A lot of disputes have been taking place in Alphabet Inc’s Google regarding ethics and work culture among the company’s employees. The intensity of the situation has been rattled as two engineers of Google resigned after the company dismissed the AI researcher Timnit Gebru. From the engineering department, one engineering director and a software developer quit Google and it’s a sign of not approving of the departure of Timnit Gebru.
Diversity and ethics have become a point of conflict on Google for some time now as David Baker, an employee of Google resigned last month. He worked at Google for sixteen years and during his departure, he said that Gebru’s dismissal “extinguished my desire to continue as a Googler”(witnessed by Reuters). David Baker worked as a director in the user safety division in Google. He also mentioned that the environment of Google was acting against the belief of diversity though it claimed otherwise. His exact words were “We cannot say we believe in diversity, and then ignore the conspicuous absence of many voices from within our walls.”
Resignation of Kannan
Vinesh Kannan, a software engineer who worked at Google resigned on Tuesday. On Wednesday, he tweeted about his resignation and that Google mistreated Timnit Gebru. He also mentioned April Christina Curley, an ex-employee of Google who claimed that she was wrongly fired by the company. The dismissal of April took place last year which means that the tension regarding diversity in work culture is going on in Google for a long time. Kannan also mentioned that both of them were wrong but Google declined to comment on this. The company has assured that it is trying its best to restore trust between the company and its employees, also it disputes April’s accusations.
Why the sudden disputes?
The tension regarding the departure of Timnit has been growing for the last few months. The workers in Google have demanded academic freedom and management commitments in the company’s research organization. In December, around 2,600 employees of Google signed a letter supporting Timnit, and last month more than 800 people joined a union to bring advancement in workplace protection.
The story of Timnit Gebru
Timnit Gebru is one of the most leading Black women who have a very impactful contribution in the field of ethical AI. Last year, Timnit was promoted by Google as the co-leader of a group focussed on ethical AI due to her remarkable performance in annual employee appraisal. After she was promoted, Jeff Dean, head of Google AI, only made a single comment regarding what she and her team are supposed to focus on. He mentioned that Timnit and her team should look forward to building software for processing human language that should abide by the AI principles of the company.
There was an exchange of email conversations between Timnit and Jeff during October 2020. Timnit informed Jeff that her team was working on a paper which was regarding the same area of understanding the complexity of language while Jeff told her that he would be interested in reading it. And, after six weeks of that conversation, Timnit was surprisingly fired by Google. She was on her vacation when she received the news.
Explaining Timnit’s departure
After Timnit was fired by Google, Jeff tried to explain the situation to his other employees. Jeff mentioned that the paper she and her team was working on didn’t meet the publication bar of the company. He also mentioned that the paper was missing relevant information regarding the recent improvements done in this field. While Timnit’s superiors tried to convince her to retract the paper Google’s Research team mentioned that the previous works of authors who claimed benefits of large language models were not scrutinized properly before approval. This created a lot of fuss questioning Google’s scrutiny process.
Annasha Dey is an NIT student, who apart from studying engineering is also a content writer. She has a great interest in photography, writing, reading novels, and travelling as well. She is a foodie who loves socializing and hanging out with her friends. She is also a trained Kathak dancer and a big fashion enthusiast. Dey also loves watching TV series, which includes F.R.I.E.N.D.S. and Big Bang Theory. To be a better writer she prefers to read more