On Thursday, Gebru, one of today's famous AI scholars and an artificial intelligence ethics researcher, was suddenly fired by Google. Gebru himself expressed dissatisfaction and protests on Twitter, which attracted widespread support and attention from the technology community.

Let’s first look at Gebru’s original suggestion that triggered the discussion on the above:

The original push said that she was fired indirectly by Jeff Dean, the boss of Google's AI department, without any warning. She is no longer able to log in to her company account, which means she has been fired.

Gebru said she was on vacation when she received the resignation notice. Is Google playing a trick of "trancing the tiger away from the mountain"?

According to foreign media reports, Gebru sent her colleagues an email saying that her superiors asked her to withdraw a research paper, but at the same time did not provide any other information, nor did she explain what was wrong with the paper, and she had no chance to defend herself. She also said in an email that Google always said that it was about to diversify without making any substantial changes.

Gebru was born in Ethiopia and later studied electrical engineering at Stanford University. Later, he joined Apple and participated in the research and development of his first iPad. In his subsequent career, he has always played the role of waving the flag for "political correctness" and "Black Lives Matter (BLM)."

We don’t know whether Google’s sudden firing of Gebru is related to it, but this has caused a lot of controversy on the external network. This undoubtedly attracted a new round of criticism for Google, which is still under the pressure of antitrust law investigations.

African-American genius computer scientist teacher studied under Li Feifei

You must be curious to see this, Google I know, but who is Gebru? Why did her dismissal cause controversy?

Gebru is an Ethiopian native and was born and raised in Ethiopia. Her parents are both from Eritrea. Her father and two sisters are electrical engineers and can be said to be born in a home of technical talents.

But unfortunately, she lost her father at a young age, and her father passed away when she was five years old, while she was raised by her mother.

In her childhood, Eritrea tried to separate from Ethiopia and became independent, so the environment of growing up was full of turmoil and uneasiness. In the late 1990, she escaped the fate of being forcibly expelled by the Ethiopian government and came to Ireland by chance.

At that time, her two sisters had lived in the United States for a while, and her mother had immigrated to the United States a few months ago. In order to reunite with her family, she also followed her mother's footsteps from Ireland to the United States.

After arriving in the United States, Gebru's life began to gradually get on the right track. She is the youngest of the three sisters in the family, but her intelligence is never inferior to her two sisters.

Benefited by her wise parents, she spent her high school life in Massachusetts (Massachusetts, where we often call MIT).

After graduating from Massachusetts High School, she received an elite education and successfully admitted to Stanford University. At Stanford University, she met her mentor, Feifei Li.

While studying at Stan University, Gebru joined Li Feifei's team and began to study combining computer vision and poll analysis. During the research period, Gebru showed a passion for politics. Under the supervision and guidance of Li Feifei, she completed a very innovative deep learning application project: analyze Google street scenes through AI and accurately analyze the political tendencies of residents in a certain film.

She believes that the U.S. government and organizations have spent too much money on gathering community information, and she hopes to come up with an alternative solution for this. Gebru has conducted statistics on the population of the U.S. neighborhood by combining deep learning and Google Street View, saying that socio-economic attributes such as voting patterns, income, race, and education can be inferred through car observations.

Gebru analyzed more than 150 million pictures in the 200 most populous cities in the United States. She found that if a community has more pickups than sedans, the community is more likely to vote for the Republican Party.

After the paper was published, the media rushed to report it. These include well-known media such as BBC News, Newsweek, The Economist and The New York Times.

Her mentor Li Feifei also commented: "... (The results obtained from this study) are comparable to some information that requires billions of dollars to obtain through census surveys..."

Devote yourself to the battle of "political correctness" and strive to change racial inequality

After graduating from Stanford University, Gebru left Feifei Li's team and joined Microsoft, becoming a member of Microsoft's AI Fair Responsibility Transparency and Ethics Laboratory (FATE).

After working at Microsoft for a while, Gebru jumped to Google again, but the work he did not change. She continues to work on ethics in artificial intelligence at Google.

While working at Google, she continued to speak out for "political correctness". While working with MIT, she studied the potential "discriminatory nature" of facial recognition technology, which she said is 35% less accurate than white men when facing black women.

And in 2016 when she attended an AI conference, she said she was the only black woman among the 8,500 representatives. As a result, she and her colleagues founded the Black in AI organization. Then she publicly emphasized the various prejudices in the field of artificial intelligence on many occasions.

After Gebru was fired by Google, several Google employees, including many tech industry giants, expressed their support for Gebru.

"I think it's a joke because it seems ridiculous for anyone to fire @ given her expertise, her skills, her influence," former CEO Ellen Pao wrote on the page. "It's what makes me think One of the events that the tech industry has no hope. ”

Kate, an artificial intelligence researcher at King's College in London, said on the board. "It's terrible, @ is one of the best voices in the field of AI ethics. It's a painful irony, and what her employer Google has done to her is so dark."

Gebru said on Twitter that she is now contacting a lawyer.

It is still hard to say whether this incident will continue to ferment in the future or whether it will sink into the sea. But from a macro perspective, Google is undoubtedly facing a new round of moral crisis.

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