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AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

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Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#781

Post by PeterisP »

fhrow4484 wrote: post #402
jerome-jh wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> behavior that is inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager. Maybe my remark is down to earth but, she literally told her group to stop working. I do not know of any company where this is an acceptable behavior for a manager. Besides the disagreements, it sounds to me that was the action that caused Google to pull the trigger. Also from Dean's email it is pretty clear there are a number of new products…

> she literally told her group to stop working. Where did you read that? in the email shown,she told a listserv called "Women and Allies" to stop writing docs that are an attempt to better the situation in terms of diversity, equity, inclusion as writing those docs are like pissing in the wind in her opinion

Quoting Jeff Dean's email about this (as published in https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-a...) " I also feel badly that hundreds of you received an email just this week from Timnit telling you to stop work on critical DEI programs. Please don’t. I understand the frustration about the pace of progress, but we have important work ahead and we need to keep at it." implies that at least Google does interpret her email as her telling people to stop work on certain issues.

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#782

Post by marton78 »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #766
rishav_sharan wrote: post #733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's miscommunication in anyway. Timnit had submitted dozens of papers before and unless the process requirements are completely new, she would be well aware of them. This seems more of a case of selective enforcement, where she had been allowed to go around the process in the past (or felt that she has enough leverage to be able to do so now) and then not being allowed to do so this time. This feels li…

> classic privileged tantrum just... wow. Can anyone point to a man ever being labelled in such a way on HN? Edit: comparing the number of comment hits for " his tantrum" vs " her tantrum" to the relative numbers for " his " and " her " shows that "tantrum" is, indeed, used 2.5 times as often to describe women as it is for men.

The price suspect I think about when I hear "tantrum" is Trump, so I don't know...

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#783

Post by spoonjim »

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…

The quality of the "argument" here is F--. Basically, it's, "nothing you say matters, only what we say matters." Phrases like "just listen" are essentially, "you will respect my authority!"

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#784

Post by alpb »

splaytreemap wrote: post #443
Copenjin wrote: post #183

I wonder why these privileged people (I don't have her huge salary, I don't live in the us or work for a FAANG) keeps forgetting that after all they are just _employees_.

I think the fact that she had a huge salary is why she feels comfortable doing this. The average person needs their job to pay the bills so they don't want to rock the boat. She's already set for life so she doesn't care who she offends because getting fired is not a big deal for her.

Future employment opportunities still exist for her. That is another reason an employee may opt in to present an alternative reality online upon events like “leaving” or “getting fired” as people externally usually don’t have time or the access to verify either side’s story. There will be another equal caliber company where she can continue to do her work. Almost everyone who left Google in such public fashion in recent history have landed similar jobs elsewhere.

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#785

Post by account42 »

jsmith45 wrote: post #486
sjs382 wrote: post #397

It's hard to make too much sense about what happened. Here's what I made of it, if anyone can point out any important mistakes/inaccuracies/details: 1. She and her co-authors submitted a paper for review 1 day before its (external, for publication?) due date. It's supposed to be submitted to Google 2 weeks prior, so they can review. 2. The authors submitted it externally before the review was returned. 3. Google deci…

It sounds to me like Google has a policy that papers must be internally reviewed before they can be "published". She understood publish in the academic sense, while Google views sending the paper out for conference review as publishing. The paper ends up failing internal review, so per policy it must be promptly retracted. This is confusing to the academic who expects to get access to the raw review responses so that…

> The massive amount of miscommunication makes her feel like she was being oppressed, due to race and or gender.

That seams a big jump. Isn't it more likely that the treatment is due to pushing for ethics in an organization whose business model is antithetical to ethics?

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#786

Post by dang »

anonvenger wrote: post #780
dang wrote: post #770

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is ideological battle boilerplate of the sort that contradicts the mandate of this site and which users were therefore right to flag: This is the fundamental victim mindset of the social media woke: any setback is chalked up to identity based oppression. Reality check: everybody has setbacks, most of them unfair, or at least easily perceived as unfair, and definitely frustrating. Most have the decency to deal wi…

Complaining about life adversities on social media in a hyperbolic race / gender wrapping, 'constantly dehumanized', is a recent widespread phenomenon. The heroine of this story happens to embody this novel behavior, which used to be a whole lot more private and a whole lot less race / gender driven. Not sure where 'ideology' enters the picture, it's a reasonably truthful observation from someone that is old enough t…

Ideology enters the picture when people repeat predictable clusters of angry and rigid reactions about complex topics. Things we've heard many times already are off topic here, especially when they're tied to classic flamewar themes. This follows from the definition of curiosity, which is the mandate of this site.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#787

Post by oh_sigh »

joshuamorton wrote: post #635
oh_sigh wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, and its unclear what this behavior was. The email clearly states: "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" > No, which is my point. No, that is the opposite of your point. You said that people critical of Google have been given a rampdown, so it is unusual for her to not be g…

Yes, and having read the email, I will reiterate my assertion that it is "certainly not obvious" what behavior is being characterized as "inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager". Repeating the vague justification message is not a response to criticism of the vague justification message. The email she was fired for (it's quoted in this thread) does not contain any content that I find to be fireable. >…

I think you're misunderstanding the purpose of the email from google management. Presumably it wasn't to lay out a case so that the email could be leaked and twitter could understand their rationale. It was just telling her the reason they are not letting her take her last 2 weeks. She still gets paid, she just can't come into the office. I don't understand why you think that email should be convincing evidence to you, an outsider who has absolutely zero to do with the employment contract between Timnit and Google. Surely, Timnit and relevant parties at Google have more context than you or I do.

> The vague justification is not borne out by any evidence.

...that's been leaked onto twitter.

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#788

Post by [deleted] »

powersnail wrote: post #720
jseliger wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently re-read Noah Smith's essay "Leaders Who Act Like Outsiders Invite Trouble" https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-03/leader... . It's not directly on point, but one concept is: "This extraordinary trend of rank-and-file members challenging the leaders of their organizations goes beyond simple populism. There may be no word for this trend in the English language. But there is one in Japanese: ge…

Maybe I'm missing something here, but isn't individuality a good thing, in general? I'm not applying this to Gebru vs Google, as in this specific case, we don't have enough evidence to know what exactly happened. While I don't like the Twitter mob per se, the idea that a person within an institution cannot publicly criticize the institution is ridiculous. Rank-and-file members should be able to challenge the leaders.…

[deleted]

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#790

Post by pankajdoharey »

jsmith45 wrote: post #486
sjs382 wrote: post #397

It's hard to make too much sense about what happened. Here's what I made of it, if anyone can point out any important mistakes/inaccuracies/details: 1. She and her co-authors submitted a paper for review 1 day before its (external, for publication?) due date. It's supposed to be submitted to Google 2 weeks prior, so they can review. 2. The authors submitted it externally before the review was returned. 3. Google deci…

It sounds to me like Google has a policy that papers must be internally reviewed before they can be "published". She understood publish in the academic sense, while Google views sending the paper out for conference review as publishing. The paper ends up failing internal review, so per policy it must be promptly retracted. This is confusing to the academic who expects to get access to the raw review responses so that…

Google is investing in coming up with smaller models aswell i.e "TensorFlow Lite". I think it is unjustified of her to condemn approaches at this stage, all research starts humble and almost always inefficient. People were doing Resnet-50 not so long ago and then processes improved. People came up with better configs with lesser layers YOLO for instance. So big models in and off itself isnt a problem. I dont see this as a good enough reason to resign.
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