The Dark Side of Big Tech's Funding for AI Research

Last week, prominent Google artificial intelligence researcher Timnit Gebru said she was fired by the company after managers asked her to retract or withdraw her name from a research paper, and she objected. Google maintains that she resigned, and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in a company memo on Wednesday that he would investigate what happened. The episode is a pointed reminder of tech companies' influence and power over their field. Big companies pump out influential research papers, fund academic conferences, compete to hire top researchers, and own the data centers required for large-scale AI experiments. A recent study found that the majority of tenure-track faculty at four prominent universities that disclose funding sources had received backing from Big Tech.