When Google fired Timnit Gebru, technical co-lead of its ethical artificial intelligence team last year, amid controversy over a paper she was co-authoring with academics and other Google researchers, the company unleashed a firestorm of criticism of the bias apparently shown by its own management, its apparent defensiveness about potential flaws in the AI underpinning its core search service and even the role of corporate research in the field of artificial intelligence as a whole. Can Google get comfortable with the necessary but uncomfortable questions research has to raise?
Gebru’s paper asked some possibly uncomfortable questions about very large language models like the ones used by Google search.