Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 310 posts

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#191

Post by free_rms »

renewiltord wrote: post #179
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…

There is a discussion to be had here but it's not possible in public because of the escalation of the topic. This is also not the best thread to be having it. Since everyone else is just saying "you don't get it" without explaining what "it" is, I will provide some brief avenues of exploration. Because they are brief, they will be coarse and imperfect, and aiming to give you directional assistance on the topic. So wi…

Thanks for the additional detail, but those all still boil down to dataset eventually, right? Those sound more like "yes, and" additions than the "no, you're racist" shitfight we saw.

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#192

Post by hezag »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #182
fhrow4484 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but at the same time not realizing that it's unethical to withhold what she did Have you considered that she has to remain vague due to the potential litigation coming down the road? In fact didn't she leave some tweets hinting at that ? ("Everything I say will be used against me ..." ?)

I can't imagine a reason that she'd be free to say Google fired her because of her demands, free to post the termination email, but not free to say what her demands were.

Because the demands are related to some internal project covered by a NDA, maybe?

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#193

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

hezag wrote: post #192
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't imagine a reason that she'd be free to say Google fired her because of her demands, free to post the termination email, but not free to say what her demands were.

Because the demands are related to some internal project covered by a NDA, maybe?

That's fair. (Although I've gotta selfishly hope that if that's true it won't stop people from leaking the email.)

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#194

Post by busrf »

thu2111 wrote: post #129
busrf wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matthew Garrett, a senior security researcher at Google, is very critical about Google on his Twitter all the time. As he has pointed out, he's still very employed. https://twitter.com/mjg59/status/1334382463498391557 Neither of us are on her team at Google. (I'm certainly not and I doubt you are.) We have no idea how easy it is to work with her. Certainly if I were working with an AI ethics researcher I would expect…

Google historically tolerates generic criticism of the firm or its actions. Gebru routinely makes slanderous and offensive allegations against specific individuals, not Google as a whole. That said, Garrett makes clear his ideological sympathies on Twitter. Undoubtably comments like this one don't endear him to his management chain: When @computerfemme was fired, the VP of security at Google Cloud sent out an email t…

Let us pretend together that you are the VP of security at Google. I’d suggest you take a stroll through Matthew’s twitter page for the past year or so and mark down everything you find seriously concerning and in your view making him incapable of performing his job. You might find quite a bit, and you might think “I can’t believe the real VP of security at Google hasn’t fired him yet!”

And yet, somehow, he’s not enough of an “insider threat” to be dismissed.

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#195

Post by jldugger »

ramraj07 wrote: post #23
cyrus20 wrote: post #17

Racism exists. Pay discrimination exists. Yet, you can't go about breaking every norm and rule if you are famous and from an under-represented group. I also saw the tweets at Yann LeCun. I'm not his biggest fan, but that wasn't right. She's hurting minorities for her own agenda. Edit: removed info about myself.

I've never heard of a 300% pay gap between people doing the same job, how does that even happen? Were you paid significantly under par or did that other person somehow hit jackpot? And at what level are we talking about?

It's not impossible -- with equity compensation and refreshers, it takes ~ four years to plateau. So if you have someone in the same role for the past four years and compare them to someone just hired, the four year employee may have more than half their income in RSUs while the new hire has maybe 10 percent of income in RSUs. If the stock does particularly well and RSUs grants have impeccable timing, compensation of 3x what you got in year one is a possibility. Especially if a level promotion happens, if you consider that 'the same job.'

Yes, it is a bit absurd. And if you're the first minority hire on a team that hires 1 person a year, you will be paid under the team average for a while, just as if you weren't.

> And at what level are we talking about?

Entry level employees at FAANG mostly. For PhDs managing people, such as the person in the article, I expect there's a much wider band of possibilities.

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#196

Post by PeterStuer »

whoknew1122 wrote: post #190
PeterStuer wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Must be a US specific thing as I do not see this in EU corporations. I assume there is also a 'Google Brain Men and Allies'? Why not just a 'Google Brain and Allies'? Or does that also exist?

I would assume that there isn't a 'Google Brain Men and Allies' affinity group. "Google Brain" does likely have its own general distro where standard work-related topics are discussed. At the hazard of becoming 'political' and triggering people, affinity groups are typically created for groups that have traditionally been underserved, marginalized, or have special considerations. As a cis male, I don't really see the…

I understand these seem to be sensitive and 'political' issues in the US. I just do not understand how any of this labeling and segregation can be productive in a workplace.

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#197

Post by kristjansson »

compycom wrote: post #83
twentytwo11 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to her, Yann LeCun is a racist just because he said that a specific ML model was biased due to a bias in the data and not because ML learning as a research field was racist. Such an inspiration!

She didn't call him a racist. She pointed out that there's more to addressing bias than just acknowledging that it's there. If you are going to say "Well, garbage-in, garbage-out!", why do you keep putting the racist garbage in? Why do you, knowing of the problem, keep using biased sources of data, knowing of the potential harms? That's the deeper question ML research/industry has to grapple with. When these models a…

> In practice, we often treat the bias as an exogenous factor when it is not, moving it outside the scope of our responsibility

Thanks the comment and this explication, you clarified the conflict that incident for me.

While I think the sibling comment is correct that LeCun and Gebru would agree on the proximate causes and mitigations of the adverse outcomes of that particular super-resolution model, the issue was (seemingly?) that focusing on the proximate causes can be read as absolving researchers of their responsibility for those outcomes, and avoids discussion of that responsibility in any instance.

Which is a entirely fair criticism of the field as a whole, though it may have been a bit lost in translation to the particular avatars in that instance.

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#198

Post by throw1232020 »

alew1 wrote: post #119

The comments here are disheartening, essentially a combination of “It was Google’s right to fire her” and “She seemed ‘difficult.’” For an industry-operated “Ethics in AI” group to have any teeth, it can’t fire people when they do research that makes them look bad, or when members of the group are ‘difficult.’ (Multiple members of the team she managed have said that she was a great manager and this came as a total su…

As somebody who has been involved in various diversity efforts for years, I'm honestly not that upset about all of this. There are real problems associated with discrimination in the US, for example in the criminal justice system. Likewise, there is discrimination in less high-stakes areas like tech.

However, the main problem with Timnit and her colleagues is that they come into every situation assuming racism even when the situation is ambiguous. Likewise, if you disagree with her or want to have a nuanced discussion, she'll accuse you of imposing intellectual labor on her and in some sense you are racist for forcing her to engage in discussion.

Again, so while I appreciate how she is purportedly working to make my life better in tech, there needs to be a real awakening as far as giving people the benefit of the doubt and allowing for discussion without shaming. Google has accumulated many people with this type of attitude who have created a culture of intimidation. You can see all of this happening in real time as her colleagues come to her defense knowing little about the situation and assuming that she was fired because she was black.

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#199

Post by zzackk »

whoknew1122 wrote: post #190
PeterStuer wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Must be a US specific thing as I do not see this in EU corporations. I assume there is also a 'Google Brain Men and Allies'? Why not just a 'Google Brain and Allies'? Or does that also exist?

I would assume that there isn't a 'Google Brain Men and Allies' affinity group. "Google Brain" does likely have its own general distro where standard work-related topics are discussed. At the hazard of becoming 'political' and triggering people, affinity groups are typically created for groups that have traditionally been underserved, marginalized, or have special considerations. As a cis male, I don't really see the…

Ahh I got it now. This is great answer and would make a lot of sense. The tech industry is very male-driven and plagued with a lot of issues, so I’d only imagine these groups as essential part of many employees survival / wellbeing. Also I’d argue that these are people issues and not US political issues.

Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google

#200

Post by black_puppydog »

twentytwo11 wrote: post #37
contemporary343 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=timnit+gebru

Very typical for a scientist to have a list of publications. Do you point to some specific piece of work?

What else do you want?

Be weary of "rockstar" scientists. Science is for the most part about incremental insights, and shouldn't make you famous.

Post reply on HN