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Let's review. Samy Bengio, co-founder of Google Brain and Google AI scientist of 14 years, unexpectedly resigns in the aftermath of Timnit Gebru and Margaret (Meg) Mitchell's firings. Gebru and Mitchell were the founders of Google's Ethical AI team, whose work on AI fairness was previously celebrated by Google AI leadership. Furthermore, Samy Bengio was Timnit's direct manager, but was completely blindsided by Timnit's firing, saying "I was stunned by what just happened to Timnit Gebru, who was in my team until a few days ago ... I stand by you, Timnit". Timnit was notified of her termination by Megan Kacholia, the Vice President of Google Research, who has since been removed from overseeing the remaining members of the Ethical AI team. Regarding the publication which precipitated Timnit's ousting, "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots ...", Samy Bengio granted publication approval for the submission. It was only after this approval that the Google Ethics AI researchers were told to rescind their names from the paper (they could not withdraw the paper entirely, since it was a collaboration with external academic researchers). Mitchell was fired shortly thereafter for allegedly violating the company's code of conduct and security policies. Now, only a few months after Gebru and Mitchell's firings, Samy Bengio has also resigned. Considering the sequence of events reviewed above, it seems clear to me that Samy Bengio's resignation is directly the result of Google's mishandling of this situation. If Timnit had not been fired while away on vacation, and Google leadership had instead found a way to address her concerns, or even accept her resignation more tactfully, then this debacle would have never unfolded in this manner, and Samy Bengio would still be at Google. I am not particularly surprised by Google's mishandling of this situation though, as it seems completely predictable and even cliche that such corporate behemoths often handle these situations in the most ham-handed ways. What I do find astonishing is the willingness of some Hacker News commenters to read into Timnit's actions and motivations, often with the most negative interpretations, but when it comes to Samy Bengio's resignation, they seem completely unable to read between the lines, and instead raise their burden of proof, so that they can deny any connection between this chain of events. Resignation letters and company wide farewell emails almost never disclose the real reasons behind a departure. Just because Samy Bengio has not explicitly said something like, "I am resigning because I stand in solidarity with Timnit Gebru", does not mean that these events are not linked, despite the assertions of some comments in this thread. In fact, it's seems to me that one would need to willfully ignore the evidence so far to conclude that these events are not linked, at least to some degree. |