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AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

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Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#591

Post by princekolt »

antiquark wrote: post #433
adamsea wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO she is saying it’s reasonable to believe that social and systemic issues have an impact on creating ML models (as the teams designing, building, and deploying said models are members of society) in ways in addition to the data sets. I don’t know what the right answer is but plenty of institutions come up with ways they attempt to deal with systemic biases. For example, blind auditions for positions in orchestras…

Sure, but Yann LeCun is a neural network expert. Should it be his job to tackle social/systemic/institutional problems? What if he doesn't want to?

Yes it should if the networks he builds have an actual impact on real people because of their social/systemic/institutional status. If he doesn't want to do it, he shouldn't be working on networks that have this kind of impact.

What if you're a nuclear engineer that just wanna make the hot bit go hotter, and don't want to care about the nasty habit that radiation has of killing people?

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#592

Post by mstg »

basicneo wrote: post #545
stevecalifornia wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You are probably going to be a very successful computer person. But you're going to go through life thinking that girls don't like you because you're a nerd. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won't be true. It'll be because you're an asshole." ~ The Social Network A good number of social activists are rude and abrasive and then blame how people react as racism/sexism. No one wants to be…

Experiencing marginalisation is frustrating, and frustrated people sometimes have outbursts. I don't think we can infer much from a few highly publicised events.

How was she marginalized? Marginalized means keeping someone in a powerless or unimportant position in society, which she was not as she had one of the most important roles in AI and was a manager.

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#593

Post by fantod »

ska wrote: post #516
Laakeri wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, the Jeff Dean's email sounds like this paper failed to cite some research and as a result made Google look less good than Google actually is. This sounds like somewhat minor academic mistake, but at the same time a major PR mistake.

That sounds like something easily rectified, so why push for retracting the submission?

I think the logic is that the paper would need to be retracted, rectified, and then resubmitted. Since the submission deadline was already passed, resubmission would be impossible.

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#594

Post by [deleted] »

jdashg wrote: post #532
IvyMike wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From this tweet: https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1334343577044979712 > I said here are the conditions. If you can meet them great I’ll take my name off this paper, if not then I can work on a last date. To employers, that qualifies as a conditional resignation.

The employer can't modify the specifics of the resignation by "moving it up", since that's not what the conditional resignation offered. They can fire her, sure, but they can't call it "resignation". You can't "resign" someone, but you can ask for their immediate resignation. If it's not voluntary, it's firing.

[deleted]

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#595

Post by screye »

sorenjan wrote: post #510
Upvoter33 wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"but it still bothers me that people like this get highly paid positions to point out problems seemingly without any technical knowledge" You are making a lot of (wrong) assumptions here. Not too many Stanford PhDs are graduating without technical knowledge

Ok, I read her Wikipedia entry and apparently she has Bachelor's and Master's degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford. Those are probably fairly standardized, so I'll concede that she does have some technical knowledge. I have however seen way to many doctorates that seem technical while they're not. There's a common theme in her career, and it's not necessarily technical knowledge. She worked at Microsoft re…

I think she deserves the minimum amount of credibility that you would assign to any Stanford Phd coming out of Fei Fei Li's lab.

You have to complete all the requirements and TA grad classes after all.

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#596

Post by ianbicking »

defertoreptar wrote: post #305

> This happened to me last year. I was in the middle of a potential lawsuit for which Kat Herller and I hired feminist lawyers who threatened to sue Google (which is when they backed off--before that Google lawyers were prepared to throw us under the bus and our leaders were following as instructed) and the next day I get some random “impact award.” Pure gaslighting. And she was under the impression that her company…

> And she was under the impression that her company would value her so much that, not only they wouldn't take the first "clean" opportunity to let her go, but that they'd want her to stay so much that she could leverage it?

In a realpolitik sense you are probably right. But right now I'm going through standard onboarding training and they are VERY explicit that it's not supposed to work this way, and that you are not supposed to retaliate or exclude someone because they make complaints or take actions based on the defense of a protected group (including themselves).

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#597

Post by tanilama »

lowercase1 wrote: post #144

Too many comments focused on whether Google was justified in firing her/the appropriateness of the email and not enough on the impact/veracity allegations. Much more interesting questions that might get revealed a bit: Does Google treat minorities appropriately? Is Google covering up ai ethics research? Does Google care about AI ethics/bias?

> Does Google care about AI ethics/bias?

Google cares about AI ethnics because talking about it gives those people, especially higher ups, an imagined sense of significance and adrenaline rush of being a savior.

But in reality, AI ethnics is just a gloried showroom of diversity/inclusiveness.

It is not a product, it doesn't generate revenue, in corporate world, nobody cares.

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#598

Post by hardwaregeek »

madrox wrote: post #571
hardwaregeek wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a little ungenerous. Social activists may go over the line and be rude or abrasive, but unfortunately it's impossible to be a polite social activist. Activism fundamentally requires telling people that their actions should be modified, that their beliefs may be flawed, that their systems have problems. It's really hard to do that and be a likeable person. Of course social activists may at times cross the line…

Ilhan Omar said something similar on Twitter in response to Obama's criticisms of the "defund the police" slogan. I think you're being overly generous to social activists. Their fundamental job is to bring social change. You can't change anything by simply alienating those who disagree with you. That creates political entrenchment. The fact is that Obama has got way more done for America than Omar, so I'm inclined to…

I think we need to distinguish between social activist and politician. Social activists can certainly be politicians, such as Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders etc. But many are not. Obama is not a social activist. He's an effective politician, one who has certainly brought about change. But he's not a social activist.

Many social activists were famously unpopular. Martin Luther King died with a 66% disapproval rating^[1]. Susan B. Anthony was ridiculed and accused of trying to destroy the institution of marriage (sound familiar?).

Of course some activists veer too far. Jane Fonda is an example. I don't fault her opposition to the Vietnam War, but her infamous photo practically advocated for violence against American troops.

In a sense the aim of social activists is to be ahead of their time. MLK was reviled in his time and practically infallible today. We need both politicians and activists for progress. Politicians push forward the policy, but the activists push forward the politicians. Without activists, politicians can end up in holding patterns, afraid to lose popularity. Without politicians, activists are just screaming into a void.

[1]: https://www.newsweek.com/martin-luther-king-jr-was-not-alway...

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#599

Post by m00x »

ianbicking wrote: post #566
deanCommie wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> forced ... to give up on Twitter after she took exception to this tweet Can you provide a source for this. What did she say? There are legitimate criticisms of Yann's tweet. Just because he is technically correct about how ML works doesn't mean that what he is saying isn't ALSO a classical dismissal of the concerns people have with AI. The issue isn't that ML is evil or racist. The issue is that if it is used too o…

I agree, reading the article ( https://syncedreview.com/2020/06/30/yann-lecun-quits-twitter... ) and the thread I also don't see how one puts this on Timnit. Coming back to the original tweet: if you changed the training data have more black people instead of white, would it perform the same but with inverted racial biases? Maybe? You really can't know without doing it. It might generate faces with a dark complexion…

> Ultimately the engineers and other humans behind the scenes are the ultimate arbiters of success, loss functions are chosen by humans, and swapping training data on the same model won't change those early decisions

How would changing loss functions alter this? This makes no sense.

Hyperparameter tuning is done iteratively, and used get the best score on the test dataset. Do you really believe the engineers hand picked examples and purposefully trained it so that looked more "white" and disregarded the test scores?

Training/test data is 100% the cause for this bias.

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