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Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

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Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#151

Post by telltruth »

timnit-drama wrote: post #15

The email she posted [1] makes it pretty clear that she sent an email with some demands/conditions (separate from the one "to Brain women and allies") and said that she would resign if they weren't met. Google said they wouldn't agree to them, accepted her threatened resignation, and told her it was effective immediately. Without knowing more context, it sounds like she tried to do some hardball negotiating by threat…

As I understand, she first sent out mass email to large group of employees that outright violated Google's policy. This act alone was sufficient for immediate termination. However, she then tried to bargain with her manager. Her manager basically let her know that bargaining was irrelevant and her action was serious enough that she is being terminated immediately. Then she comes back and tells the story with twist that Google ignored her bargaining and terminated her even while she initiated that bargaining. She goes on to reveal a lot of things except the content of her email or even hint of exactly what was so incriminating. Now she wants to keep lid closed in the name of future lawsuit all the while launching attacks on everyone. I feel whole thing is super muddy. If she is truly ethical, she needs to come out clean on exactly what happened or just stop attacking everyone and keep playing victim.

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#152

Post by visarga »

astrange wrote: post #84
throwaway-kmc wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is reasonable for one of the founders and most highly respected members of the field to make confident claims about something that is as open and shut as this. The paper in question was training a network to upres faces. The researchers trained it on a dataset containing primarily White faces and released it on GitHub for reproducibility. Subsequent people used it on Black faces and found it make them whit…

> I’m not sure what else there is possibly wrong here. Is the width of their convolutions racist? Not that parameter specifically, but if you say the data is wrong then that means any other parameter might be wrong too. More data might mean the model is too small to fit it, or the hyperparameters might be wrong to train it, or you now have the wrong ratio of other phenotypes (let's say that instead of races…) in the…

Occam's razor makes us think in this case it's the data, the simplest explanation.

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#153

Post by sumtechguy »

jiuahweruihawi wrote: post #107

There's so much context missing here. What did she post on Google Brain? What were the demands she made to Google? Are these in the public domain? (If they're not public then I imagine they'll be leaked eventually if this gets enough media attention. Are we witnessing the opening act of Google's next enormous Damore-style PR clusterfuck? Grab your popcorn.)

Yeah there is a lot missing here.

I personally have ever seen the 'do x or I quit' move work exactly once. The second time they tried it they took them up on the offer. They were even very nice to work with and were part of the 'do not fire this person or it is chaos' team. When he did it the first time he said 'I can only do this once if I try again they will fire me on the spot'. He did it a second time just to see if they would match his external offer (they let him ride the 2 weeks at least). You usually only get one shot at that sort of move. If you do it all the time, managers start looking for ways to offload you. You will be seen as a threat to org stability as you come off as unreliable. No matter how key you are.

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#154

Post by pmarreck »

1) We don't know what her demands were. Perhaps they were unreasonable.

2) She sent them right after an email blast that apparently rubbed execs the wrong way.

3) Then she threatened to leave and they called her bluff.

If I was a manager and an otherwise well-respected BUT irate employee who made unreasonable demands threatened to leave right after sending out a controversial email blast, I think I'd let them leave, as well. Negativity doesn't produce positive solutions.

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#155

Post by telltruth »

techbusters wrote: post #27
timnit-drama wrote: post #15

The email she posted [1] makes it pretty clear that she sent an email with some demands/conditions (separate from the one "to Brain women and allies") and said that she would resign if they weren't met. Google said they wouldn't agree to them, accepted her threatened resignation, and told her it was effective immediately. Without knowing more context, it sounds like she tried to do some hardball negotiating by threat…

There is still a civil way to accept a resignation, with proper timelines and transfer of responsibilities. She offered to resign in some time due to some demands, and the immediate termination seems to be related to an email unrelated to those demands. This sounds a lot like a sleazy move by Google to couch an immediate firing as a resignation.

I don't think she ever resigned. My guess is that her manager Megan was being nice to her by saying that this is not firing but "accepting resignation". Unfortunately, her manager was obviously not trained in firing. Never "accept resignation" if employee didn't actually resigned, even if you want to nice to them.

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#156

Post by visarga »

compycom wrote: post #85
fullstackPM wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't that go both ways though? Why was Gebru so confident that the bias is because of something else other than the training dataset? She immediately assumed that there are other items contributing to the bias and devolved the quality of the conversation as well by making those claims in a frustrated/exasperated tone. The most obvious and easiest way to clear this up would be for the original researches to train…

The whole point is that it never is trained on a "Senegal" dataset, is it? Why do we always see these errors where white-centric datasets produce white-centric results? While it would be a symmetric situation a vacuum, we do not live in a vacuum. And acknowledging dataset bias by itself doesn't address the bias meaningfully. In practice, we often treat the bias as an exogenous factor when it is not, moving it outside…

This is a great goal but the time and place for it is not in a super-resolution paper. There are specific conferences, benchmarks and projects where it can be achieved with more efficiency.

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#157

Post by visarga »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #36
square_usual wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "reasonable" to assume "she picked a fight". It's not "reasonable" to fire someone for "picking a fight", whatever that is. It's awful how people are willing to be so charitable to Google here after doing the exact opposite in Damore's case.

It's not really about charity to Google. I just don't consider her Twitter feed a trustworthy source of information, given her general frequency of toxic Twitter drama and her extended, bad faith attack on LeCun. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Google was in the wrong here, and if they are I hope she gets some kind of justice, but I don't think we can just take her word for it.

Yeah, after that episode I blacklisted her on my Twitter.

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#158

Post by visarga »

jl2718 wrote: post #124
contemporary343 wrote: post #18

Reading through some of her earlier tweets there seemed to have been conflict around her/ her team pursuing a particular research direction or projects, directions that higher ups were not happy about because of how it might make Google look. This is ultimately the limitation of being a researcher in a company - some topics will be off limits and you’re not allowed to poke around things that will make the company loo…

Are there any publications or results that show what she accomplished as a research scientist at google? What is considered the leading edge of the field of in AI ethics research? Had she accomplished something of great distinction in this field prior to google? Was her google street view result related to ethics? I would assume that ethics research would involve how an AI can learn to act ethically. Perhaps somethin…

She had a highly cited paper in 2018 about "Gender Shades", second author. The paper is about dataset bias and the creation of a small size benchmark for bias detection.

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#159

Post by raxxorrax »

vyhd wrote: post #111
spicyramen wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is only one human race right? I don't see people in colors sorry

"I choose to be blind to the reality of racism and abdicate myself of any responsibility to fix it" sure is a stance you could take, I guess.

You cannot even say one interpretation is idealism and the other is realism because it is US pop culture bullshit. You notice because your remark has an added indignation.
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