Google is reorganizing its responsible AI teams after Timnit Gebru’s resignation. The AI ethics team will now reach Marian Croak, a prominent black executive in the engineering department. Croak will also supervise employees focused on fair engineering products, according to Bloomberg. She will report to Jeff Dean, who leads the company’s AI efforts.
The AI ethics team was not aware of the reorganization until Wednesday night’s news.
The change is an attempt to stabilize the department, which has been in crisis for months, Bloomberg reports. In December, Timnit Gebru, co-leader of the AI ethics team, announced that she had been fired abruptly. The following month, the company began investigating its counterpart Margaret Mitchell, who used a script to read his emails for examples of discrimination against Gebru. Mitchell now says that she was blocked from your corporate accounts for more than five weeks.
Before his resignation, Gebru tried to publish an article on the dangers of the great models of language processing. Megan Kacholia, vice president of Google search, asked her to withdraw the article. Gebru stepped back, saying the company needed to be more transparent about the publishing process. Shortly after, she was fired.
The AI ethics team published a six-page letter after Gebru’s termination, calling for Kacholia to be replaced. “We lost confidence in Megan Kacholia and asked for her to be removed from our reporting chain,” said the letter.
Now, the team may be fulfilling your wish. As part of the reorganization, Kacholia will no longer lead ethical AI researchers, according to Bloomberg. It is unclear what this means for Margaret Mitchell, who is still being investigated by the company.
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Verge.