- Two Nvidia employees met with CEO Jensen Huang in 2020 to warn that artificial intelligence could negatively affect minorities.
- Both were not satisfied with his response, according to Bloomberg, and left the company soon after.
- One LinkedIn post on the meeting was “the most devastating 45 minutes of my professional career.”
Two Nvidia employees warned CEO Jensen Huang that artificial intelligence could be harmful to minorities — and one was so unhappy with his response that he quit shortly afterward. according to a Bloomberg report.
Nvidia employees Masheika Allgood and Alexander Tsado met with Nvidia boss Huang in 2020 to voice concerns from company employees about the dangers of artificial intelligence, especially for minorities.
Both left unsatisfied, according to Bloomberg, and left the company shortly thereafter. Allgood said she left because Nvidia “wasn’t willing to lead in an area that was very important to me.”
Tsado, a former director of product marketing at Nvidia, told Bloomberg that he wanted Huang to understand the importance of the issue.
“We’re building these tools and I’m looking at them and thinking, this isn’t going to work for me because I’m black,” he said.
In the meeting, which Allgood described as “the most devastating 45 minutes of my professional life” in a LinkedIn post, The two former presidents of the company’s Black Employees Caucus warned that the unintended effects of the new technology would be disproportionately felt by minority groups. The duo spent a year collecting employee concerns about artificial intelligence.
Allgood told Bloomberg she raised concerns that AI facial recognition systems used in self-driving car technology could pose a threat to minorities, with studies suggesting that some facial recognition technologies they have more difficulty recognizing people of color.
He said Huang pushed back against that, replying that autonomous vehicles could be tested on highways where they would pose less of a threat to pedestrians.
Self-driving technology has come under increased scrutiny in recent months after a horrific accident involving a Cruise robotaxi in San Francisco.
In the weeks following the crash, which led to Cruz recalling its entire fleet of autonomous vehiclesreports indicate that the company’s driverless car technology had difficulty identifying children and large holes in the past.
Similar concerns have been raised about artificial intelligence and minorities. The biased nature of many of the huge datasets on which AI models are trained means that some have exhibited biased behaviour.
In 2015, Google faced backlash after its image recognition systems were discovered classifies blacks as “gorillas” — a problem he fixed by preventing it from recognizing gorillas altogether.
More recently, AI image generators such as OpenAI’s DALL-E have been found they perpetuate harmful stereotypes when asked for images of “African workers”.
Nvidia is a vital part of the AI arms race
Nvidia has seen Its stock price has soared as a result of the AI revolutionwith tech companies clamoring for graphics processing units (GPUs) that are vital for training AI models.
A company spokesperson told Bloomberg that the chipmaker had done substantial work to make its AI products safe and inclusive since Allgood and Tsado left.
Huang green-lighted some of Allgood’s proposals, according to internal emails seen by Bloomberg, and the company has now created an AI & Legal Ethics program.
However, the chipmaker continues to lag behind other tech companies in diversity. 7.8% of its US workforce is black, Hispanic or Native American, according to data compiled by Bloombergcompared to 18% at rival Intel, for example.
Nvidia did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, made outside normal business hours.
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