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Google will restructure its responsible artificial intelligence efforts to centralize teams under one leader, according to people familiar with the situation, as the internet giant tries to stabilize groups working on research and ethical products after months of chaos.
The Alphabet Inc. unit is expected to announce the changes as early as Thursday, according to people, who asked not to be identified when discussing private information. Google has sought to dispel employee grievances stemming from the acrimonious departure of prominent black researcher Timnit Gebru. The AI teams will join Marian Croak, a Black Google executive who currently serves as the vice president of engineering focusing on site reliability issues. Croak will report to Jeff Dean, senior vice president of Google AI.
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Croak will oversee the ethics AI team that has come under scrutiny, as well as employees from other equity teams. These include people working on machine learning, computer vision systems, natural language processing and those who design equity products, one of the people said. Megan Kacholia, who drew criticism from employees after firing Gebru, will no longer supervise these researchers, the person said.
Google representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment outside of regular business hours.
The crisis began in early December when Gebru, who is best known for showing how more effective facial recognition algorithms are at identifying whites than blacks, said she was fired by email. Google has claimed to have accepted his resignation after a dispute over an AI research paper critical of its technology that Google executives asked Gebru to remove or remove from Google. Her dismissal shocked the Ethical AI research team she co-headed, with members of her group taking to Twitter to publicly support her and criticize Google.
Two weeks later, a group of Google artificial intelligence researchers sent a full list of demands to management calling for new policies and leadership changes. Google also sidelined the other head of its AI ethics research team, Margaret Mitchell, five weeks ago, blocking her out of her corporate network.
This isn’t the first time Google has turned to Croak to deal with the problem. A few days after Gebru’s dismissal, Croak hosted a meeting of Dean and Kacholia on one side, and researchers and the Black Googlers Network on the other.
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