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AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

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Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#601

Post by samizdis »

FT article [1] "Google embroiled in row over AI bias research" seems calm/considered. Includes:

> Jeff Dean, Google’s head of AI, defended the decision in an internal email to staff on Thursday, saying the paper “didn’t meet our bar for publication”. He also described Ms Gebru’s departure as a resignation, after Google had refused to agree to unspecified conditions she had set to stay at the company.

> The dispute has threatened to shine a light on Google’s handling of internal AI research that could hurt its business, as well as the company’s long-running difficulties in trying to bring more diversity to its workforce. ...

> The paper looked at the potential bias in large-scale language models, one of the hottest new fields of natural language research. Systems like OpenAI’s GPT-3 and Google’s own system, Bert, attempt to predict the next word in any phrase or sentence — a method that has been used to produce surprisingly effective automated writing, and which Google uses to better understand complex search queries.

> The language models are trained on vast amounts of text, usually drawn from the internet, leading to warnings that they could regurgitate racial and other biases that are contained in the underlying training material.

> “From the outside, it looks like someone at Google decided this was harmful to their interests,” said Emily Bender, a professor of computational linguistics at the University of Washington, who co-authored the paper.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/995c62ab-26b1-4eed-b1fb-cb4846023...

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#602

Post by jumby »

prionassembly wrote: post #43
bitshift010 wrote: post #13

Chief AI Scientist at Facebook, Yann Lecun, quit Twitter after a back and forth with this particular AI researcher - https://syncedreview.com/2020/06/30/yann-lecun-quits-twitter... >I’m always amazed at how people can continue to do thing after thing like this and then turn around and ask me for some sort of extra DEI work or input. This happened to me last year. I was in the middle of a potential lawsuit for which K…

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…

Honestly, I am not even sure _how_ they would fix the system(s) they complain most about? Assume Yann is wrong and Timnit is right, what is the proposal for fixing the bias that somehow is inherent in the system?

She says 'let us lead and you follow' -- sure...where? What are we concretely doing about the "in-built bias" problem?

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#603

Post by wonnage »

1024core wrote: post #449

This person forced Yann LeCun (one of the top 3 AI/ML researchers today, head of Facebook AI, and an ML researcher since the 80s) to give up on Twitter after she took exception to this tweet of his: https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1274782757907030016 She lives her life attacking people who she disagrees with, and brings in race/gender into any conflict where she's involved. I am surprised Google had hired her, beca…

I don't think you understand the word "forced"... did Twitter delete his account?

Congratulations on blaming the victim. This is what POC in tech deal with every day.

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#604

Post by canniballectern »

1024core wrote: post #449

This person forced Yann LeCun (one of the top 3 AI/ML researchers today, head of Facebook AI, and an ML researcher since the 80s) to give up on Twitter after she took exception to this tweet of his: https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1274782757907030016 She lives her life attacking people who she disagrees with, and brings in race/gender into any conflict where she's involved. I am surprised Google had hired her, beca…

I see the tweet, but I don't see her in the replies at all. Where did she take exception to the tweet?

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#605

Post by dragonwriter »

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…

> The fact is that Obama has got way more done for America than Omar, so I'm inclined to think he's right.

Its funny how the people endorsing Obama's experience on the "defund the police" slogan losing people seem to ignore the other "error" he mentioned as losing people in the same interview: giving too small of a platform within the Democratic Party to voices like AOC's (who, obviously, has the opposite view as Obama on "defund the police") who have proven quite effective with connecting with large constituencies with which the party establishment (implicitly, including Obama himself) has been ineffective.

I would be cautious in selectively referencing that Obama interview to suggest he knows better than "The Squad".

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#606

Post by wonnage »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #550
1024core wrote: post #449

This person forced Yann LeCun (one of the top 3 AI/ML researchers today, head of Facebook AI, and an ML researcher since the 80s) to give up on Twitter after she took exception to this tweet of his: https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1274782757907030016 She lives her life attacking people who she disagrees with, and brings in race/gender into any conflict where she's involved. I am surprised Google had hired her, beca…

I do not know the details of this case and I can't speak to the subject's character. However I can't help but note that people who study the effects of race and gender tend to bring race/gender into anything and everything, because well, that's their job. If your response is that race and gender should be brought into only the areas where race and gender are relevant, I'd respond that the prevailing opinion among gen…

Please share why you think a person who was hired to address race/gender bias in AI writing a paper about race/gender bias in AI is tending to "bring race/gender into anything and everything"?

Or let's cut to the chase, you saw the headline, and your immediate conclusion was this was a raging SJW. Why did you jump to that conclusion?

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#607

Post by xibalba »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #598
madrox wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Obama got his start as an actual activist, under the title of "community organizer", in Chicago. Even in his early years, he clearly understood that to get real results, you have to make compromises and avoid demonizing people on the other side of issues. To my eye, Obama's emotional intelligence, communication ability, and strategic aptitude are genius-level-off-the-charts-stupendous, whereas these firebrand activists you mention are operating at an elementary level.

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#608

Post by wonnage »

hpoe wrote: post #461
1024core wrote: post #449

This person forced Yann LeCun (one of the top 3 AI/ML researchers today, head of Facebook AI, and an ML researcher since the 80s) to give up on Twitter after she took exception to this tweet of his: https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1274782757907030016 She lives her life attacking people who she disagrees with, and brings in race/gender into any conflict where she's involved. I am surprised Google had hired her, beca…

So I don't know enough to make a well informed opinion; however it seems part of the aggreivement on her part is that she was not given the names of those who peer reviewed her paper. If internally she has a history of bringing race or sex into every discussion I could see why they'd rather be anonymous. Even being accused of being racist can ruin someone's career in this current climate.

You're commenting on an article where a person was fired due to being a racial/gender justice advocate, and you're worried about "Even being accused of being racist can ruin someone's career in this current climate" ???

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#609

Post by bgee »

hpoe wrote: post #577
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…

May I direct you to watch Daryl Davis's ted talk or really anything he speaks about. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORp3q1Oaezw For context he is a black man that has gotten over a hundred leaders of the KKK, including former convicts to leave the Klan. Not by arguing with them, not be reasoning, not by showing them the effects of their behaviour, but instead by sitting down, talking with them and becoming their fri…

What a talk. Thanks.

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#610

Post by lightcatcher »

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…

Fairness, Accountability, Transparency (aka FAT) is a real sub-field of machine learning, that is as technical as any other machine learning sub-field in my opinion. It is not a PR stunt. I've published at top ML conference a paper about some CUDA kernels I wrote to accelerate training a class of RNNs, so I feel have technical grounding to make these claims.

Here are some FAT papers I've enjoyed: https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.08010 https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.04023 https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.04383 (won best paper award at ICML 2018)

Many FAT papers are published at NeurIPS or ICML (generally considered top two machine learning conferences). There's also a conference just on the topic: https://facctconference.org/

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