In late 2018, Google AI researchers Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini got the go-ahead to test an elegant idea. Google had invented powerful computer chips called tensor processing units, or TPUs, to run machine learning algorithms inside its data centers--but, the pair wondered, what if AI software could help improve that same AI hardware? The project, later codenamed Morpheus, won support from Google's AI boss Jeff Dean and attracted interest from the company's chipmaking team. It focused on a step in chip design when engineers must decide how to physically arrange blocks of circuits on a chunk of silicon, a complex, months-long puzzle that helps determine a chip's performance. In June 2021, Goldie and Mirhoseini were lead authors on a paper in the journal Nature that claimed a technique called reinforcement learning could perform that step better than Google's own engineers, and do it in just a few hours.

This was what Debbie and her team wanted to accomplish with Style AI. Style AI is a Shopping feature that helps people see how a product looks on various types of body styles and offers styling advice. Style AI works by using a machine learning algorithm to look at a specific product and visually understand it. "So if someone searches'gingham long sleeve shirt,' Style AI will look at images of long-sleeved gingham shirts, apply our vision recognition technology and understand things like the pattern and the sleeve length and show users fashions that might interest them." In order to make sure Style AI was inclusive of all different types of shapes, sizes and skin tones Debbie consulted with Google's Product Fairness, or ProFair, team.

Google has lost a couple of talents due to the way it treated and the departure of its former top AI ethics researcher, Dr. Timnit Gebru. According to Reuters, engineering director David Baker left the tech giant last month after 16 years with the company. In a letter seen by the news organization, Baker said Gebru's exit "extinguished [his] desire to continue as a Googler." He added: "We cannot say we believe in diversity, and then ignore the conspicuous absence of many voices from within our walls." Software engineer Vinesh Kannan, who built infrastructure and features for organic shopping on the website, has also left the company.

Gebru, an alumni of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, is one of the leading voices in the ethical use of artificial intelligence. She is well-known for her work on a landmark study in 2018 that showed how facial recognition software misidentified dark-skinned women as much as 35% of the time, whereas the technology worked with near precision on white men. She has also been an outspoken critic of the lack of diversity and unequal treatment of Black workers at tech companies, particularly at Alphabet Inc.'s Google, and said she believed her dismissal was meant to send a message to the rest of Google's employees not to speak up. Platformer received the email Gebru sent; she herself did not have access to her account after Google terminated her. It is published in full below.

I had stopped writing here as you may know, after all the micro and macro aggressions and harassments I received after posting my stories here (and then of course it started being moderated). Recently however, I was contributing to a document that Katherine and Daphne were writing where they were dismayed by the fact that after all this talk, this org seems to have hired 14% or so women this year. Samy has hired 39% from what I understand but he has zero incentive to do this. What I want to say is stop writing your documents because it doesn't make a difference. The DEI OKRs that we don't know where they come from (and are never met anyways), the random discussions, the "we need more mentorship" rather than "we need to stop the toxic environments that hinder us from progressing" the constant fighting and education at your cost, they don't matter.

At the time of Google's birth, in 1998, Microsoft was in mortal combat with the Department of Justice, which had launched an epic antitrust suit against Bill Gates and his minions. Microsoft was accused of being a behemoth that dominated the entire industry. The DOJ won the suit, although it failed to break up the company as it had hoped. But it did hobble the Redmond, Washington giant in its efforts to dominate the world. Google was one of the companies that benefited.

Google has trained over 5,000 employees who were part of its customer-facing Cloud teams in asking critical questions to spot potential ethical issues, such as whether an AI application might lead to economic or educational exclusion or cause physical, psychological, social or environmental harm. In addition to launching the initial'Tech Ethics' training that over 800 Googlers have taken since its launch last year, Google developed a new training for AI Principles issue spotting. "We piloted the course with more than 2,000 Googlers, and it is now available as an online self-study course to all Googlers across the company," the company said. Google recently released a version of this training as a mandatory course for customer-facing Cloud teams and 5,000 Cloud employees have already taken it. "Our goal is for Google to be a helpful partner not only to researchers and developers who are building AI applications, but also to the billions of people who use them in everyday products," said the tech giant.

Suicide disproportionately affects LGBTQ youth. In the U.S. alone, more than 1.8 million LGBTQ youth between the ages of 13 and 24 seriously consider suicide or experience a significant crisis each year. Additionally, LGBTQ youth are over four times more likely to attempt suicide than their peers, while up to 50 percent of all trans people have made a suicide attempt--most before the age of 25. Black LGBTQ young people are even more impacted as they hold multiple marginalized identities, and research shows that Black youth ages five to 12 are dying by suicide at roughly twice the rate of their white peers. To support this particularly vulnerable and diverse community, The Trevor Project takes an intersectional approach to crisis intervention and suicide prevention.

Details Hello! all Greetings from *GDG Hildesheim* We're sure most of you are interested in learning new technologies and tools. That's why we're excited to participate in the first Community Speedrun Challenge that Google is organizing for developer communities in Europe. And as part of the GDG-Hildesheim, you're among the first to know about this!! The Community Speedrun Challenge is a training program that will run in May where you'll have the opportunity to join four Speedruns and get hands-on experience with Machine Learning on Google Cloud and Tensorflow, and take your first steps with tools like BigQuery, Cloud Speech API, and Cloud ML Engine. Every Speedrun is open for a week to give you the ability to finish all labs in your best time, scoring more points and winning prizes.

"Do you believe in magic?" Google asked attendees of its annual developer conference this May, playing the seminal Lovin' Spoonful tune as an introduction. Throughout the three-day event, company executives repeatedly answered yes while touting new features of the Google Assistant, the company's version of Alexa or Siri, that can indeed feel magical. The tool can book you a rental car, tell you what the weather is like at your mother's house, and even interpret live conversations across 26 languages. But to some of the Google employees responsible for making the Assistant work, the tagline of the conference – "Keep making magic" – obscured a more mundane reality: the technical wizardry relies on massive data sets built by subcontracted human workers earning low wages. "It's smoke and mirrors if anything," said a current Google employee who, as with the others quoted in this story, spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.