Tesla has released the latest version of its Full Self-Driving tech -- which allows the car to maneuver city and residential streets without human input -- to around 400,000 people in North America, quadrupling the number of people using it during much of 2022. That has renewed questions about the tech's safety. Government investigators are looking into whether Tesla's driver-assistance features caused crashes. And in January, a report emerged that a former Tesla engineer had testified that a 2016 demo of in which the company claimed one of its cars was driving itself was actually staged.

Machine learning engineer Ari Font was worried about the future of Twitter's algorithms. It was mid-2020, and the leader of the team researching ethics and accountability for the company's ML had just left Twitter. For Font, the future of the ethics research was unclear. Font was the manager of Twitter's machine learning platforms teams -- part of Twitter Cortex, the company's central ML organization -- at the time, but she believed that ethics research could transform the way Twitter relies on machine learning. She'd always felt that algorithmic accountability and ethics should shape not just how Twitter used algorithms, but all practical AI applications.