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Google can’t get out of its own way.
Already facing an antitrust case (and labor dispute), the search giant is embroiled in a controversy with Timnit Gebru, a star AI researcher who was forced out of the company last week.
A champion of diversity in tech, Gebru’s previous research notably discovered gender and skin-type bias in facial recognition technology.
According to the MIT Technology Review, these models — AIs trained on staggering amounts of text data — are “key to Google’s business.”
Here are some of Gebru’s latest research findings:
Potentially.
Many AI ethicists believe Google “pushed her out because of the inconvenient truths that she was uncovering about a core line of its research” writes the MIT Technology Review.
A letter in support of Gebru has been signed by 1.5k+ Google employees and 2.1k+ academics in the AI field.
(Read more: Tech writer Casey Newton shared the email exchange between Gebru and her boss, Jeff Dean, that led to her departure.)