfill. I’ve heard the reaction to Dr. Gebru’s departure loud and clear: It seeded doubts and led some in our community to question their place at Google, wrote Pichai in the memo, which was obtained by