Silicon Valley Business Journal/Luke Stangel: Google AI executive at the center of Project Maven is quitting

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Google AI executive at the center of Project Maven is quitting

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Fei-Fei Li, an artificial intelligence expert at Stanford University, is stepping down as the head of Google's Google Cloud AI unit.
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Fei-Fei Li, an artificial intelligence expert at Stanford University, is stepping down as the head of Google's Google Cloud AI unit.

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By Luke Stangel  – Contributing writer
Sep 11, 2018, 6:29am PDT Updated an hour ago

A Google executive widely regarded as one of the company’s top minds in artificial intelligence is stepping down, after less than two years on the job, the company said in a blog post Monday.

Fei-Fei Li will be replaced by Andrew Moore, a former Googler who currently heads up the school of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University.

Earlier this year, Li found herself at the center of an internal debate over whether Google should have agreed to participate in Project Maven, a Pentagon effort that uses artificial intelligence to process military drone footage.

Leaked emails showed Li agonized over how the public would perceive Google’s involvement in the project, though not necessarily the ethics of the project itself.

“This is red meat to the media to find all ways to damage Google,” she wrote, according to a copy of the email obtained by the Intercept. “You probably heard Elon Musk and his comment about AI causing WW3.

“I don’t know what would happen if the media starts picking up a theme that Google is secretly building AI weapons or AI technologies to enable weapons for the Defense industry. Google Cloud has been building our theme on Democratizing AI in 2017, and Diane [Greene, head of Google Cloud] and I have been talking about Humanistic AI for enterprise. I’d be super careful to protect these very positive images.”
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Google Cloud didn’t widely announce its participation in Project Maven.

Months later, word of the project spread internally, prompting thousands of employees at the Alphabet Inc.-owned business to publicly pressure the company to cancel its Pentagon contract for Project Maven.

CEO Sundar Pichai later issued Google’s first artificial intelligence code of ethics.

Li joined the company in January 2017 as Google Cloud’s Chief Scientist for AI and Machine Learning. She teaches computer science at Stanford University, and is the director of both the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab and Stanford Vision Lab.

She’ll return to Stanford once Moore replaces her by the end of the year.
Andrew Moore worked at Google from 2006 to 2014, and will work out of the company’s Pittsburgh office, near Carnegie Mellon University, as he steps in to become its chief of artificial intelligence.
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Andrew Moore worked at Google from 2006 to 2014, and will work out of the company’s Pittsburgh office, near Carnegie Mellon University, as he steps in to become its chief of artificial intelligence.

Joe Wojcik

Moore worked at Google from 2006 to 2014, and will work out of the company’s Pittsburgh office, near Carnegie Mellon.

“I am bursting with excitement about this,” Moore said in Google’s blog announcement. “I have always deeply believed in the power of technology to improve the state of the world, so for me it's a big opportunity to help Google bring useful AI to all the other industry verticals.”
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