What Really Happened When Google Ousted Timnit Gebru

One afternoon in late November of last year, Timnit Gebru was sitting on the couch in her San Francisco Bay Area home, crying. Gebru, a researcher at Google, had just clicked out of a last-minute video meeting with an executive named Megan Kacholia, who had issued a jarring command. Gebru was the coleader of a group at the company that studies the social and ethical ramifications of artificial intelligence, and Kacholia had ordered Gebru to retract her latest research paper--or else remove her name from its list of authors, along with those of several other members of her team. The paper in question was, in Gebru's mind, pretty unobjectionable. It surveyed the known pitfalls of so-called large language models, a type of AI software--most famously exemplified by a system called GPT-3--that was stoking excitement in the tech industry.