Another Google AI Employee Leaves Following Two High-Profile Oustings of Researchers in His Team

Google's latest resignation involves a high-ranking employee who works as an AI scientist in the company's artificial intelligence division. On Tuesday, Apr. 6, the 14-year professional left the company following the departure of two AI researchers under his team.

Samy Bengio, who previously helped the California tech giant with its AI and the deep learning-focused unit, Google Brain has confirmed his exit in service.

Google AI Scientist is the Latest to Leave the Company

"I learned so much with all of you, in terms of machine learning research of course, but also on how difficult yet important it is to organize a large team of researchers so as to promote long term ambitious research, exploration, rigor, diversity, and inclusion," Bengio sent an email to the staff, Bloomberg reported.

However, the report stated that Bengio did not mention the departure of the two other employees in the letter.

Since December 2020, Google has been struggling in dealing with several resignations coming from its AI department. The departure of Bengio is the biggest loss in the company since he is currently the highest-ranking employee to quit his job.

In the same month, a Black woman named Timnit Gebru who has worked as a Google AI ethicist declared that the company fired her.

On Twitter, he posted that she was kicked out by Jeff Dean, the current head of the AI division after she called out the risk in AI's bias involving the Google search engine.

The creation of an open-source framework, Torch, involves Bengio in the process. The said framework also features a wide range of tools needed for machine learning.

Moreover, he was also included in the TensorFlow Team, which later became more popular than the Torch.

Previously, researchers from Facebook have utilized his creation. The experts used it for the PyTorch library which houses the AI tools.

Furthermore, Bengio also posted his research about adversarial machine learning which is about the malicious inputs designed to deceive machine learning models.

The Google Employee Fired After Gebru

In a report by CNET, the co-leader of the AI team, Margaret Mitchell was also fired by the company just two months after Gebru left. The firm discovered that Mitchell was using automated software to seek for the old messages, only to find discriminatory remarks to Gebru.

Mitchell and Gebru worked together in cultivating a lot of researchers with other AI experts. They also pointed out the downsides of the AI during their stay in Google.

Apart from that, they were also part of the decision-making body led by the Google executives. They took part in discussing features like image recognition service which aims to recognize the people's gender through the photos.

At the time, the Google AI research leader, Dean said that Gebru's departure was because her research paper was believed to have poor quality. As support, Gebru's teammates opposed the decision from their heads.

More than 2,600 Google employees have signed the letter protesting Google's treatment of Gebru. When Gebru left, Bengio stated that he stood by her, as well as the rest of the team.

In February, Google assigned Marian Croak to take over the AI development. Croak is the vice president of Google engineering.

This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by Joen Coronel