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Timnit Gebru

Joint first author of bender-2021-stochastic-parrots, affiliated per the March 2021 byline with Black in AI, Palo Alta. Her byline affiliation postdates the end of her Google employment on 2020-12-02, a sequence widely covered in the press and not documented inside the paper itself.

The parrots paper leans on frameworks she built. “Datasheets for Datasets” appears in its reference list as [52], “Model cards for model reporting” as [86], and “Lessons from archives” with Eun Seo Jo, the archival-history model for data curation recommended in section 7, as [62].

Her employment at Google ended on 2020-12-02, in a dispute over this paper. The account across the Verge (2020-12-03), CNN (2021-03-11) and WIRED (2021-06-08): she was technical co-lead of Google’s Ethical AI Team; management asked her to withdraw the submitted paper or remove the Google employees from it; she replied offering terms; the company ended the employment that day, calling it an accepted resignation, and she has maintained she was fired. The March 2021 byline lists Black in AI, the group she co-founded, as her affiliation, one of the five author sites with no Google on it. In June 2021 she announced fundraising for an independent institute, and on 2021-12-02 she founded DAIR, research aimed at Africa and the African diaspora. The acronym’s expansion varies by source. Wikipedia gives Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, and the Stanford HAI event page writes Distributed AI Research Institute.

With Émile P. Torres she coined the TESCREAL acronym, the futurist-ideology bundle this vault files at tescreal. She received the 2026 Right Livelihood Award for “challenging concentrated power in artificial intelligence”.

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