Ex-Googler Timnit Gebru Starts Her Own AI Research Center | WIRED
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One year ago Google artificial intelligence researcher Timnit Gebru tweeted, “I was fired” and ignited a controversy over the freedom of employees to question the impact of their company’s technology. Thursday, she launched a new research institute to ask questions about responsible use of artificial intelligence that Gebru says Google and other tech companies won’t.
“Instead of fighting from the inside, I want to show a model for an independent institution with a different set of incentive structures,” says Gebru, who is founder and executive director of Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research (DAIR). The first part of the name is a reference to her aim to be more inclusive than most AI labs—which skew white, Western, and male—and to recruit people from parts of the world rarely represented in the tech industry.
Gebru was ejected from Google after clashing with bosses over a research paper urging caution with new text-processing technology enthusiastically adopted by Google and other tech companies. Google has said she resigned and was not fired, but acknowledged that it later fired Margaret Mitchell, another researcher who with Gebru co-led a team researching ethical AI. The company placed new checks on the topics its researchers can explore. Google spokesperson Jason Freidenfelds declined to comment but directed WIRED to a recent report on the company’s work on AI governance, which said Google has published more than 500 papers on “responsible innovation” since 2018.
The fallout at Google highlighted the inherent conflicts in tech companies sponsoring or employing researchers to study the implications of technology they seek to profit from. Earlier this year, organizers of a leading conference on technology and society canceled Google’s sponsorship of the event. Gebru says DAIR will be freer to question the potential downsides of AI and will be unencumbered by the academic politics and pressure to publish that she says can complicate university research.
DAIR is currently a project of nonprofit Code for Science and Society but will later incorporate as a nonprofit in its own right, Gebru says. Her project has received grants totaling more than $3 million from the Ford, MacArthur, Rockefeller, and Open Society foundations, as well as the Kapor Center. Over time, she hopes to diversify DAIR’s financial support by taking on consulting work related to its research.
DAIR joins a recent flourishing of work and organizations taking a broader and critical view of AI technology. New nonprofits and university centers have sprung up to study and critique AI’s effects in and on the world, such as NYU’s AI Now Institute, the Algorithmic Justice League, and Data for Black Lives. Some researchers in AI labs also study the impacts and proper use of algorithms, and scholars from other fields such as law and sociology have turned their own critical eyes on AI.