New AI ethics team at Google Research

I wrote about Google’s AI ethics crisis last December, when the company pushed out their Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team’s co-lead Timnit Gebru after a series of conflicts around a critical paper she was working on. Her dismissal was not received well by her team and the community at large. A few months later, Google also fired Margaret Mitchell, the team’s other co-lead. And now it seems that the dust has settled a bit, internally at least: according to a post on Google’s The Keyword blog, Dr. Marian Croak, long-time VP at the company, “has created and will lead a new center of expertise on responsible AI within Google Research.” I wonder how much of Gebru’s and Mitchell’s original team is sticking around for this new group — the researchers who spoke out publicly did not seem to have much faith left in their ability to work on ethical AI issues from inside Google.