谷歌首席执行官桑达尔·皮查伊（Sundar Pichai）周三在给员工的一封电子邮件中谈到了备受争议的人工智能伦理研究员蒂姆尼特·盖布鲁（Timnit Gebru）离职一事。他写道：“我们需要为一位杰出的黑人**领导人，她有着巨大的才华，不幸离开了谷歌而承担责任。”。这封邮件的消息最早由Axios发布。

虽然皮查伊没有说格布鲁被解雇，因为她和其他许多人都声称，他承诺检讨导致她离开公司的步骤。他写道：“我们需要评估导致格布鲁博士离职的情况，研究我们本可以改进的地方，并领导一个更加尊重的过程。”。

他还为Gebru的离开“导致我们社区的一些人质疑他们在谷歌的地位”道歉，并承诺考虑未来的“降级策略”。

在Twitter上，Gebru写道，这张纸条远非道歉。

上周，Gebru在推特上说，公司因为她发给Brain Women and Allians listserv的一封电子邮件而突然解雇了她。在邮件中，她对公司试图让她收回一篇关于大型语言处理模型风险的研究论文表示失望。

这封邮件引发了Gebru和googleresearch高层的对话。Gebru要求满足某些条件，以便她留在公司，包括知道谁要求收回她的论文的细节。其中一位经理梅根·卡乔利亚（Megan Kacholia）表示，公司无法满足这些条件，并先发制人地接受了格布鲁的辞职。

谷歌人工智能负责人杰夫·迪恩发表了一份说明，解释了Gebru的论文没有达到公司标准的原因。他说，该报告是在公司通常需要两周时间的最后期限前一天提交审查的。

但Gebru自己的团队对此评价进行了反驳，在一篇博客文章中写道，出版物审查政策的实施“不公平和歧视性的”。Verge审查的一项内部分析显示，大多数出版物批准发生在截止日期之前，41%的批准发生在截止日期之后。研究小组写道：“许多论文在没有达到这一‘要求’的情况下被批准发表。”。

12月4日，googlewalkout媒体账户发布了一份**书，**Gebru被解雇。迄今为止，已有超过2300名谷歌员工和3700名行业盟友签署了该协议。

请阅读Pichai的完整电子邮件：

Hi everyone,

One of the things I’ve been most proud of this year is how Googlers from across the company came together to address our racial equity commitments. It’s hard, important work, and while we’re steadfast in our commitment to do better, we have a lot to learn and improve. An important piece of this is learning from our experiences like the departure of Dr. Timnit Gebru.

I’ve heard the reaction to Dr. Gebru’s departure loud and clear: it seeded doubts and led some in our community to question their place at Google. I want to say how sorry I am for that, and I accept the resp***ibility of working to restore your trust.

First - we need to assess the circumstances that led up to Dr. Gebru’s departure, examining where we could have improved and led a more respectful process. We will begin a review of what happened to identify all the points where we can learn — c***idering everything from de-escalation strategies to new processes we can put in place. Jeff and I have spoken and are fully committed to doing this. One of the best aspects of Google’s engineering culture is our sincere desire to understand where things go wrong and how we can improve.

Second - we need to accept resp***ibility for the fact that a prominent Black, female leader with immense talent left Google unhappily. This loss has had a ripple effect through some of our least represented communities, who saw themselves and some of their experiences reflected in Dr. Gebru’s. It was also keenly felt because Dr. Gebru is an expert in an important area of AI Ethics that we must continue to make progress on — progress that depends on our ability to ask ourselves challenging questi***.

It’s incredibly important to me that our Black, women, and underrepresented Googlers know that we value you and you do belong at Google. And the burden of pushing us to do better should not fall on your shoulders. We started a conversation together earlier this year when we announced a broad set of racial equity commitments to take a fresh look at all of our systems from hiring and leveling, to promotion and retention, and to address the need for leadership accountability across all of these steps. The events of the last week are a painful but important reminder of the progress we still need to make.

This is a top priority for me and Google leads, and I want to recommit to translating the energy that we’ve seen this year into real change as we move forward into 2021 and beyond.

— Sundar