Hey, What Next listener, it's Mary.

Just wanted to give you a quick heads up that today's show is going to sound a little bit different.

That's because our friends over at What Next TBD, they had a great interview that just couldn't wait until Friday.

So, we're going to switch things up a bit.

For the rest of the show, you're going to be hearing from Lizzie O'Leary.

I'll be back tomorrow.

Earlier this fall, Timnit Gebrou submitted a paper for consideration for an academic conference,

not something that's particularly unusual for her. Timneit studies ethics and artificial intelligence, so this is

the kind of thing she does. But since she was working at Google, there were some standard

pre-submission hoops to jump through. Google wanted to review the paper, which Timnit wrote

with several of her colleagues and sign off on it. And that's when Timneed says she started getting pushback.

So this was the week before Thanksgiving at 4.30 p.m. randomly. There's like a meeting on my

calendar. Nobody's telling me what it's about. She was told by senior managers that the paper didn't

meet Google's publication bar and that she should retract it or take the names

of Google employees off of it. Timnit wanted more clarity on who objected to the paper and why they

wanted it retracted and said that if Google couldn't provide that information, she would resign.

This kicked off a few days of wrangling and several intense emails.

Until one night, December 1st, Timit was chatting with a woman on her team, one of her direct

reports. I actually was thinking, I was like, oh, you know what? I haven't told her that this

paper thing is escalating so quickly. I probably should tell her about it. Poor woman is,

she's not on this paper.

She doesn't know anything about it.

...