VentureBeat's third-annual Women in AI Breakfast was recently held to bring together leaders in the industry. The breakfast was presented by Capital One and moderated by Noelle Silver, the founder of the nonprofit "do-tank" (we LOVE this term!) Women in AI, and focused on "inclusive engineering" and diverse AI, topics that have never been more crucial than in the era of smart everything and facial recognition software. And getting to a more diverse future for AI starts with engineers who are designing products for everyone, not just a portion of the population. Kay Firsh Butterfield, head of AI and machine learning and executive committee member of the World Economic Forum, said, "We've been doing some work with a number of the big tech companies to ask what does responsible use of technology actually look like. One of the things we know is that you need diverse product teams. We should all be at the table, with different backgrounds, so that our products use good, non-biased AI." (See WiCipedia: Coded Bias sheds light on facial recognition inequalities.)

Sometimes it seems like working at a Big Tech company is a dream situation. There are fancy at-work perks and services available to employees, catered meals and those famous nap pods. Yet many of us now know there's also a dark underbelly to working at these companies. In other words, all the perks come with some compromise and secrecy. One person who saw and exposed this side of tech is former Google engineer Manu Cornet (now at Twitter), who created comics and memes about the ethics and politics of working at Google, from its military contracts to its treatment of minorities and women to its famous "Don't be evil" motto, as well as many lighter topics. Cornet also famously drew portraits of 100 Google female engineers after James Damore's 2017 "gender manifesto" tore through the company. To check out two whole volumes of Cornet's insightful, boundary-breaking looks into Big Tech, click here. (See WiCipedia: Dolly Babes, Manifesto Backlash & 'Brotastic' Failures.)

Instacart, the grocery delivery company, experienced an unprecedented boom during the peak of the pandemic when many felt it was unsafe to leave their homes, even to buy groceries. That boom resulted in a shortage of staff and increased scrutiny into how workers, especially those who were actually delivering the groceries, were treated and paid. Possibly as a result, the company is now bringing in a new (female!) CEO, TechCrunch reports. Formerly of "controversial" Facebook, Fidji Simo will take the reins at Instacart on August 2. Simo is also a co-founder of Women in Product, a nonprofit organization that aims to bridge the gender gap for women in product management and tech at large. Hopefully Simo will bring that focus to Instacart as well. (See WiCipedia: Podcast Recs, Interview No-Nos & Creating a Majority Female Tech Company.)

— Eryn Leavens, Special Features & Copy Editor, Light Reading. Follow us on Twitter @LR_WiC and contact Eryn directly at [email protected].