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

AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

platformer.news

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 926 posts

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#231

Post by voisin »

twic wrote: post #135
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…

Can you really call them toxic and disruptive when they're doing exactly the thing they were told they were hired for? Companies hire activists because they want to look good without actually changing things. Activists go to work for companies because they want to change things. So, naturally, the company has to lie to the activist about their function to do this, and the activist has to be naive about it. If the act…

> Companies hire activists because they want to look good without actually changing things.

I agree with this statement but for the life of me I can’t come up with a satisfactory answer as to why companies don’t want to actually change things. Is it purely institutional inertia? Are the benefits of a more diverse workplace not accepted by the powers that be, so efforts to achieve that are undermined?

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#232

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

xupybd wrote: post #65

She seems very passionate about makeing the world a better place. The only downside to this sort of drive is that it doesn't always align with everyone else's vision of a better world. I don't think she and Google were on the same page and perhaps both parties will be much happier going their separate ways.

> She seems very passionate about makeing the world a better place.

Some of the worst people in history who committed the worst atrocities were very passionate about making the world a better place, at least as they defined “better”.

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#233

Post by contemporary343 »

Bukhmanizer wrote: post #219
contemporary343 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, what? She's a researcher and this is a Google research division. A 1000 citations is a large number for any single paper, even in ML. And yes, even inside Google research, this aspect of impact plays a big role in evaluation of researchers.

I work in research, and citation count, especially of a single paper, is such a dumb metric for evaluating performance. There are about a million reasons that one paper gets cited over another that don’t have to do with quality. Does the same paper get 1000+ citations if it were published in 2010? Or even 2015? Probably not.

It's an original research paper (not review) and it was published in 2018. So yes, 1000 citations at the very least conveys that it was noticed and had an impact.

Also, anyone who works in the field of AI fairness and ethics research knows about it. So yeah, it's an important study.

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#234

Post by IfOnlyYouKnew »

antiquark wrote: post #225
IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, "I'm so tired" means that it's an argument they have replied to before. She has written dozens of research papers, some of which probably contained arguments other than repetition of "you're a racist and a bad person". You of course know about this, or would now about this considering she is called an "AI researcher at Google" in the title of this tread. So the only lazy and un-constructive criticism is to assume…

Then what is Gebru's solution to the FlickFaceHQ database having too many pictures of white people?

Expanding the dataset and/or using a subset of it?

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#235

Post by room500 »

suyash wrote: post #9

As per her Tweet Jeff Dean at Google is who decided to fire her https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1334352694664957952?s...

Later in the tweet:

"This is the exact email I received from Megan who reports to Jeff. Who I can't imagine would do this without consulting and clearing with him of course."

I am sure Jeff Dean was made aware of the situation given the PR impact. But it is a stretch to say that Jeff Dean personally decided to fire her against her manager's wishes.

Allegations like that need evidence.

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#236

Post by 6nf »

namesbc wrote: post #184
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…

As soon as someone uses the phrase "social justice warriors" you know they the rest of the argument isn't going to have any substance.

Your comment is pretty meta

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#237

Post by idlewords »

aylmao wrote: post #168
idlewords wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> No one got fired here. I mean, from the tweets what I gather is she wasn't planning on leaving just yet. Saying "hey, you want to resign by [X] but we'd rather you be gone so let us inform you've just been resigned as of now" is essentially firing [1]. > Offering to resign was a huge mistake. I think this will be good for her in the long term. I'm sure she'll find another research position, and the alternative was…

I have no doubt she'll land on her feet, just like everyone who quits Google in such circumstances, but if you actually want to have an impact in such a situation, make them fire you instead of giving them an out like this.

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#238

Post by nilkn »

suyash wrote: post #9

As per her Tweet Jeff Dean at Google is who decided to fire her https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1334352694664957952?s...

Speaking as someone who is a senior manager/director, my experience is dismissals of high-profile employees usually have a ton of complexity under the hood, and whatever information is publicly available is often the tip of the iceberg. Out of respect for the folks involved, the full details of the lead-up to the dismissal are almost never released even internally in the company. This information asymmetry makes it relatively easy for a sufficiently vocal dismissed party to control the public narrative even if their internal behavior at the company was extraordinarily problematic.

These dismissal decisions are not made lightly and I would wager there was a long history of events leading up to this. You usually only see the straw that broke the camel's back.

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#239

Post by jeffbee »

tkfu wrote: post #149
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

Ok, but how do you do that? It was easy in classical music; they just started doing auditions behind a curtain, without any verbal Q&A, and suddenly a field that used to be dominated by men became pretty much 50/50, and all the people who said that men were better at the highest echelons of musical achievement had to shut up. But tech companies want to talk to the humans they're hiring, so race and gender are (almost…

There are some fairly easy steps you can take that other, more-diverse organizations have taken. First, you have to get rid of your referral pipeline, because hiring people your employees already know is the opposite of diversity. Second, instead of recruiting from organizations you've already heard of, like Stanford where this person came from, you park a full-time recruiter at institutions with practical diversity, like Houston, Georgia, UNLV, CUNY. Finally, you go for diversity of thought, by hiring philosophers and carpenters instead of CS grads. I know for a fact that were I to hire into my AI Ethics department, the last person I would recruit would be a Stanford AI researcher. I'd go directly to the philosophy department.

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#240

Post by antiquark »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #234
antiquark wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then what is Gebru's solution to the FlickFaceHQ database having too many pictures of white people?

Expanding the dataset and/or using a subset of it?

Gebru would disagree:

> “I think that now a lot of people have understood that we need to have more diverse datasets, but unfortunately I felt like that’s kind of where the understanding has stopped. It’s like ‘let’s diversify our datasets. And that’s kind of ethics and fairness, right?’ But you can’t ignore social and structural problems.“

This seems to be saying that Yann LeCun should actually be addressing social and structural problems, rather that just applying neural networks to data sets.

https://syncedreview.com/2020/06/30/yann-lecun-quits-twitter...

Post reply on HN