Timnit Gebru's Exit From Google Exposes a Crisis in AI

Alex Hanna is a sociologist and senior research scientist on the Ethical AI team at Google. Meredith Whittaker is the Minderoo Research Professor at NYU, the faculty director of the AI Now Institute at NYU, and a long-time tech worker who helped lead labor organizing at Google. This year has held many things, among them bold claims of artificial intelligence breakthroughs. Industry commentators speculated that the language-generation model GPT-3 may have achieved "artificial general intelligence," while others lauded Alphabet subsidiary DeepMind's protein-folding algorithm--Alphafold--and its capacity to "transform biology." While the basis of such claims is thinner than the effusive headlines, this hasn't done much to dampen enthusiasm across the industry, whose profits and prestige are dependent on AI's proliferation.