Timnit Gebru
AI ethics researcher who founded the DAIR Institute
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Timnit Gebru is an Ethiopian-born computer scientist who researches bias and harms in artificial intelligence. She co-authored the Gender Shades study on facial recognition and co-founded Black in AI. After her contested departure from Google in 2020, she founded the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR).
Biography
Background
Gebru was born in Addis Ababa to Eritrean parents and left Ethiopia as a teenager during the Ethiopian–Eritrean war, receiving asylum in the US. She studied electrical engineering at Stanford and worked at Apple.
Research
She earned her PhD at Stanford under Fei-Fei Li, using street-view images to estimate demographics. With Joy Buolamwini she co-wrote Gender Shades (2018), showing facial-recognition systems were least accurate for darker-skinned women.
She co-led Google’s Ethical AI team. In December 2020 she left after a dispute over a paper, later published as “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots”, about the risks of large language models; she says she was fired.
DAIR
In 2021 she founded DAIR, an independent research institute. She co-founded Black in AI in 2017 and was named to Time’s 100 most influential people in 2022.
Timeline
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2017
PhD from Stanford; co-founds Black in AI
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2018
Gender Shades; joins Google
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2020
Leaves Google
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2021
Founds DAIR; Stochastic Parrots published
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2022
Time 100
Notable works
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2018
Gender Shades Paper
With Joy Buolamwini.
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2021
On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots Paper
With Emily Bender and others.
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2018
Datasheets for Datasets Paper
Did you know?
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1
Thousands of Google employees signed a letter supporting her.
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2
“Stochastic parrots” became a common phrase in AI debates.
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3
She proposed “datasheets” documenting how AI datasets are made.
Connections
Frequently asked
Who is Timnit Gebru?
Timnit Gebru is an Ethiopian-born computer scientist who researches bias and harms in artificial intelligence. She co-authored the Gender Shades study on facial recognition and co-founded Black in AI. After her contested departure from Google in 2020, she founded the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR).
Where is Timnit Gebru from?
Timnit Gebru was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
What is Timnit Gebru known for?
Timnit Gebru is best known for Gender Shades study; “Stochastic Parrots” paper; firing from Google (2020); founding DAIR and Black in AI.
References
- Timnit Gebru — Wikipedia. Wikipedia. Retrieved 4 November 2026.
- Timnit Gebru — Goodreads author page. Goodreads. Retrieved 4 November 2026.
- Official website. ai.stanford.edu. Retrieved 4 November 2026.
- Timnit Gebru (Q59753117) — structured data. Wikidata. Retrieved 4 November 2026.
Includes material from the Wikipedia article “Timnit Gebru”, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. That text is available under the same licence. Learn more
External links
About this profile
- Researched by the TrackFame editorial team; reviewed by Sanjay Sokal under our editorial policy
- First published 4 November 2026
- Last updated
Cite this page
“Timnit Gebru.” TrackFame, last updated 5 November 2026. https://trackfame.com/person/timnit-gebru
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