Alphabet Inc. Chief Executive Sundar Pichai has bet big on artificial intelligence as central to the company’s future, investing billions of dollars to embed the technology in the conglomerate’s disparate divisions. Now, it is one of his trickiest management challenges.
Over the past 18 months, Google’s parent has waded through one controversy after another involving its top researchers and executives in the field.
In the most high-profile incident, last month Google parted ways with a prominent AI researcher, Timnit Gebru, after she turned in studies critical of the company’s approach to AI and complained to colleagues about its diversity efforts. Her research findings concluded that Google wasn’t careful enough in deploying such powerful technology and was callous about the environmental impact of building supercomputers.
Mr. Pichai pledged an investigation into the circumstances around her departure and said he would seek to restore trust. Ms. Gebru’s boss, Jeff Dean, told employees that he determined her research was insufficiently rigorous.
Nearly 2,700 Google employees have since signed a public letter that says Ms. Gebru’s departure “heralds danger for people working for ethical and just AI—especially Black people and People of Color—across Google.”
