Timnit Gebru was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; her father, an electrical engineer, died when she was five, and she was raised by her economist mother. At 15 she fled Ethiopia during the Eritrean-Ethiopian War, was granted asylum in the United States, and settled in Massachusetts, later earning her bachelor's, master's and Ph.D. in electrical engineering, all from Stanford University.
After a postdoc at Microsoft Research studying algorithmic bias, Gebru joined Google in 2018 to co-lead its Ethical AI research team, where she hired prominent researchers of colour and co-authored influential papers, including the Gender Shades study exposing racial and gender bias in facial recognition systems.
In December 2020, Gebru was fired by Google after refusing to withdraw a co-authored paper on the risks of large language models, an event that sparked a major internal labor movement. A year later she founded the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), an independent research organisation examining AI's impact on marginalised communities free from Big Tech's influence.
- Co-founder of Black in AI, promoting diversity in AI research
- Founder and Executive Director of the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR)
- Co-author of the influential Gender Shades study on facial recognition bias
- Named to Time's Most Influential People and Nature's Ten People Who Shaped Science
- Publish the finding even when the company that employs you doesn't want to hear it.. She was fired for refusing to retract her co-authored paper on AI risks.
- Build the independent institution when the existing ones won't let you do the work freely.. She founded DAIR specifically outside Big Tech's structures.
- Turn a personal setback into a rallying point for collective action.. Her firing helped spark the first union formed by Google tech workers.