Samy Bengio, who has worked for Google as an AI scientist for 14 years, is leaving the company after the recent riot over diversity and censorship.
A shareholder of Alphabet, meanwhile, is asking for better protection for whistleblowers.
Bengio gave his notice a few weeks after two of his colleagues were fired. He is the highest-ranking AI employee to leave the company, believed to be in the wake of an internal battle over Google’s scientists’ independence.
Samy Bengio has been with the tech giant for fourteen years, in the Google Brain department focuses on deep learning and artificial intelligence. Google has confirmed the resignation.
The man is leaving amid ongoing controversy within Google’s AI department. It started in December when the company fired Timnit Gebru, a prominent researcher into ethics in AI.
According to Gebru, Google had asked her to stop working on a paper that exposed the danger of bias in machine translations and AI analysis of language use. The kind of systems that Google itself uses in its search engine that is.
Two months later, one of the Ethical AI team’s bosses, Margaret Mitchell, was fired for allegedly misusing corporate data. Mitchell herself says she ran a program on her old posts to see if Gebru was discriminated against by Google.