Photographer: David Paul Morris / Bloomberg
Photographer: David Paul Morris / Bloomberg
Google fired the lead of its Arctic Ethics team, Meg Mitchell, overcoming the turmoil surrounding his AI department following the departure of Timnit Gebru, a former Mitchell colleague.
Following Friday’s shooting, Google’s AI chief executive Jeff Dean tried to forge a relationship with the company’s employees, saying at a handshake that he took “some responsibility” for the breach of trust with employees research.
“I’m taking some responsibility and me feeling other leaders in the organization will also take over, ”Dean said during the meeting. “We know the team is ethical AI feeling kind of harassment with the decision to ask some members of that team to withdraw the paper and other events. ”
Earlier, Mitchell tweet “I’m burned,” she says, “in too much pain to express much of anything useful. The shooting of @timnitGebru created a domino effect on trauma for me and the rest of the team, and I believe we are getting more punishment for that trauma. “
Mitchell ‘s firing indicated that even when Google tried to move past the turmoil in its AI division with an apology, a change of leadership and new policies, the uproar did not indicate that they were giving up.
Mitchell had been a public critic about Google and its management after Gebru left. Gebru, one of the few most prominent Black women in AI research, said she was fired in December after she refused to withdraw a search paper that was critical of Google’s core technology or the authors ’removal. The company has said it has resigned. Mitchell co-authored the paper. Former colleagues expressed anger over the way Google handled the matter.
The Alphabet Inc. Mitchell has been accused of downloading files from her systems and they said he would review his conduct. For five weeks, Mitchell, who had co-led the Ethical AI team with Gebru, was locked out of all physical systems – unable to access her email or calendar.
“After investigating the conduct of this manager, we identified a number of breaches of our code of conduct, in addition to our security policies, which included the deletion of confidential documents. was aware of the business and private data of other employees, ”a Google spokesperson said in a statement.
Mitchell’s dismissal came the same day Dean apologized in an email to staff for what he had done he handled the departure of Gebru and promised to put officers forward on diversity progress. Dean also said that Google would double its human resources workforce dedicated to employee retention.
Alex Hanna, a researcher on Google’s Ethical AI team, wrote that the internet giant has a dual standard for behavior, citing allegations of sexual misconduct against former officers.
“Google is a breeding ground for anti-talkers, opportunity-seekers, and people who are just about ego and fame,” Hanna wrote on Twitter. “But the door is open to anyone who is willing to protect friends from discrimination, who raise voices that need to be heard. ”
Dean, in his email to employees, said that Google ‘s behavior towards Gebru hurt some female and black employees and asked them if they were with the company, but they did not. he apologized to Gebru. The company announced a new group for responsible AI use on Thursday, led by Marian Croak, an honorary Black action group that had previously addressed site reliability. But some members of the Ethical AI team, which reports to Croak, feeling blind to the news.
Later, at the staff meeting, Dean said he was not trying to “punish anyone” by reorganizing the company’s accountable AI efforts.
Mitchell joined Google in November 2016 after spending time at the Microsoft Corp. search lab, where she worked on the company’s Seeing AI project, a technology to help blind users to A “view” of the world around them that was greatly enhanced by Chief Executive Satya Nadella. At Google, she founded the Ethical AI team in 2017 and worked on projects including a way to explain what machine learning models do and their limitations, and how to make machine learning data more accountable and clearer.
(Updates with comments from the executive team begin in the second paragraph.)