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Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai apologized for the firing of leading AI ethics researcher Timnit Gebru in a companywide memo, following days of mounting anger at Gebru's forced departure from thousands of Google employees and leaders in the AI ethics community.
Pichai pledged to investigate the circumstances of Gebru's departure and accepted responsibility for the fact that a well-respected Black woman left the company "unhappily." Google plans to begin a review of Gebru's firing and consider whether changes should be made to prevent the incidents surrounding her departure from happening again, according to his note. "The events of the last week are a painful but important reminder of the progress we still need to make," he wrote.
"Don't paint me as an 'angry Black woman' for whom you need 'de-escalation strategies' for," Gebru wrote on Twitter in response to the apology. Pichai's memo "does not say 'I'm sorry for what we did to her and it was wrong.' What it DOES say is 'it seeded doubts and led some in our community to question their place at Google.' So I see this as 'I'm sorry for how it played out but I'm not sorry for what we did to her yet," she added.
Gebru announced last week that she had been fired from Google because she refused to accept the company's demands that she remove her name from a research paper and because of an email she wrote decrying Google's diversity efforts, setting off a firestorm of protest. More than 1,500 Google workers signed a petition in support of her work, and members of her own former AI ethics team wrote a public letter challenging Google's claims that Gebru had resigned.
Update: This article was updated at 12:35 p.m. PT with Gebru's response.
Anna Kramer is a reporter at Protocol (@ anna_c_kramer), where she helps write and produce Source Code, Protocol's daily newsletter. Prior to joining the team, she covered tech and small business for the San Francisco Chronicle and privacy for Bloomberg Law. She is a recent graduate of Brown University, where she studied International Relations and Arabic and wrote her senior thesis about surveillance tools and technological development in the Middle East.
Big Tech benefits from Biden’s sweeping immigration actions
Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai praised President Biden's immigration actions, which read like a tech industry wishlist.
Newly-inaugurated President Joe Biden signed two immigration-related executive orders on Wednesday.
Emily Birnbaum ( @birnbaum_e) is a tech policy reporter with Protocol. Her coverage focuses on the U.S. government's attempts to regulate one of the most powerful industries in the world, with a focus on antitrust, privacy and politics. Previously, she worked as a tech policy reporter with The Hill after spending several months as a breaking news reporter. She is a Bethesda, Maryland native and proud Kenyon College alumna.
Immediately after being sworn in as president Wednesday, Joe Biden signed two pro-immigration executive orders and delivered an immigration bill to Congress that reads like a tech industry wishlist. The move drew enthusiastic praise from tech leaders, including Apple CEO Tim Cook and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai.
President Biden nullified several of former-President Trump's most hawkish immigration policies. His executive orders reversed the so-called "Muslim ban" and instructed the attorney general and the secretary of Homeland Security to preserve the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program, which the Trump administration had sought to end. He also sent an expansive immigration reform bill to Congress that would provide a pathway to citizenship for undocumented individuals and make it easier for foreign U.S. graduates with STEM degrees to stay in the United States, among other provisions.
Emily Birnbaum ( @birnbaum_e) is a tech policy reporter with Protocol. Her coverage focuses on the U.S. government's attempts to regulate one of the most powerful industries in the world, with a focus on antitrust, privacy and politics. Previously, she worked as a tech policy reporter with The Hill after spending several months as a breaking news reporter. She is a Bethesda, Maryland native and proud Kenyon College alumna.
The current state-of-the-art quantum computers are a tangle of wires. And that can't be the case in the future.
The iconic image of quantum computing is the "Google chandelier," with its hundreds of intricately arranged copper wires descending like the tendrils of a metallic jellyfish. It's a grand and impressive device, but in that tangle of wires lurks a big problem.
"If you're thinking about the long-term prospects of quantum computing, that image should be just terrifying," Jim Clarke, the director of quantum hardware at Intel, told Protocol.
Google says it’s fighting election lies, but its ads fund them
A new report finds that more than 1,600 brands, from Disney to Procter & Gamble, have advertisements running on sites that push pro-Trump conspiracy theories. The majority of those ads are served by Google.
Google is the most dominant player in programmatic advertising, but it has a spotty record enforcing rules for publishers.
Shortly after November's presidential election, a story appeared on the website of far-right personality Charlie Kirk, claiming that 10,000 dead people had returned mail-in ballots in Michigan. But after publishing, a correction appeared at the top of the story, completely debunking the misleading headline, which remains, months later, unchanged.
"We are not aware of a single confirmed case showing that a ballot was actually cast on behalf of a deceased individual," the correction, which quoted Michigan election officials, read.
Google’s productivity guru has some advice for you
Here's how Laura Mae Martin helps Google's top execs work smarter.
Laura Mae Martin, Google's executive productivity adviser, works one-on-one with the company's top brass.
Kevin McAllister ( @k__mcallister) is an associate editor at Protocol, leading the development of Braintrust. Prior to joining the team, he was a rankings data reporter at The Wall Street Journal, where he oversaw structured data projects for the Journal's strategy team.
If productivity were a product at Google, then Laura Mae Martin would be its product manager.
She's Google's executive productivity adviser, a job she created following a successful 20% project about managing inboxes that she debuted while working in keyword sales. As the company's top expert on productivity, her remit seems simple enough: Make Googlers more efficient in their day-to-day work lives. But in practice, that means working directly with the top executives of a trillion-dollar company to make some of tech's most sought-after talent better at what they do.
Kevin McAllister ( @k__mcallister) is an associate editor at Protocol, leading the development of Braintrust. Prior to joining the team, he was a rankings data reporter at The Wall Street Journal, where he oversaw structured data projects for the Journal's strategy team.
Nine tricks from Google’s productivity guru
These productivity tips were voted as some of the best by Google employees. Now they're yours.
Google Workspace, G Suite's successor, has plenty of integrations to take advantage of.
Kevin McAllister ( @k__mcallister) is an associate editor at Protocol, leading the development of Braintrust. Prior to joining the team, he was a rankings data reporter at The Wall Street Journal, where he oversaw structured data projects for the Journal's strategy team.
Each Friday, Google's top productivity expert, Laura Mae Martin, sends a note to more than half the company globally describing ways that different departments are using their own tools to be more efficient. Here's a list of the favorites, as upvoted by Googlers themselves.
Read more about how Martin coaches Google's top execs to work smarter.
Kevin McAllister ( @k__mcallister) is an associate editor at Protocol, leading the development of Braintrust. Prior to joining the team, he was a rankings data reporter at The Wall Street Journal, where he oversaw structured data projects for the Journal's strategy team.