Timnit Gebru Concepts

Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

by Karen Hao · 19 May 2025 · 660pp · 179,531 words

thought of writing his own book about extinction-level threats, including AI. Later, at a recurring AI Salon event at Stanford, a young researcher named Timnit Gebru would come up to him after a talk and ask him why he was so obsessed with AI when the threat of climate change was

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machine learning engineer and popular tech blogger observing from the sidelines. Not everyone was impressed. On the night of OpenAI’s launch in December 2015, Timnit Gebru, the AI researcher who’d questioned Musk about prioritizing the threats of AI over climate change, couldn’t believe the announcement. All week the Stanford

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problematic than the stock photos it was using to teach the model what was acceptable. It was a shocking realization that would push Raji, like Timnit Gebru, to severely question the dominant direction of AI development. In the late 2010s and early 2020s, as the challenges of deep learning grew more apparent

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the public one number to convey the sheer size of the model: 175 billion parameters, over one hundred times the size of GPT-2. * * * — To Timnit Gebru, the Ethiopia-born Stanford researcher, the scaling trend posed myriad other challenges. By then, she had become a prominent figure within AI research and had

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letter on Medium protesting Google’s treatment of Gebru was tearing through the tech community like wildfire. “We, the undersigned, stand in solidarity with Dr. Timnit Gebru,” it wrote, “who was terminated from her position…following unprecedented research censorship.” I needed to get my hands on that paper. In the early evening

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around the world that have blossomed to resist the empires of AI, assert their rights to self-determination, and envision a new way forward. After Timnit Gebru was ousted from Google, she founded a nonprofit in December 2021 to continue her research. She named it DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute—“distributed

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(blog), January 24, 2019, blog.samaltman.com/how-to-be-successful. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Later, at a recurring AI: Author interview with Timnit Gebru, August 2023. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Murdering all competing”: Tad Friend, “Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny,” New Yorker, October 3, 2016, newyorker.com

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“It was a beacon”: Author interview with Chip Huyen, August 2019. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT All week the Stanford University: Author interview with Timnit Gebru, March 2021. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Hello from Timnit”: Copy of the email, provided by Gebru. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Some

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,” preprint, arXiv, April 23, 2021, doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2104.10350. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT This included a groundbreaking: Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru, “Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification,” in Proceedings of the 1st Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency (2018): 77–91, proceedings.mlr

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Tech’s Control,” MIT Technology Review, June 14, 2021, technologyreview.com/2021/06/14/1026148/ai-big-tech-timnit-gebru-paper-ethics. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT had approached Gebru: Author interview with Timnit Gebru, August 2023. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT In 2017, a Facebook: Alex Hern, “Facebook Translates ‘Good Morning

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, including one day after her ouster, as well as a detailed account in Tom Simonite, “What Really Happened When Google Ousted Timnit Gebru,” Wired, June 8, 2021, wired.com/story/google-timnit-gebru-ai-what-really-happened. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT If not, she would be: Dialogue between Gebru and Emily M

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REFERENCE IN TEXT “Definitely not my area”: Simonite, “What Really Happened.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT In total, it presented four: Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Shmargaret Shmitchell [Meg Mitchell], “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? “” in FAccT ’21: Proceedings of

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-ethical. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “We, the undersigned”: Google Walkout for Real Change, “Standing with Dr. Timnit Gebru—#ISupportTimnit #BelieveBlackWomen,” Medium, December 3, 2020, https://googlewalkout.medium.com/standing-with-dr-timnit-gebru-isupporttimnit-believeblackwomen-6dadc300d382. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT A few hours later, I: Karen Hao, “We Read the

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Paper That Forced Timnit Gebru out of Google. Here’s What It Says,” MIT Technology Review, December 4, 2020, technologyreview.com

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/2020/12/04/1013294/google-ai-ethics-research-paper-forced-out-timnit-gebru. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT On December 9, as protests: Ina Fried, “Scoop: Google CEO Pledges to Investigate Exit of Top AI Ethicist,” Axios

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, December 9, 2020, axios.com/2020/12/09/sundar-pichai-memo-timnit-gebru-exit. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT On December 16, representatives: Karen Hao, “Congress Wants Answers from Google About Timnit Gebru’s Firing,” MIT Technology Review, December 17, 2020, technologyreview.com/2020/12/17/1014994/congress

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: Mozilla, “About DeepSpeech,” Mozilla GitHub, accessed December 16, 2024, mozilla.github.io/deepspeech-playbook/DEEPSPEECH.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT After Timnit Gebru was ousted: Author interviews with Timnit Gebru, August 2024; and Milagros Miceli, August 2024. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT she founded a nonprofit: “About Us,” Distributed AI Research

Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race That Will Change the World

by Parmy Olson · 284pp · 96,087 words

seem as futile as trying to turn the Titanic around just moments before hitting the iceberg. Still, that didn’t stop an AI scientist named Timnit Gebru from trying. In December 2015, at the NeurIPS conference where Sam Altman and Elon Musk announced they were creating AI “for the benefit of humanity

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cash offshore, untaxed, and limiting the lifespan of iPhones so that people would have to keep buying them. And behind the scenes at Google, researchers Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell were starting to sound a warning about how language models could amplify prejudice. Tech giants had amassed enormous wealth, and as they

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that statistically, they were less often on the receiving end of the bias problems that were cropping up in AI systems and large language models. Timnit Gebru, the computer scientist who had started coleading Google’s small ethical AI research team with Margaret Mitchell, was hyperaware of how few Black people were

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that these language models were understanding language,” she says. “It was like the arguments never ended.” Bender’s tweets were important, because that’s how Timnit Gebru eventually found her. It was late in the summer of 2021 and Gebru was itching to work on a new research paper about large language

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it would happen. They also tended to advocate for light-touch regulation when they brought those concerns before Congress. The other group included those like Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell, who’d been agitating for years over the risks that AI already posed to society. This “AI ethics” group tended to skew

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25, 2017. Chapter 8: Everything Is Awesome Angwin, Julia, Jeff Larson, Surya Mattu, and Lauren Kirchner. “Machine Bias.” ProPublica, May 23, 2016. Buolamwini, Joy, and Timnit Gebru. “Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification.” Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 81 (2018): 1–15. Dastin, Jeffrey. “Amazon Scraps Secret AI Recruiting

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Still Can’t Find Gorillas. And Neither Can Apple’s.” New York Times, May 22, 2023. Harris, Josh. “There Was All Sorts of Toxic Behaviour’: Timnit Gebru on Her Sacking by Google, AI’s Dangers and Big Tech’s Biases.” The Guardian, May 22, 2023. Horwitz, Jeff. “The Facebook Files.” Wall Street

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Check Their Phones 144 Times a Day. Here’s How to Cut Back.” Fortune, July 19, 2023. Simonite, Tom. “What Really Happened When Google Ousted Timnit Gebru.” Wired, June 8, 2021. “The Social Atrocity: Meta and the Right to Remedy for the Rohingya.” Amnesty International report, September 29, 2022. Wakabayashi, Daisuke, and

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Grant Sims. “How Tech Platforms Fuel U.S. Political Polarization and What Government Can Do about It.” www.brookings.edu, September 27, 2021. Bender, Emily, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Shmargaret Shmitchell. “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” FAccTConference ’21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM

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in Months Leading Up to Jan. 6 Attack, Records Show.” ProPublica and Washington Post, January 4, 2022. Simonite, Tom. “What Really Happened When Google Ousted Timnit Gebru.” Wired, June 8, 2021. Tiku, Nitasha. “The Google Engineer Who Thinks the Company’s AI Has Come to Life.” Washington Post, June 11, 2022. Venkit

The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation

by Cathy O'Neil · 15 Mar 2022 · 318pp · 73,713 words

intelligence engines that power them. This requires the deepest technical expertise. Google, for one, worked to boost its fairness credentials in 2018 when it hired Timnit Gebru from Microsoft. Born in Ethiopia, Gebru had a PhD in AI from Stanford. Alongside MIT researcher Joy Buolamwini and computer whiz Deborah Raji, she had

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/08/18/squidbillies-star-fired-stuart-baker-response-controversy/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT she had published a groundbreaking 2017 study: Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru, “Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification,” ed. Sorelle A. Friedler and Christo Wilson, Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 81 (2018): 1–15

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/buolamwini18a/buolamwini18a.pdf. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT led Amazon and Microsoft to stop selling the software to law enforcement: Nitasha Tiku, “Google Hired Timnit Gebru to Be an Outspoken Critic of Unethical AI. Then She Was Fired for It,” The Washington Post, December 23, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology

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/2020/12/23/google-timnit-gebru-ai-ethics/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots”: Karen Hao, “We Read the Paper That Forced

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Timnit Gebru out of Google. Here’s What It Says,” MIT Technology Review, December 4, 2020, https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-ai-ethics-

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research-paper-forced-out-timnit-gebru/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT she denounced the company for censoring her: Casey Newton, “The Withering Email That Got an Ethical AI Researcher Fired

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/ds1a.htm. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “research integrity and academic freedom”: “Standing with Dr. Timnit Gebru—#ISupportTimnit #BelieveBlackWomen,” Google Walkout for Real Change, Medium, December 3, 2020, https://googlewalkout.medium.com/standing-with-dr-timnit-gebru-isupporttimnit-believeblackwomen-6dadc300d382. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “I accept the responsibility of working to

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trust”: Ina Fried, “Scoop: Google CEO Pledges to Investigate Exit of Top AI Ethicist,” Axios, December 9, 2020, https://www.axios.com/sundar-pichai-memo-timnit-gebru-exit-18b0efb0-5bc3-41e6-ac28-2956732ed78b.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT one of her top collaborators, Margaret Mitchell, was let go: Tom Simonite

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-ai-researcher-says-fired-google/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT The issues ranged from fairness to freedom and equality: “On the Firing of Dr. Timnit Gebru,” Google Docs, accessed June 7, 2021, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ERi2crDToYhYjEjxRoOzO-uOUeLgdoLPfnx1JOErg2w/view. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “I’m fired”: MMitchell

More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity

by Adam Becker · 14 Jun 2025 · 381pp · 119,533 words

one of the largest AI companies, with billions in funding from Google and Amazon.76 There is even federal funding for AI alignment grants, as Timnit Gebru, AI scientist and founder of the Distributed AI Research Institute, tells me. “So now, even if you don’t want to work in the companies

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their perspectives. That implicit bias on the part of the developers, reflected in training-set selection and in the algorithm designs themselves, exacerbates algorithmic bias. Timnit Gebru is part of that small fraction of the tech industry composed of Black women—and the even smaller fraction who have PhDs in AI. She

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clear ideological link to modern movements like transhumanism and singularitarianism. Through cosmism’s influence on twentieth-century science fiction, the link is historical as well. Timnit Gebru and Émile Torres have dubbed this set of related ideologies (traced throughout this book) the TESCREAL bundle: Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and

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INTERVIEW REQUESTS INTERVIEWS David Chalmers, March 1, 2024, video call Brad DeLong, December 21, 2023, Berkeley, CA Jacob Foster, June 12, 2024, Santa Fe, NM Timnit Gebru, August 23, 2023, Palo Alto, CA David Gerard, May 27, 2023, London, UK J. Storrs Hall, March 19, 2024, video call Michael Hendricks, January 19

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/03/ai-ethics-pioneers-exit-from-google-involved-research-into-risks-and-inequality-in-large-language-models/; Karen Hao, “We Read the Paper That Forced Timnit Gebru Out of Google. Here’s What It Says,” MIT Technology Review, December 4, 2020, www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-ai-ethics-research

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-paper-forced-out-timnit-gebru/. 113 Krystal Hu, “ChatGPT Sets Record for Fastest-Growing User Base,” Reuters, February 2, 2023, www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-sets-record-fastest-growing-user

The Long History of the Future: Why Tomorrow's Technology Still Isn't Here

by Nicole Kobie · 3 Jul 2024 · 348pp · 119,358 words

impact me. If you want real criticism of LLMs and the great AI panic of the early 2020s, there’s one name you should know: Timnit Gebru. When Hinton quit Google, he was awarded interviews in all the best publications, with glowing headlines dubbing him the ‘godfather of AI’. But Gebru left

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when faced with behaviour spurred by poverty. Would it help to have more diversity in the companies developing future tech? Unquestionably. AI researchers such as Timnit Gebru and Joy Buolamwini, whom we met in an earlier chapter, use their time to watch for such flaws, aware of the impact as it reflects

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cars, with activists taking on Google’s Waymo and GM’s Cruise with nothing more than a bit of free time and traffic cones. And Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell may have lost their jobs at Google, but they are winning plenty of headlines and, perhaps, the argument regarding AI. People can

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, here, here, here, here, here Perceptron model here pre-1970s here, here SRI Shakey robot here, here strong vs weak here, here symbolic here, here Timnit Gebru et al AI paper controversy here, here Asimo robot, Honda here ASKA here Asseily, Alex here Atari here, here augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality

AI in Museums: Reflections, Perspectives and Applications

by Sonja Thiel and Johannes C. Bernhardt · 31 Dec 2023 · 321pp · 113,564 words

impact of these facts on their methodology. These reflections should be prominent in the project descriptions, oriented toward the model cards proposed by Margaret Mitchell, Timnit Gebru, and others (Mitchell/ Wu/Zaldivar 2019). What social aspects can we, however, observe when we shift our gaze from image recognition technology or machine learning

Amateurs!: How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters

by Joanna Walsh · 22 Sep 2025 · 255pp · 80,203 words

is in fact built first and foremost to serve the needs of those who already have the most privilege in society,’ wrote AI research scientist Timnit Gebru, sacked from her post as co-leader of Google’s Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team in 2020. One of Google’s complaints against Gebru was her

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abolishes any practical sense of the future and of the collective project, thereby abandoning the thinking of future change to fantasies of sheer catastrophe’.31 Timnit Gebru sees these fantasies recur with disturbing political consequences she identifies using the acronym she developed with Émile P. Torres: TESCREAL – transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism

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(Palliative Art Making in the Age of Anxiety) 2019 Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics 2020/02 Denis Shiryaev, L’arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat 2020 Timnit Gebru, co-leader of Google’s Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team, sacked 2020 Shawn Presser, Books3 2020 Nadeem, Bethke, Reddy, StereoSet 2020 Venvonis, Vowlenu 2021 Harney, Moten

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Neuro-sama, the AI Twitch Streamer Who Plays Minecraft, Sings Karaoke, Loves Art’, Bloomberg, 16 June 2023. 23.Ibid. 24.‘Google AI Ethics Co-Lead Timnit Gebru Says She Was Fired Over an Email’, Venture Beat. 25.Rachel Gordon, ‘Large Language Models Are Biased. Can Logic Help Save them?’, MIT News, 3

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, Drew A. Hudson, Ehsan Adeli, Russ Altman et al., ‘On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models’, arXiv, 12 July 2022. 27.Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major and Shmargaret Shmitchell, ‘On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?’, FAccT ’21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM

The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future

by Keach Hagey · 19 May 2025 · 439pp · 125,379 words

late 2020, a similar fight over safety had broken out at Google over the publication of a controversial paper by lead researchers Emily Bender and Timnit Gebru called “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?”14 The title’s menacing image of a plumed colossus combines the

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Google Brain’s transformer paper. They renamed the model LaMDA, for Language Models for Dialog Applications. It was a lightning rod for controversy. In 2020, Timnit Gebru, the well-known AI ethics researcher, said she was fired for refusing to retract the “Stochastic Parrots” paper that raised questions about the risks of

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, “OpenAI API,” OpenAI blog, June 11, 2020. 13.Tom Simonite, “OpenAI’s Text Generator Is Going Commercial,” Wired, June 11, 2020. 14.Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, Margaret Mitchell, “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness

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, Accountability, and Transparency, 2021. 15.Emily Bobrow, “Timnit Gebru Is Calling Attention to the Pitfall of AI,” The Wall Street Journal, February 24, 2023. 16.Sam Altman @sama, “I am a stochastic parrot and

The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values

by Brian Christian · 5 Oct 2020 · 625pp · 167,349 words

Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity released a face image dataset called IJB-A, boasting, they claimed, “wider geographic variation of subjects.”46 With Microsoft’s Timnit Gebru, Buolamwini did an analysis of the IJB-A and found that it was more than 75% male, and almost 80% light-skinned. Just 4.4

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Shafto. “Children’s Imitation of Causal Action Sequences Is Influenced by Statistical and Pedagogical Evidence.” Cognition 120, no. 3 (2011): 331–40. Buolamwini, Joy, and Timnit Gebru. “Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification.” In Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency, 77–91, 2018. Burda, Yuri, Harri Edwards, Deepak Pathak

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World

by Cade Metz · 15 Mar 2021 · 414pp · 109,622 words

should have been a wake-up call for the industry. It was not. It took other women of color to take this fundamental problem public. Timnit Gebru, who was studying artificial intelligence at Stanford University under Fei-Fei Li, was the Ethiopia-born daughter of an Eritrean couple who had immigrated to

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gender has an effect on the types of questions that we ask,” she said. “You’re putting yourself in a position of myopia.” Mitchell and Timnit Gebru, who joined her at Google, were part of a growing effort to lay down firm ethical frameworks for AI technologies, looking at bias, surveillance, and

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2011. ALAN EUSTACE, the executive and engineer who oversaw Google’s rush into deep learning before leaving the company to set a world skydiving record. TIMNIT GEBRU, the former Stanford researcher who joined the Google ethics team. JOHN “J.G.” GIANNANDREA, the head of AI at Google who defected to Apple. IAN