“I’ve heard the reaction to Dr. Gebru’s departure loud and clear: It seeded doubts and led some in our community to question their place at Google. I want to say how sorry I am for that, and I accept the responsibility of working to restore your trust,” Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in a Dec. 9 email to the company.
The former A.I. co-lead, Timnit Gebru, PhD, left the company last week after sending an email highlighting biases built into its artificial intelligence technology, according to The New York Times.
The company retracted one of Dr. Gebru’s papers that identified a flaw in Google’s language technology, including a system that powers Google’s search engine. Dr. Gebru said she requested an explanation for why the paper was retracted and stated she would resign without a satisfactory response.
Google accepted her statement as her resignation, igniting an industry backlash.
Mr. Pichai said Google would review the incident and make changes.
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