---
category: Skeptics & Critics
created: 2026-09-22
relations:
- end: 2020-12
  fn: 1
  role: manager, Ethical AI team
  type: employed_by
  with: '[[Google]]'
- fn: 3
  start: 2021-12-02
  type: founded
  with: '[[Distributed AI Research Institute]]'
- fn: 4
  role: co-developer with Émile P. Torres
  start: 2023
  type: participant_in
  with: '[[TESCREAL]]'
summary: Computer scientist who left Google's Ethical AI team in December 2020 in
  a dispute over a paper on large language models, founded DAIR in 2021, and developed
  the TESCREAL critique with Émile P. Torres.
tags:
- Person
- ArtificialIntelligence
- Google
- TESCREAL
updated: 2026-09-22
---

Timnit Gebru was a manager of Google's Ethical AI team until December 2020. After a dispute over a paper she had co-written on large language models, she emailed a list of women and allies in Google Brain about the company's treatment of the paper and of diversity work; Google cut off her corporate account. The head of Google Research, Jeff Dean, told employees that the paper had been submitted before internal review was complete, that a cross-functional team had found it "didn't meet our bar for publication," because it "ignored too much relevant research" on the efficiency of large models and on mitigating bias, and that Gebru had written that she would leave unless certain conditions were met: "We accept and respect her decision to resign from Google." *Platformer,* which published both emails, reported that Google had terminated her.[^1] The paper, "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?," written with the linguist Emily Bender and others, appeared at the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency in 2021.[^2]

### DAIR

On December 2, 2021, Gebru launched the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), described as an independent, community-rooted institute "set to counter Big Tech's pervasive influence on the research, development and deployment of AI," with funding from the Ford Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Kapor Center and the Open Society Foundation. "AI needs to be brought back down to earth," she said.[^3]

### TESCREAL

With the philosopher [Émile P. Torres](/people/émile-p-torres/), who coined the acronym, Gebru developed [TESCREAL](/concepts/tescreal/), a name for the bundle of transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism and longtermism that they argued descends from Anglo-American [eugenics](/concepts/eugenics/). Their paper in *First Monday* in April 2024 placed [Julian Huxley](/people/julian-huxley/) with Francis Galton among its progenitors and applied the label "TESCREALists" to [Sam Altman](/people/sam-altman/), [Elon Musk](/people/elon-musk/), [Marc Andreessen](/people/marc-andreessen/) and [Sam Bankman-Fried](/people/sam-bankman-fried/).[^4]

[^1]: Newton, Casey. "The withering email that got an ethical AI researcher fired at Google." *Platformer,* December 2020, publishing Gebru's email and Jeff Dean's email to employees in full. https://www.platformer.news/the-withering-email-that-got-an-ethical/
[^2]: Bender, Emily M., Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Shmargaret Shmitchell. "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?" *Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency,* 2021, pp. 610-623. https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922 (text not examined).
[^3]: Distributed AI Research Institute. Press release, December 2, 2021. https://dair-institute.org/press-release/
[^4]: Gebru, Timnit, and Émile P. Torres. "The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence." *First Monday* 29, no. 4, April 2024. https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13636