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AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

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Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#101

Post by idlewords »

jononor wrote: post #79
parliament32 wrote: post #26

I don't think "fired" is the right choice of words -- she gave an ultimatum offering to resign, and they accepted her resignation. Is accepting a resignation the same as firing someone? > Thanks for making your conditions clear. We cannot agree to #1 and #2 as you are requesting. We respect your decision to leave Google as a result, and we are accepting your resignation. https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1334364…

The next two tweets contain more: > However, we believe the end of your employment should happen faster than your email reflects because certain aspects of the email you sent last night to non-management employees in the brain group reflect behavior that is inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager. > As a result, we are accepting your resignation immediately, effective today. We will send your final pay…

No, this is more like giving two weeks' notice and then being asked to leave the building immediately. It's not pleasant but it also isn't the same as being fired. Google called her bluff here.

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#102

Post by RandallBrown »

greatjack613 wrote: post #48

Unrelated, but hiring by race or gender is inherently racist. We should hire by skill alone whether the person is a Lesbian Black Female, or a White Male

While I do agree with you that technically this is correct, the issue has quite a bit of nuance.

It's a hell of a lot easier for a white male to pick up those skills because of culture and society than it is for most other groups of people.

I think there's a lot that can be done to help minority groups succeed and I'm a little less concerned about what's "fair" to white males like me.

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#103

Post by sudosysgen »

tgv wrote: post #58
prionassembly wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tone of her replies is regrettable: Yann: “ML systems are biased when data is biased" Timnit: “I’m sick of this framing. Tired of it. Many people have tried to explain, many scholars. Listen to us. You can’t just reduce harms caused by ML to dataset bias. Even amidst of world wide protests people don’t hear our voices and try to learn from us, they assume they’re experts in everything. Let us lead her and you fol…

But isn't it commonly accepted that ML systems reflect the bias in the data, and that it's hard to predict and control the bias in advance?

Her point is more than that. I think that she was trying to say that ML systems have an inherent bias that is independent of their data.

This is a consequence of the fact that it's not possible to do generalization, and thus learning, without bias to begin with. What an AI researcher does when deciding which architecture is essentially tuning the bias in the generalization system in order to produce better results, which is not in and of itself bad, and is indeed unavoidable.

By bias, I mean really anything that means that the function g() is used over the function h(). In practice this can be anything from the seed for the random values, to the choice of activation function, to the architecture of the network, and so on.

If the architectures are selected for their performance on dataset y, then it is possible that even when trained on dataset x, they retain some of the bias of dataset y, because their generalization bias, which is architectural, was tuned for dataset y. This is, admittedly, a theoretical result, and it's not clear that it applies in every case, but it is a solid point.

For that reason the point that benchmarking against non-biased datasets is important was made, and thus that there is more to bias than the final dataset used for training during deployment. Therefore, it's not only a responsibility of the engineering community, but also of the scientific community.

I've posted it somewhere here already, but here's a nice paper that explains the point that there is more to bias than simply the dataset : http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom/pubs/NeedForBias_1980.pdf

Interestingly enough, this is true of all learning systems, including humans, and is a proof of why it's impossible to be completely unbiased in really anything.

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#104

Post by mcphage »

greatjack613 wrote: post #48

Unrelated, but hiring by race or gender is inherently racist. We should hire by skill alone whether the person is a Lesbian Black Female, or a White Male

> We should hire by skill alone

Since you can't actually calculate someone's skill, all you can do is hire on an attempted measurement of skill. And if you find reasons to think that your measurement of skill has inaccuracies, you'd probably be better off taking that into account when evaluating a candidate.

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#106

Post by IfOnlyYouKnew »

KentLane wrote: post #57
silisili wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that Lecun argument was a really bad first impression of her from me. I guess she found out life isn't Twitter and you can't just go around telling everyone they are bad and wrong without consequences.

She will land on her feet. There is a huge demand for ideologues willing to lobotomize ML. “Let’s generate fake data with GANs to prevent our AI from discovering politically uncomfortable regularities!” It’s ugly work but someone has to do it, right?

The only ugly thing I see is your comment.

Edit: I've now read the rest of the thread and the above is no longer true.

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#107

Post by christmm »

It is surprising she was not fired long ago. I suppose Timnit was usually rewarded for such an attitude, chock full of victim based language.

"after all the micro and macro aggressions and harassments I received" "does it just happen to people like me who are constantly dehumanized?" "Silencing marginalized voices like this is the opposite of the NAUWU principles which we discussed" "the next day I get some random “impact award.” Pure gaslighting" "Writing more documents and saying things over and over again will tire you out but no one will listen."

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#108

Post by swirepe »

high_derivative wrote: post #90

These things seem to play out like clockwork. Progressive companies hire social justice warriors into vague ethics or policy roles, let them hire their activist friends, shower them with fast track careers and promotions. It's good optics, the progressives like it because it makes them feel better about working at big techs. Said hires have thus far, as far as I can tell, not produced anything of substantial value to…

>It's good optics, the progressives like it because it makes them feel better about working at big techs.

>Said hires have thus far, as far as I can tell, not produced anything of substantial value to any of these companies.

These two statements are at odds with each other.

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#109

Post by idlewords »

high_derivative wrote: post #90

These things seem to play out like clockwork. Progressive companies hire social justice warriors into vague ethics or policy roles, let them hire their activist friends, shower them with fast track careers and promotions. It's good optics, the progressives like it because it makes them feel better about working at big techs. Said hires have thus far, as far as I can tell, not produced anything of substantial value to…

No one got fired here. Offering to resign was a huge mistake.

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#110

Post by contemporary343 »

aparsons wrote: post #75
chunkyks wrote: post #11

Being fired for this sort of thing sucks. This also sounds like an opportunity for an awesome person to spread their wings now they're out from under what sounds like a pretty oppressive system

She claims to be a leading researcher in the field, but has she written any significant papers or research of note? Her biggest accomplishment seems to be driving Yann LeCunn off Twitter with angry accusations. She tried to continue her power trip at a workplace but her boss called her bluff. This is a great firing for Google. She won’t be missed.

Uh what? https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Timnit+gebru

The first paper listed there has over 1000 citations in 2 years. That’s influence and impact.

Just because you don’t know of her work doesn’t mean that her work has not had an impact and that she’s not well known in her research community. She definitely is.

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