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.

Gebru was raised in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Her father, an electrical engineer with a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), died when she was five years old, and she was raised by her mother, an economist. Both her parents are from Eritrea. When Gebru was 15, during the Eritrean–Ethiopian War, she fled Ethiopia after some of her family were deported to Eritrea and compelled to fight in the war. She was initially denied a U.S. visa and briefly lived in Ireland, but she eventually received political asylum in the U.S., an experience she said was "miserable". Gebru settled in Somerville, Massachusetts, to attend high school, where she says she immediately started to experience racial discrimination, with some teachers refusing to allow her to take certain Advanced Placement courses, despite being a high-achiever.

After she completed high school, an encounter with the police set Gebru on a course toward a focus on ethics in technology. A friend of hers, a Black woman, was assaulted in a bar, and Gebru called the police to report it. She says that instead of filing the assault report, her friend was arrested and remanded to a cell. Gebru called it a pivotal moment and a "blatant example of systemic racism."

In 2001, Gebru was accepted at Stanford University. There she earned her Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in electrical engineering and her PhD in computer vision in 2017. Gebru was advised during her PhD program by Fei-Fei Li.

During the 2008 United States presidential election, Gebru canvassed in support of Barack Obama.

Gebru presented her doctoral research at the 2017 LDV Capital Vision Summit competition, where computer vision scientists present their work to members of industry and venture capitalists. Gebru won the competition, starting a series of collaborations with other entrepreneurs and investors.