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IPhone 12 charger

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The iPhone 12 Ships Without a Charger. Will It Curb E-Waste?
Apple’s decision to skip the charger and EarPods sounds like a step that would reduce the company’s environmental footprint. But it’s not that simple.

PHOTOGRAPH: APPLE
APPLE’S NEWEST IPHONE comes with no charging adapter or EarPods in the box. It’s the same with the Apple Watches that debuted last month. A charging cable is included (USB-C to Lightning cable for the iPhone 12), but Apple wants buyers to supply their own charging bricks to plug into the wall.

The company’s reasons are straightforward. "Customers already have over 700 million Lightning headphones, and many customers have moved to a wireless experience," said Lisa Jackson, vice president of environment, policy, and social initiatives at Apple, during Tuesday’s iPhone launch event. "There are also over 2 billion Apple power adapters out there in the world, and that’s not counting the billions of third-party adapters. We’re removing these items from the iPhone box, which reduces carbon emissions and avoids the mining and use of precious materials."

With fewer items included, the iPhone’s packaging is smaller. Jackson claims that Apple can fit up to 70 percent more products on a shipping pallet. "Taken all together, the changes we’ve made for iPhone 12 cut over 2 million metric tons of carbon annually; it’s like removing 450,000 cars from roads every year."

Some accessory makers say the move is welcome, offering customers more choice. And Apple should be commended for making a transparent effort to decrease its environmental footprint. But sustainability experts are skeptical, saying that Apple’s efforts make only a small impact on the growing electronic waste crisis.

E-Waste Explosion
The world generated 53.6 million metric tons of electronic waste in 2019, according to the Global E-Waste Monitor 2020, a report coauthored by Ruediger Kuehr, head of the Sustainable Cycles (SCYCLE) Programme hosted by the United Nations University, with collaboration from other organizations including the International Telecommunication Union. That number will continue to spike up to 74 million metric tons by 2030, almost double the amount recorded in 2014.

E-waste, which includes batteries, appliances, phones, screens, and cables, might seem like junk at the end of its lifecycle to the people tossing it out, but those items contain traces of valuable components like iron, copper, and gold. The report says the value of raw materials in global e-waste from 2019 sits at around $57 billion. Much of this e-waste ends up in developing countries like Ghana and Thailand, and it has spawned an industry of people scavenging for these valuable parts to make a living. But the e-waste also contains toxic materials.

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"A total of 50 tons of mercury and 71 kilotons of [brominated flame retardant] plastics are found in globally undocumented flows of e-waste annually, which is largely released into the environment and impacts the health of the exposed workers," the report says.

Apple routinely touts its efforts to reduce toxic components in its hardware. In its 2020 Environmental Progress Report, the company says it spent four years researching and developing an alternative to polyvinyl chloride (PVC), a material used in the manufacturing process of power cords. The resulting material isn’t toxin-free, but Apple claims it has a "lower toxicological and ecological risk." It often points out these advancements, like "arsenic-free display glass," and "Beryllium-free" components in environmental reports about its products.

Yet Kuehr says it’s important to put the impact of the removal of the charger and EarPods from the latest iPhones and Apple Watches into perspective.

"The percentage of chargers coming from tablets, smartphones, et cetera is 0.1 percent of the total e-waste increase," he said. "This makes up roughly 54,000 metric tons of e-waste generated. If you consider only Apple’s portion, it’s probably half or less. At the maximum, you could probably say it’s 25,000 metric tons, or 0.05 percent of the total e-waste increase annually."

The lack of a charging adapter in the box doesn’t mean people won’t need them anymore, Kuehr says. People may use what they have available at home, but many will still buy adapters from Apple. Those will now need to be packed and shipped separately from the phones, thereby increasing the environmental consequences.

Sara Behdad, a sustainability researcher at the University of Florida, agrees. "Apple’s analysis is based on this impression that some users really don’t need chargers and EarPods, because they already have them. Some users don’t. Then they have to purchase them, and that requires packaging and extra transportation."

The relationship between a charger and an iPhone isn’t necessarily one-to-one, either. Behdad says she’s used more chargers than the number of phones she’s owned. While this is anecdotal, and Behdad says there need to be surveys and more research to make any conclusive statements, it’s quite possible people will buy more than one charger from Apple or other accessory makers.

Volume Play
There are other concerns about Apple’s claim that it can pack more product on shipping pallets because of the iPhone 12’s smaller box.

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"They talk about pallet utilization in which they can somehow transport more iPhones," Behdad says. "The way that it’s distributed is not based on how many they can put in a pallet but based on demand, and I don’t think the demand will change. If they already sell 100 units of iPhones to a specific store, they will still ship that number after today. They don’t suddenly ship 200 to the store. They ship based on demand, not based on how many they can put on a pallet."

Kuehr also highlights that Apple doesn’t use a universal charging cable among its portfolio of devices. The iPhone uses a proprietary Lightning port, but most of the tech industry has turned to the USB-C connector for charging, connecting displays, and transferring files. The same USB-C cable used to recharge Facebook’s Oculus Quest virtual reality headset can also juice up a Samsung phone or a Chromebook. Yet two different cables are required between Apple’s iPad Pro and the iPhone, creating more e-waste.

Similarly, last year’s iPhone 11 included a power adapter with a USB-A port. The iPhone 12 comes with only a USB-C to Lightning cable, which is incompatible with that adapter. Unless you have a USB-C adapter from a third-party accessory maker or from other electronics you purchased, you’ll need a new adapter.

Apple has previously argued against the European Union’s push for a universal charger across all smartphones, saying it would stifle innovation and create an "unprecedented volume of electronic waste," as people would get rid of their Lightning accessories and cables en masse.

Yet the company today announced a new MagSafe system for the iPhone 12, allowing the device to securely and magnetically attach to other accessories, like wireless chargers, cases, and wallets. Existing wireless chargers will still recharge the iPhone 12 range, but customers are likely going to adopt this new system and dispose of their older accessories. Aira, a company that makes unique wireless charging tech that can detect a device’s placement rather than requiring specific positioning on the user’s part, says MagSafe adds a "layer of fragmentation and exclusion to the mix."

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"Apple has now created two divergent paths for wireless charging: one focused on free device placement on a surface that supports the globally-adopted Qi standard and another that is proprietary to a specific product and company," reads a statement on Aira’s website. An accessory-maker can offer a wireless charger for both Android and iPhone owners, but now they will need to create separate MagSafe variants for iPhone 12 owners.

Then there’s the issue of repairability. Kuehr says Apple can do more to allow consumers the option to repair their own devices. The company has notoriously lobbied against legislation that would require Apple to grant customers access to the resources required to perform their own fixes. Apple made some strides toward repairability in 2019 when it started offering independent repair businesses the same manuals and tools used by authorized service providers, but repair advocates say it should make these available to customers too.

More important is reaching a closed loop in its production cycle—using 100 percent recycled materials for the entire manufacturing process—as this is the area where a phone’s environmental impact is the largest. Kuehr says it starts by Apple setting up its own system to get its devices back in its hands, thus reducing the need to mine the earth for materials. "Then they will design the machines in a way that they’re easier to repair, where components can be reused."

Apple announced such an initiative in 2017 with the goal of creating such a closed supply loop, and it has made some progress. The new iPhone 12 range uses 100 percent recycled rare earth elements for all the magnets inside, and the same is true of the Taptic Engine (which provides haptic feedback) in last year’s iPhone. Apple has also been using 100 percent recycled aluminum enclosures for several years in select products. It employs disassembly bots to recover these precious materials from used devices, and the company also recently set its sights on becoming carbon neutral by 2030.

It will take quite some time before Apple unveils an iPhone made completely of recycled components and materials. And that’s precisely why Kuehr is apprehensive of the latest announcement about the charging adapter. "One should be a little bit careful in claiming too much for only taking away chargers from the parcel, because there’s a lot more to be done by a large company."

Adapt and Change
The idea of excluding a charging adapter isn’t new. It was thought up several years ago as a way to cut prices on already affordable phones, says George Paparrizos, senior director of product management at Qualcomm. It didn’t catch on because, at the time, charging standards and ports were not unified.

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However, the world has rallied around the reversible USB-C connector, the port found on today’s MacBooks, Windows laptops, Android phones, select iPads, headphones, and many other devices. Paired with the open Power Delivery standard for battery charging, the latest spec allows adapters to output up to 100 watts, with the ability to scale down if the device that’s plugged in can’t accept that much power.

Qualcomm’s new Quick Charge 5 protocol supports the PD standard and can output 100 watts as well. Qualcomm claims it can fully recharge a phone in just 15 minutes. The adapters included with many phones today aren’t adequate enough to recharge bigger, power-hungry machines, but as more high-power chargers arrive, Paparrizos says, you’ll be able to carry a single adapter to charge your smartphone, tablet, laptop, and other gadgets.

There’s another solution that already exists, and it’s quickly becoming popular among accessory makers. It’s called gallium nitride (GaN), and it’s a compound with semiconductor properties. Before it began appearing in chargers, it was used to create the blue LED in the early 1990s, which in turn made it even easier to create the efficient white LEDs that currently power everything from street lamps to your smartphone’s screen. The scientists behind the feat won a Nobel Prize in 2014.

In the early 2000s, those in the power electronics field started thinking about GaN as a substitute for silicon transistors, says Huili Grace Xing, a materials science researcher at Cornell University. Gallium and nitrogen, when bonded, have features that are advantageous when used for charging. For example, the compound can cool faster while also operating at higher temperatures.

Other benefits are more visual. Using GaN results in a charging adapter that’s significantly smaller despite offering the same power, if not more. Take accessory-maker Aukey’s 100-watt GaN power adapter, which costs $40. Not only is it cheaper than the 96-watt adapter Apple includes for its 16-inch MacBook Pro ($79), but it’s also 36 percent smaller.

In my own charging tests, the Aukey adapter fully recharged a MacBook Pro a few minutes faster than Apple’s—in about an hour and 20 minutes. Aukey’s 61-watt GaN charger also juiced up the latest iPad Pro an hour faster than the adapter Apple includes in the box. The days of lugging around a giant brick are quickly disappearing.

Reducing the need for multiple chargers, and the fact that GaN enables smaller-sized electronics, means it could make a small impact in reducing electronic waste. "This means less plastics, less ceramics, less metal wires, less processing, less reprocessing to deliver the same function," Xing says.

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Julian Chokkattu is a senior associate editor at WIRED, covering personal technology and reviewing consumer products. Previously he was the mobile and wearables editor at Digital Trends, steering coverage and reviews of smartphones and smartwatches, and an intern at TechCrunch. He graduated from Rutgers University with a bachelor’s degree in… Read more
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Ai ethical racism

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How one employee’s exit shook Google and the AI industry

Updated 10:38 AM EST, Thu March 11, 2021 September, Timnit Gebru, then co-leader of the ethical AI team at Google, sent a private message on Twitter to Emily Bender, a computational linguistics professor at the University of Washington.

"Hi Emily, I’m wondering if you’ve written something regarding ethical considerations of large language models or something you could recommend from others?" she asked, referring to a buzzy kind of artificial intelligence software trained on text from an enormous number of webpages.

Google reshuffles AI team leadership after researcher’s controversial departure
The question may sound unassuming but it touched on something central to the future of Google’s foundational product: search. This kind of AI has become increasingly capable and popular in the last couple years, driven largely by language models from Google and research lab OpenAI. Such AI can generate text, mimicking everything from news articles and recipes to poetry, and it has quickly become key to Google Search, which the company said responds to trillions of queries each year. In late 2019, the company started relying on such AI to help answer one in 10 English-language queries from US users; nearly a year later, the company said it was handling nearly all English queries and is also being used to answer queries in dozens of other languages.

"Sorry, I haven’t!" Bender quickly replied to Gebru, according to messages viewed by CNN Business. But Bender, who at the time mostly knew Gebru from her presence on Twitter, was intrigued by the question. Within minutes she fired back several ideas about the ethical implications of such state-of-the-art AI models, including the "Carbon cost of creating the damn things" and "AI hype/people claiming it’s understanding when it isn’t," and cited some relevant academic papers.

Gebru, a prominent Black woman in AI — a field that’s largely White and male — is known for her research into bias and inequality in AI. It’s a relatively new area of study that explores how the technology, which is made by humans, soaks up our biases. The research scientist is also cofounder of Black in AI, a group focused on getting more Black people into the field. She responded to Bender that she was trying to get Google to consider the ethical implications of large language models.

Bender suggested co-authoring an academic paper looking at these AI models and related ethical pitfalls. Within two days, Bender sent Gebru an outline for a paper. A month later, the women had written that paper (helped by other coauthors, including Gebru’s co-team leader at Google, Margaret Mitchell) and submitted it to the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, or FAccT. The paper’s title was "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?" and it included a tiny parrot emoji after the question mark. (The phrase "stochastic parrots" refers to the idea that these enormous AI models are pulling together words without truly understanding what they mean, similar to how a parrot learns to repeat things it hears.)

The paper considers the risks of building ever-larger AI language models trained on huge swaths of the internet, such as the environmental costs and the perpetuation of biases, as well as what can be done to diminish those risks. It turned out to be a much bigger deal than Gebru or Bender could have anticipated.

Timnit Gebru said she was fired by Google after criticizing its approach to minority hiring and the biases built into today’s artificial intelligence systems.
Before they were even notified in December about whether it had been accepted by the conference, Gebru abruptly left Google. On Wednesday, December 2, she tweeted that she had been "immediately fired" for an email she sent to an internal mailing list. In the email she expressed dismay over the ongoing lack of diversity at the company and frustration over an internal process related to the review of that not-yet-public research paper. (Google said it had accepted Gebru’s resignation over a list of demands she had sent via email that needed to be met for her to continue working at the company.)

Gebru’s exit from Google’s ethical AI team kickstarted a months-long crisis for the tech giant’s AI division, including employee departures, a leadership shuffle, and widening distrust of the company’s historically well-regarded scholarship in the larger AI community. The conflict quickly escalated to the top of Google’s leadership, forcing CEO Sundar Pichai to announce the company would investigate what happened and to apologize for how the circumstances of Gebru’s departure caused some employees to question their place at the company. The company finished its months-long review in February.

But her ousting, and the fallout from it, reignites concerns about an issue with implications beyond Google: how tech companies attempt to police themselves. With very few laws regulating AI in the United States, companies and academic institutions often make their own rules about what is and isn’t okay when developing increasingly powerful software. Ethical AI teams, such as the one Gebru co-led at Google, can help with that accountability. But the crisis at Google shows the tensions that can arise when academic research is conducted within a company whose future depends on the same technology that’s under examination.

"Academics should be able to critique these companies without repercussion," Gebru told CNN Business.

Google declined to make anyone available to interview for this piece. In a statement, Google said it has hundreds of people working on responsible AI, and has produced more than 200 publications related to building responsible AI in the past year. "This research is incredibly important and we’re continuing to expand our work in this area in keeping with our AI Principles," a company spokesperson said.

"A constant battle from day one"
Gebru joined Google in September 2018, at Mitchell’s urging, as the co-leader of the Ethical AI team. According to those who have worked on it, the team was a small, diverse group of about a dozen employees including research and social scientists and software engineers — and it was initially brought together by Mitchell about three years ago. It researches the ethical repercussions of AI and advises the company on AI policies and products.

Two Google employees quit over AI researcher Timnit Gebru’s exit
Gebru, who earned her doctorate degree in computer vision at Stanford and held a postdoctoral position at Microsoft Research, said she was initially unsure about joining the company. Gebru said she didn’t see many vocal, opinionated women, which she had seen at Microsoft, and a number of women warned her about sexism and harassment they faced at Google. (The company, which has faced public criticism from its employees over its handling of sexual harassment and discrimination in the workplace, has previously pledged to "build a more equitable and respectful workplace.")

She was eventually convinced by Mitchell’s efforts to build a diverse team.

During the following two years, Gebru said, the team worked on numerous projects aimed at laying a foundation for how people do research and build products at Google, such as through the development of model cards that are meant to make AI models more transparent. It also worked with other groups at Google to consider ethical issues that might arise in data collection or the development of new products. Gebru pointed out that Alex Hanna, a senior research scientist at Google, was instrumental in figuring out guidelines for when researchers might want to (or not want to) annotate gender in dataset. (Doing so could, for instance, be helpful, or it could perpetuate biases or stereotypes.)

"I felt like our group was like a family," Gebru said.

Yet Gebru also described working at Google as "a constant battle, from day one." If she complained about something, for instance, she said she would be told she was "difficult." She recounted one incident where she was told, via email, that she was not being productive and was making demands because she declined an invitation for a meeting that was to be held the next day. Though Gebru does not have documentation of such incidents, Hanna said she heard a number of similar stories like this from Gebru and Mitchell.

"The outside world sees us much more as experts, really respects us a lot more than anyone at Google," Gebru said. "It was such a shock when I arrived there to see that."

Margaret Mitchell brought together the Ethical AI team at Google and later described Gebru’s departure as a "horrible life-changing loss in a year of horrible life-changing losses."
"Constantly dehumanized"
Internal conflict came to a head in early December. Gebru said she had a long back-and-forth with Google AI leadership in which she was repeatedly told to retract the "stochastic parrots" paper from consideration for presentation at the FAccT conference, or remove her name from it.

On the evening of Tuesday, December 1, she sent an email to Google’s Brain Women and Allies mailing list, expressing frustration about the company’s internal review process and its treatment of her, as well as dismay over the ongoing lack of diversity at the company.

"Have you ever heard of someone getting ‘feedback’ on a paper through a privileged and confidential document to HR? Does that sound like a standard procedure to you or does it just happen to people like me who are constantly dehumanized?" she wrote in the email, which was first reported by the website Platformer. (Gebru confirmed the authenticity of the email to CNN Business.)

She also wrote that the paper was sent to more than 30 researchers for feedback, which Bender, the professor, confirmed to CNN Business in an interview. This was done because the authors figured their work was "likely to ruffle some feathers" in the AI community, as it went against the grain of the current main direction of the field, Bender said. This feedback was solicited from a range of people, including many whose feathers they expected would be ruffled — and incorporated into the paper.

"We had no idea it was going to turn into what it has turned into," Bender said.

The next day, Wednesday, December 2, Gebru learned she was no longer a Google employee.

Emily Bender, a computational linguistics professor, suggested co-authoring an academic paper with Gebru looking at these AI models and related ethical pitfalls after the two messaged each other on Twitter. "We had no idea it was going to turn into what it has turned into," she said.
In an email sent to Google Research employees and posted publicly a day later, Jeff Dean, Google’s head of AI, told employees that the company wasn’t given the required two weeks to review the paper before its deadline. The paper was reviewed internally, he wrote, but it "didn’t meet our bar for publication."

"It ignored too much relevant research — for example, it talked about the environmental impact of large models, but disregarded subsequent research showing much greater efficiencies. Similarly, it raised concerns about bias in language models, but didn’t take into account recent research to mitigate these issues," he wrote.

Gebru said there was nothing unusual about how the paper was submitted for internal review at Google. She disputed Dean’s claim that the two-week window is a requirement at the company and noted her team did an analysis which found the majority of 140 recent research papers were submitted and approved within one day or less. Since she started at the company, she’s been listed as a coauthor on numerous publications.

Uncomfortable taking her name off the paper and wanting transparency, Gebru wrote an email that the company soon used to seal her fate. Dean said Gebru’s email included demands that had to be met if she were to remain at Google. "Timnit wrote that if we didn’t meet these demands, she would leave Google and work on an end date," Dean wrote.

She told CNN Business that her conditions included transparency about the way the paper was ordered to be retracted, as well as meetings with Dean and another AI executive at Google to talk about the treatment of researchers.

"We accept and respect her decision to resign from Google," Dean wrote in his note.

Outrage in AI
Gebru’s exit from the tech giant immediately sparked outrage within her small team, in the company at large, and in the AI and tech industries. Coworkers and others quickly shared support for her online, including Mitchell, who called it a "horrible life-changing loss in a year of horrible life-changing losses."

A Medium post decrying Gebru’s departure and demanding transparency about Google’s decision regarding the research paper quickly gained the signatures of more than 1,300 Google employees and more than 1,600 supporters within the academic and AI fields. As of the second week of March, its number of supporters had swelled to nearly 2,700 Google employees and over 4,300 others.

Google tried to quell the controversy and the swell of emotions that came with it, with Google’s CEO promising an investigation into what happened. Employees in the ethical AI group responded by sending their own list of demands in a letter to Pichai, including an apology from Dean and another manager for how Gebru was treated, and for the company to offer Gebru a new, higher-level position at Google.

Behind the scenes, tensions only grew.

Mitchell told CNN Business she was put on administrative leave in January and had her email access blocked then. And Hanna said the company conducted an investigation during which it scheduled interviews with various AI ethics team members, with little to no notice.

"They were frankly interrogation sessions, from how Meg [Mitchell] described it and how other team members described it," Hanna, who still works at Google, said.

Alex Hanna, who still works at Google, said the company conducted interviews with various AI ethics team members. "They were frankly interrogation sessions," she said.
On February 18, the company announced it had shuffled the leadership of its responsible AI efforts. It named Marian Croak, a Black woman who has been a VP at the company for six years, to run a new center focused on responsible AI within Google Research. Ten teams centered around AI ethics, fairness, and accessibility — including the Ethical AI team — now report to her. Google declined to make Croak available for an interview.

Hanna said the ethical AI team had met with Croak several times in mid-December, during which the group went over its list of demands point by point. Hanna said it felt like progress was being made at those meetings.

Google is trying to end the controversy over its Ethical AI team. It’s not going well
A day after that leadership changeup, Dean announced several policy changes in an internal memo, saying Google plans to modify its approach for handling how certain employees leave the company after finishing a months-long review of Gebru’s exit. A copy of the memo, which was obtained by CNN Business, said changes would include having HR employees review "sensitive" employee exits.

It wasn’t quite a new chapter for the company yet, though. After months of being outspoken on Twitter following Gebru’s exit — including tweeting a lengthy internal memo that was heavily critical of Google — Mitchell’s time at Google was up. "I’m fired," she tweeted that afternoon.

A Google spokesperson did not dispute that Mitchell was fired when asked for comment on the matter. The company cited a review that found "multiple violations" of its code of conduct, including taking "confidential business-sensitive documents and private data of other employees."

Mitchell told CNN Business that the ethical AI team had been "terrified" that she would be next to go after Gebru.

"I have no doubt that my advocacy on race and gender issues, as well as my support of Dr. Gebru, led to me being banned and then terminated," she said.

Jeff Dean, Google’s head of AI, hinted at a hit to the company’s reputation in research during a town hall meeting. "I think the way to regain trust is to continue to publish cutting-edge work in many, many areas, including pushing the boundaries on responsible-AI-related topics," he said.
Big company, big research
More than three months after Gebru’s departure, the shock waves can still be felt inside and outside the company.

"It’s absolutely devastating," Hanna said. "How are you supposed to do work as usual? How are you even supposed to know what kinds of things you can say? How are you supposed to know what kinds of things you’re supposed to do? What are going to be the conditions in which the company throws you under the bus?"

On Monday, Google Walkout for Real Change, an activism group formed in 2018 by Google employees to protest sexual harassment and misconduct at the company, called for those in the AI field to stand in solidarity with the AI ethics group. It urged academic AI conferences to, among other things, refuse to consider papers that were edited by lawyers "or similar corporate representatives" and turn down sponsorships from Google. The group also asked schools and other research groups to stop taking funding from organizations such as Google until it commits to "clear and externally enforced and validated" research standards.

By its nature, academic research about technology can be disruptive and critical. In addition to Google, many large companies run research centers, such as Microsoft Research and Facebook AI Research, and they tend to project them publicly as somewhat separate from the company itself.

But until Google provides some transparency about its research and publication processes, Bender thinks "everything that comes out of Google has a big asterisk next to it." A recent Reuters report that Google lawyers had edited one of its researchers’ AI papers is also fueling mistrust regarding work that comes out of the company. (Google responded to Reuters by saying it edited the paper due to inaccurate usage of legal terms.)

"Basically we’re in a situation where, okay, here’s a paper with a Google affiliation, how much should we believe it?" Bender said. Gebru said what happened to her and her group signals the importance of funding for independent research.

And the company has said it’s intent on fixing its reputation as a research institution. In a recent Google town hall meeting, which Reuters first reported on and CNN Business has also obtained audio from, the company outlined changes it’s making to its internal research and publication practices. Google did not respond to a question about the authenticity of the audio.

A radish in a tutu walking a dog? This AI can draw it really well
"I think the way to regain trust is to continue to publish cutting-edge work in many, many areas, including pushing the boundaries on responsible-AI-related topics, publishing things that are deeply interesting to the research community, I think is one of the best ways to continue to be a leader in the research field," Dean said, responding to an employee question regarding outside researchers saying they will read papers from Google "with more skepticism now."

In early March, the FAccT conference halted its sponsorship agreement with Google. Gebru is one of the conference’s founders, and served as a member of FAccT’s first executive committee. Google had been a sponsor each year since the annual conference began in 2018. Michael Ekstrand, co-chair of the ACM FAccT Network, confirmed to CNN Business that the sponsorship was halted, saying the move was determined to be "in the best interests of the community" and that the group will "revisit" its sponsorship policy for 2022. Ekstrand said Gebru was not involved in the decision.

The conference, which began virtually last week, runs through Friday. Gebru’s and Bender’s paper was presented on Wednesday. In tweets posted during the online presentation — which had been recorded in advance by Bender and another paper coauthor — Gebru called the experience "surreal."

"Never imagined what transpired after we decided to collaborate on this paper," she tweeted.

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