Google sacks top AI researcher

Atop Google scientist on ethical artificial intelligence says she was fired after criticizing the company’s diversity efforts, a claim the Alphabet Inc unit disputed, in the latest brush-up between the internet giant and worker activists.
Timnit Gebru, who is Black, said on Twitter she was fired on Wednesday after sending an email to colleagues expressing frustration over gender diversity within Google’s AI unit and questioning whether company leaders reviewed her work more stringently than that of people from different backgrounds. Gebru co-founded the nonprofit Black in AI that aims to increase representation of people of color in artificial intelligence and co-authored a landmark paper on bias in facial analysis technology.
Jeff Dean, head of Google’s AI unit, told staff in an email reviewed by Reuters that Gebru had threatened to resign unless she was told which colleagues deemed a draft paper she wrote was unpublishable, a demand Dean rejected.
“We accept and respect her decision to resign from Google,” Dean wrote in the email, adding, “we all genuinely share Timnit’s passion to make AI more equitable and inclusive.”