Apple Hires Samy Bengio, Ex-Google AI Scientist Who Resigned After Colleagues Were Fired

Samy Bengio is expected to lead a new AI research unit at Apple.

By Reuters | Updated: 4 May 2021 17:17 IST

Highlights

Mitchell and Gebru had co-led a team researching ethics issues in AI
They had voiced concern about Google's workplace diversity
Apple declined to comment on Bengio's role

Apple said on Monday it has hired former distinguished Google scientist Samy Bengio, who left the search giant amid turmoil in its artificial intelligence research department.

Bengio is expected to lead a new AI research unit at Apple under John Giannandrea, senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy, two people familiar with the matter said. Giannandrea joined Apple in 2018 after spending about eight years at Google.

Apple declined to comment on Bengio's role. Bengio did not respond to a request for comment.

Samsung Wins Patent for a Tri-Fold Smartphone With Specialised Barrier Layer for Improved Durability

Bengio who left Google last week after about 14 years said last month he was pursuing "other exciting opportunities".

His decision followed Google's firings in recent months of fellow scientists Margaret Mitchell after alleging she transferred electronic files out of the company and Timnit Gebru after she threatened to quit rather than retract a paper.

Mitchell and Gebru had co-led a team researching ethics issues in AI, and had voiced concern about Google's workplace diversity and approach to reviewing research. Bengio had expressed support for the pair.

Google AI Researcher Samy Bengio Resigns After Colleagues' Firings

As one of the early leaders of the Google Brain research team, Bengio advanced the "deep learning" algorithms that underpin today's AI systems for analysing images, speech, and other data.

© Thomson Reuters 2021

Is Mi 11X the best phone under Rs. 35,000? We discussed this on Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast. Later (starting at 23:50), we jump over to the Marvel series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Orbital is available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music and wherever you get your podcasts.

Affiliate links may be automatically generated - see our ethics statement for details.

Comments

For the latest tech news and reviews, follow Gadgets 360 on X, Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads and Google News. For the latest videos on gadgets and tech, subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you want to know everything about top influencers, follow our in-house Who'sThat360 on Instagram and YouTube.