Rex Kerr
1 min readApr 7, 2024

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That's not a good example because that was her job at Google! Of course it was welcome--they were paying her to do exactly that. They hired her for her expertise!

But what they didn't appreciate is her demanding that she be able to publish what she wanted when Google still had internal concerns about the paper, with giving them no time (~1 day) to review it. Maybe the concerns were valid. Maybe not. (I've read the paper that was eventually published; it definitely has some gratuitously negative content that would, if true, impact Google's business model. But I don't know whether that was in the original that Google objected to.) Timnit apparently thought she was bigger than Google--I get to do it my way, or I'm out.

Reasonable in academia, harder to pull off in the corporate world.

So, she was out. Not for raising ethical concerns--she'd done that before she even got into Google! But for not playing the corporate researcher game.

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Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

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