In blow to Google, AI research manager leaves after several colleagues ousted
07 April, 2021
Google research supervisor Samy Bengio, who oversaw the company’s AI ethics group until a controversy resulted in the ouster of several female leaders, resigned in Tuesday to pursue various other opportunities.
Mr Bengio, who managed hundreds of researchers found in the Google Brain workforce, announced his departure in an email to staff that was obtained by Bloomberg. His last time will be April 28. An expert in a type of AI known as equipment learning, Mr Bengio joined Google in 2007.
Ousted Ethical AI co-leads Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell possessed reported to Bengio and thought to be him an ally. In February, Google reorganised the research unit, placing the remaining Ethical AI group members under Marian Croak, trimming Mr Bengio’s responsibilities.
“While We am pumped up about my next task, there’s no doubt that leaving this wonderful workforce is really tricky,” Mr Bengio wrote in the email. He did not make reference to Ms Gebru, Ms Mitchell or the disagreements that resulted in their departures. Google declined to comment.
In November, Mr Bengio’s then-manager Megan Kacholia met with Ms Gebru to demand she retract a paper co-written with Ms Mitchell and different Google researchers that criticised an AI technology powering a few of Google’s search results.
In early December, Google dismissed Ms Gebru in what she termed a firing and Google has named an acceptance of her resignation. In February, the business fired Ms Mitchell.
“The resignation of Samy Bengio is a major loss for Google,” tweeted El Mahdi El Mhamdi, a scientist at Google Human brain who said Mr Bengio helped build “just about the most fundamental research groups in industry since Bell Labs, also just about the most profitable ones.”
“I learned so very much with everyone, regarding machine learning study of course, but also on how difficult but important it is to organise a large team of researchers to be able to promote long term ambitious exploration, exploration, rigor, diversity and inclusion,” Mr Bengio wrote in his email.
Prior to joining Google, Mr Bengio co-developed Torch, an open-source framework and package of tools for growing machine-learning algorithms. At Google, he was part of the TensorFlow workforce, building a rival providing that surpassed Torch in popularity.
Facebook researchers used his earlier work because of its PyTorch library of AI equipment. Mr Bengio as well published research in areas like adversarial machine learning, which feeds false or misleading facts to algorithms to attempt to technique or corrupt them.
Source: www.thenationalnews.com
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