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  | Timnit Gebru was a star researcher at Google who warned that messy AI can spread racism and other ills. But Google's pushback on a paper she cowrote ended in her leaving the company late last year—with much of the ensuing controversy playing out over company email, listservs, and Twitter. WIRED senior writer Tom Simonite spoke to Gebru to understand how Google ended up ousting a prominent AI ethics researcher and diversity advocate—and whether Big Tech can regulate from within. The paper at the heart of the controversy warned that biases could be built into large language models, a new generation of AI systems for interpreting or generating text. Simonite reports that the paper had largely been deemed uncontroversial, but Gebru's bosses asked her to retract the paper or remove her name from it. She asked for guidance in revising the paper, and soon after, Gebru tweeted that she had been fired. (Google maintains she resigned.) "The story of what actually happened in the lead-up to Gebru's exit from Google reveals a more tortured and complex backdrop," Simonite writes. "It's the tale of a gifted engineer who was swept up in the AI revolution before she became one of its biggest critics, a refugee who worked her way to the center of the tech industry and became determined to reform it. It's also about a company—the world's fifth largest—trying to regain its equilibrium after four years of scandals, controversies, and mutinies, but doing so in ways that unbalanced the ship even further." Read more here. |  | In Monday's newsletter, there was a broken link on our recommended video, about a bar owner who built an alarm to stop you from forgetting your credit card. Here's the correct link; it's well worth watching. | |
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