Timnit Gebru

Timnit Gebru (Amharic and Tigrinya: ትምኒት ገብሩ; 1982/1983) is an Eritrean Ethiopian-born computer scientist who works in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI), algorithmic bias and data mining. She is a co-founder of Black in AI, an advocacy group that has pushed for more Black roles in AI development and research. She is the founder of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR).

In December 2020, public controversy erupted over the circumstances surrounding Gebru's departure from Google, where she was technical co-lead of the Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team. Gebru had coauthored a paper on the risks of large language models (LLMs) acting as stochastic parrots, and submitted it for publication. According to Jeff Dean, the paper was submitted without waiting for Google's internal review, which then asserted that it ignored too much relevant research. Google management requested that Gebru either withdraw the paper or remove the names of all the authors employed by Google. Gebru requested the identity and feedback of every reviewer, and stated that if Google refused she would talk to her manager about "a last date". Google terminated her employment immediately, stating that they were accepting her resignation. Gebru maintained that she had not formally offered to resign, and only threatened to.

Gebru has been recognized widely for her expertise in the ethics of artificial intelligence. She was named one of the World's 50 Greatest Leaders by Fortune and one of Nature's ten people who shaped science in 2021, and in 2022, one of Time's most influential people.