Despite record profits, a number of them are worried that the company is suffering from both its size and leadership from its C.E.O., Sundar Pichai.
"It is hard to argue that things aren’t going great for Google. Revenue and profits are charting new highs every three months. Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is worth $1.6 trillion. Google has rooted itself deeper and deeper into the lives of everyday Americans.
"But a restive class of Google executives worry that the company is showing cracks. They say Google’s work force is increasingly outspoken. Personnel problems are spilling into the public. Decisive leadership and big ideas have given way to risk aversion and incrementalism. And some of those executives are leaving and letting everyone know exactly why.
"Fifteen current and former Google executives, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of angering Google and Mr. Pichai, told The New York Times that Google was suffering from many of the pitfalls of a large, maturing company — a paralyzing bureaucracy, a bias toward inaction and a fixation on public perception."
Two weeks after her forced exit, the AI ethics researcher reflects on her time at Google and the state of the AI field.
I was very hesitant to go to an environment where I knew Google Research was not well known for its advocacy for women. There were a number of issues that I had heard through my whisper networks. In fact, when I said I was going to go to Google Research, a number of people actually sat me down. So I was just already dreading it, like “Oh, man, okay, what am I going into?”
The biggest mismatch I see is that there are so many people who respect us, but then there’s people at the top, like VPs, who just maybe can’t stand us or just don’t respect our authority or expertise at all. I’ve seen that a number of times. But people in Google Cloud, or Cloud AI specifically, some of the senior leadership—they were very supportive. I felt like they really respected our leadership, so they would try to pull us into many things. On the other hand, this latest fiasco was not from them. I have my suspicions of which VPs it was coming from, and they certainly did not respect our expertise or leadership.
We had 128 citations [on that paper], and we sent our paper to many of these people that we cited. We were so thorough. I said, okay, I want to bucket the people that we’re going to ask feedback from in four buckets. One is the people who have developed large language models themselves, just to get their perspective. One is people who work in the area of understanding and mitigating the bias in these models. One is people who might disagree with our view. One is people who use these large language models for various things. And we have a whole document with all of this feedback that we were supposed to go through to address, and which I want to do still before we release this work.
But the way they [Google leadership] were talking to us, it wasn’t like they were talking to world-renowned experts and linguists. Like Emily Bender [a professor at the University of Washington and a coauthor of the paper] is not some random person who just put her name on a random paper out there. I felt like the whole thing was so disrespectful.
Then in that document, I wrote that this has been extremely disrespectful to the Ethical AI team, and there needs to be a conversation, not just with Jeff and our team, and Megan and our team, but the whole of Research about respect for researchers and how to have these kinds of discussions. Nope. No engagement with that whatsoever.
I cried, by the way. When I had that first meeting, which was Thursday before Thanksgiving, a day before I was going to go on vacation—when Megan told us that you have to retract this paper, I started crying. I was so upset because I said, I’m so tired of constant fighting here. I thought that if I just ignored all of this DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] hypocrisy and other stuff, and I just focused on my work, then at least I could get my work done. And now you’re coming for my work. So I literally started crying.
I thought that they would be smarter than doing it in this exact way, because it’s a confluence of so many issues that they’re dealing with: research censorship, ethical AI, labor rights, DEI—all the things that they’ve come under fire for before. So I didn’t expect it to be in that way—like, cut off my corporate account completely. That’s so ruthless. That’s not what they do to people who’ve engaged in gross misconduct. They hand them $80 million, and they give them a nice little exit, or maybe they passive-aggressively don’t promote them, or whatever. They don’t do to the people who are actually creating a hostile workplace environment what they did to me.
