BIGGER THAN BIAS

THREE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-FOUR DAYS AFTER she lost her job as a co-lead of Google’s ethical artificial intelligence (AI) team, Timnit Gebru is nestled into a couch at an Airbnb rental in Boston, about to embark on a new phase in her career.

Google hired Gebru in 2018 to help ensure that its AI products did not perpetuate racism or other societal inequalities. In her role, Gebru hired prominent researchers of color, published several papers that highlighted biases and ethical risks, and spoke at conferences. She also began raising her voice internally about her experiences of racism and sexism at work. But it was one of her research papers that led to her departure. “I had so many issues at Google,” Gebru tells TIME over a Zoom call. “But the censorship of my paper was the worst instance.”

In that fateful paper, Gebru and her co-authors questioned the ethics of large language AI models, which seek to understand and reproduce human language. Google is a world leader in AI research, an industry forecast to contribute $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030, according to accounting firm PwC. But Gebru’s paper suggested that, in their rush to build bigger, more powerful language models, companies including Google weren’t stopping to think about the kinds of biases being built into them—biases that could entrench existing inequalities, rather than help solve them. It also raised concerns about the environmental impact of the AIs, which use huge amounts of energy. In the battle for AI dominance, Big Tech companies were seemingly prioritizing profits over safety, the authors suggested, calling for the industry to slow down. “It was like, You built this thing, but mine is even bigger,” Gebru recalls of the atmosphere at the time. “When you have that attitude, you’re obviously not thinking about ethics.”

Gebru’s departure from Google