Timnit Gebru

Timnit Gebru is a computer scientist who works on algorithmic bias and data mining. She is an advocate for diversity in technology and a co-founder of Black in AI, a community of black researchers working in artificial intelligence. Her employment with Google as technical co-lead of the Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team was abruptly ended in December 2020.

About Timnit Gebru in brief

Summary Timnit GebruTimnit Gebru is a computer scientist who works on algorithmic bias and data mining. She is an advocate for diversity in technology and a co-founder of Black in AI, a community of black researchers working in artificial intelligence. Her employment with Google as technical co-lead of the Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team was abruptly ended in December 2020. She was asked to withdraw her name from an as-yet-unpublished paper called \”On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?\”, which had been submitted to an external academic conference. The paper is expected to be published at the conference in March 2021. In a New York Times interview, she has expressed that she believes facial recognition is too dangerous to be used for law enforcement and security purposes right now.

She has co-authored a paper on the very risks of very large language models, which she believes could be used in the future for security and law enforcement purposes. Her father died when she was five years old and she was raised by her mother. She escaped potential forced deportation to Eritrea by the Ethiopian government in the late 1990s and traveled to Ireland. She then moved to the United States to join her mother and her two older sisters who had been living in the U.S.