{"id":131638,"date":"2021-12-02T11:24:21","date_gmt":"2021-12-02T19:24:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/12\/ex-googler-timnit-gebru-starts-her-own-ai-research-center"},"modified":"2021-12-02T11:24:21","modified_gmt":"2021-12-02T19:24:21","slug":"ex-googler-timnit-gebru-starts-her-own-ai-research-center","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/12\/ex-googler-timnit-gebru-starts-her-own-ai-research-center","title":{"rendered":"Ex-Googler Timnit Gebru Starts Her Own AI Research Center"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/ex-googler-timnit-gebru-starts-her-own-ai-research-center3.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>ONE YEAR AGO Google <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wired.com\/tag\/artificial-intelligence\/\">artificial intelligence<\/a> researcher Timnit Gebru <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wired.com\/story\/prominent-ai-ethics-researcher-says-google-fired-her\/\">tweeted, \u201cI was fired\u201d<\/a> and ignited a controversy over the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wired.com\/story\/google-timnit-gebru-ai-what-really-happened\/\">freedom of employees to question the impact of their company\u2019s technology<\/a>. Thursday, she launched a new research institute to ask questions about responsible use of artificial intelligence that Gebru says Google and other tech companies won\u2019t.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cInstead of fighting from the inside, I want to show a model for an independent institution with a different set of incentive structures,\u201d says Gebru, who is founder and executive director of Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research (DAIR). The first part of the name is a reference to her aim to be more inclusive than most AI labs\u2014which <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wired.com\/story\/artificial-intelligence-researchers-gender-imbalance\/\">skew white, Western, and male <\/a>\u2014and to recruit people from parts of the world rarely represented in the tech industry.<\/p>\n<p>Gebru was ejected from Google after clashing with bosses over a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wired.com\/story\/behind-paper-led-google-researchers-firing\/\">research paper urging caution<\/a> with new text-processing technology <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wired.com\/story\/stanford-proposal-ai-foundations-ignites-debate\/\">enthusiastically adopted by Google and other tech companies<\/a>. Google has said she resigned and was not fired, but acknowledged that it later <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wired.com\/story\/second-ai-researcher-says-fired-google\/\">fired Margaret Mitchell<\/a>, another researcher who with Gebru co-led a team researching ethical AI. The company <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wired.com\/story\/google-timnit-gebru-ai-what-really-happened\/\">placed new checks<\/a> on the topics its researchers can explore. Google spokesperson Jason Freidenfelds declined to comment but directed WIRED to a <a class=\"\"  data-offer-url=\"https:\/\/storage.googleapis.com\/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod\/documents\/AI_Principles_Progress_Update_2021.pdf\" href=\"https:\/\/storage.googleapis.com\/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod\/documents\/AI_Principles_Progress_Update_2021.pdf\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">recent report<\/a> on the company\u2019s work on AI governance, which said Google has published more than 500 papers on \u201cresponsible innovation\u201d since 2018.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>ONE YEAR AGO Google artificial intelligence researcher Timnit Gebru tweeted, \u201cI was fired\u201d and ignited a controversy over the freedom of employees to question the impact of their company\u2019s technology. Thursday, she launched a new research institute to ask questions about responsible use of artificial intelligence that Gebru says Google and other tech companies won\u2019t. [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":578,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1759,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-131638","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-governance","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131638","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/578"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131638"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131638\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}