She was a star engineer who warned that messy AI can spread racism. Google brought her in. Then it forced her out. Can Big Tech take criticism from within?
Google employees reportedly begged the company to not launch Bard over the chatbot s "pathological" lies, but the company ultimately opened access to the ChatGPT rival last month.
Giannandrea himself joined the company in 2018 after spending roughly eight years at Google.
Bengio, who oversaw AI ethics at Google Brain left the company on 28 April following the announcement of his resignation earlier in the month. Although he cited the desire to pursue “other exciting opportunities”, his departure followed a series of controversial dismissals, including those involving two close colleagues, Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell.
Gebru claims to have been fired in December after Bengio’s manager at the time, Megan Kacholia, asked her to retract a paper co-written with Mitchell. In the research paper, they criticised the algorithms Google had deployed in its search engine.
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Google research manager Samy Bengio, who oversaw the company’s AI ethics group until a controversy led to the ouster of two female leaders, resigned on Tuesday to pursue other opportunities.
Mr Bengio, who managed hundreds of researchers in the Google Brain team, announced his departure in an email to staff that was obtained by Bloomberg. His last day will be April 28. An expert in a type of AI known as machine learning, Mr Bengio joined Google in 2007.
Ousted Ethical AI co-leads Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell had reported to Bengio and considered him an ally. In February, Google reorganised the research unit, placing the remaining Ethical AI group members under Marian Croak, cutting Mr Bengio’s responsibilities.
February 24th, 2021
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AI and ML systems have advanced in both sophistication and capability at a staggering rate in recent years. They can now model protein structures based only on the molecule’s amino-acid sequence, create poetry and text on par with human writers even spot specific individuals in a crowd (assuming their complexion is sufficiently light). But for as impressive as these feats of computational prowess are, the field continues to struggle with a number of fundamental moral and ethical issues. A facial recognition system designed to identify terrorists can just as easily be leveraged to monitor peaceful protesters or suppress ethnic minorities, depending on how it is deployed.