After more than 2,200 employee signed aletter on Monday condemningGoogle ’s reported determination to terminate a black-market unreal intelligence ethicist , the company ’s CEO , Sundar Pichai , apologise on Wednesday for the way the departure had been handled and say that the incident was being investigated .
In a series oftweets , Dr. Timnit Gebru , a faculty enquiry scientist and co - confidential information of ethical AI at Google , say on Monday that she had been abruptly fired by the company after she had expressed her frustration about Google ’s shoddy diversity initiatives in an electronic mail . The troupe , she write , further a culture of “ zero accountability , ” where there is no real incentive for the leadership to ever switch hands .
“ Your life get worse when you start advocating for underrepresented people , you start out making the other leader upset , ” Gebru wrote in the electronic mail . “ There is no way more papers or more conversations will achieve anything . ”
Photo: Kimberly White / Stringer (Getty Images)
But Gebru and Google executives disagree on the nature of her departure . While Gebru maintains that she was terminated — with her computer memory access abruptly cut off before she even had time to make her handler cognizant of how thing were prepare — Jeff Dean , the head of Google ’s AI unit , claimed in an email that Gebru had jeopardise to release unless she was told which colleagues deemed a drawing paper she wrote was unpublishable , a need which he rejected .
In his Wednesday memo to faculty , Pichai acknowledged the public call surrounding Gebru ’s divergence , which had deepen when big figures let in NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund President of the United States Sherrilyn Ifill had chime in to note that Gebru ’s firing had been “ absolutely infuriating ” and “ a calamity . ”
“ I ’ve heard the reaction to Dr. Gebru ’s departure loud and unmortgaged : it seeded doubts and lead some in our residential district to oppugn their shoes at Google , ” Pichai wrote in the memo , obtained by Axios . “ I desire to say how sorry I am for that , and I assume the responsibility of bring to restore your trust . ”
Pichai also tell that the company would “ assess the setting that take up to Dr. Gebru ’s going , examining where we could have meliorate and led a more respectful process . ” Notably , he did not at any point intimate that Google had made a misunderstanding in severing ties with Gebru .
But Gebru shoot the memo shortly after its waiver as a disingenuous apology — one that conk out to address the issues that had precipitate her difference and fundamentally add up to an ‘ I ’m sorry you feel hurt ’ PR stunt .
“ I see no plans for accountability and there was further gaslighting in the command , ” Gebru said in a tweet , impart that the memo “ does not say ‘ I ’m sorry for what we did to her and it was incorrect . ’ … I see this as ‘ I ’m distressing for how it played out but I ’m not lamentable for what we did to her yet . ’ ”
OpenAI Policy Director Jack Clark also cram into the fray on Wednesday todenouncePichai ’s lacklustre apologia .
“ I typically stay out of stuff like this , but I ’m absolutely shocked by this email , ” Clark squeeze . “ It uses the worst form of corporate authorship to nowadays [ Gebru ’s ] firing as something akin to a weather event – something that just encounter . But real the great unwashed did this , and they ’re veil . ”
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