Google Brain's founding member resigned, and he also broke up with Jeff Dean

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Samy Bengio, one of the founding members of Google Brain, said on Tuesday that he will leave Google on April 28 to "pursue other exciting opportunities."

This move may be due to dissatisfaction with the previous incident in which Jeff Dean, head of Google AI, fired two AI ethics researchers. He wrote in an email:

I have learned a lot with you all, not only in terms of machine learning research, but also how difficult but important it is to organize a large research team committed to long-term research, exploration, rigor, diversity, and inclusion.

Samy Bengio is the younger brother of Yoshua Bengio, one of the three giants of deep learning . He has worked at Google for 14 years . Andrew Ng once commented that he "played an important role in promoting the development of AI technology and ethics."

Two engineers had already resigned in protest of the firing, Samy Bengio being the most senior of them.

Samy's colleagues at Google Brain believe his departure is "a huge loss for Google" because Samy participated in establishing the most important research team in the industry and Google's most profitable research team.

The dismissal scandal continues to ferment

In December 2020, AI ethics researcher Timnit Gebru and Google AI head Jeff Dean had serious disagreements over the internal review of a paper.

Gebru expressed her dissatisfaction through Google's internal mailing list "Brain Women and Allies", and exposed Google's unfair treatment of black people, a vulnerable group, and its lack of attention to AI ethics.

Gebru was fired by Jeff Dean, head of Google's AI department, and his access to company accounts was cut off.

Gebru was working on the AI ​​ethics group led by Samy Bengio at the time. Samy later posted on Facebook to express his shock at the incident and expressed his support for her.

Jeff Dean's move was condemned by more than 1,400 Google employees and sparked heated debate in the industry.

In February this year, Margaret Mitchell, one of the founders of the AI ​​Ethics Group, was also fired for "violating the company's security policy" because she used an automatic script to search the internal network for evidence that the company treated Gebru unfairly.

Google subsequently reorganized its AI ethics group, appointed a new head, Marian Croak, and reduced Samy's responsibilities.

After the news of Samy's resignation came out, both Mitchell and Gebru expressed their respect and gratitude to Samy, as well as their dissatisfaction with Google.

Samy Bengio

Samy Bengio was born in Morocco in 1965 and later immigrated to Canada. He studied CS at the University of Montreal for his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees.

He has published more than 250 papers in the fields of neural networks and machine learning. He joined Google in 2007 and helped Andrew Ng, Jeff Dean and others to co-found Google Brain.

He is also a member of the organizing committee of the top artificial intelligence conferences NeurIPS and ICLR, and has served as chairman.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that he is also one of the authors of Torch, which is the predecessor of Pytorch, the second largest machine learning framework today.