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AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

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Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#851

Post by thu2111 »

TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #588
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'm always hearing tales of how insane Google's social justice warrior culture has become ... but I'm always hearing these stories from White, Asian, or Indian males. I wonder how bad it actually is in reality. The picture insiders paint is that of organizations infested with technically mediocre people who form cliques that provide air cover for each others mediocrity ... with sex and race providing a disincentive f…

I definitely saw a bit of that when I was there, but only a bit. I think it mostly started after I left. Before about 2012 or so, every female engineer I encountered was just as competent as the men. I never thought about diversity culture because everyone was of pretty consistent skill, at least in the parts of the org I was in.

After 2012 we got a diversity hire on our team who was useless in every way, was a pathological liar and manipulator, yet who was consistently rewarded because the bosses boss was a female feminist. Her boss knew she was trouble but could do nothing. I did encounter a few more cases where female employees would just inexplicably have skills gaps that shouldn't have happened at Google, like not knowing what hexadecimal was.

I never encountered grumbling about competition. Google was not a hugely competitive place at that time because there was more than enough for everyone. Promos were generally not quotad, for instance, at least not for most of the rank and file.

I was a high performance underrepresented minority, there's no way I'd go to Google. Wouldn't people just assume I'm there because of quota filling, instead of my actual performance?

If you were genuinely high performance then no, of course people wouldn't assume that. And sure you'd go to Google, because they pay very well.

The real issue and it's not at all Google specific are the minority low performers or outright troublemakers, like Gebru. Then people absolutely assume they are quota filling. They go anyway because they aren't self aware enough to realise that's happening and blame any lack of respect they get to racism/sexism. And the money is still great so why wouldn't they go?

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#852

Post by dang »

njanirudh wrote: post #713
deanCommie wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wife says to her programmer husband, "Go to the store and buy a loaf of bread. If they have eggs, buy a dozen." Husband returns with 12 loaves of bread. Most software engineers can read the above joke, and laugh at themselves, then go ahead and upvote your comment not realizing that it is EXACTLY THE SAME THING. Employee: "This is extremely important to me. If you can't address what is important to me, then I can't w…

There is a way to approach all this professionally. From what I know about timnit from Twitter she is an emotional, unreasonable and maybe an sjw type character.

You can't post like this to HN, regardless of how someone else is or you feel they are. Personal attacks are particularly not allowed and you've posted more than one of them. Beyond that, your comments have been almost all flamebait and/or unsubstantive and/or nasty, so I'm going to ban this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. Here they are: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Note that we want thoughtful, curious conversation here, and when the topic happens to be a divisive one, comments need to become more thoughtful, not less.

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#853

Post by yaoxx151 »

curiousllama wrote: post #19
black_puppydog wrote: post #2

I think this is actually the better link to be discussing, rather than the twitter threads shared before. The most relevant parts (in terms of back story) should be this: > A week before you go out on vacation, you see a meeting pop up at 4:30pm PST on your calendar (this popped up at around 2pm). No one would tell you what the meeting was about in advance. Then in that meeting your manager’s manager tells you “it ha…

I really want to read that paper. Can't wait til it's published. Presuming it'll be at FAccT*...

It might not be FAccT. The deadline was a month ago but it seems she submitted the paper recently.

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#854

Post by dekhn »

cbsks wrote: post #844
shuckles wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will say that having many processes, selectively enforced is a common cover for disparate treatment.

That’s a good point. How many other Google researchers have submitted papers to conferences without waiting for the 2 week internal review to complete? What happened in those cases if the paper failed the internal review? Without more context it’s impossible to tell if this was a case of discrimination or just a case a researcher not following Google’s internal policies and suffering the consequences.

I don't have stats, but when I tried to do this it was made quite clear that I needed to submit 2 weeks early because nobody who reviews can drop their day work to do a priority review for anything less than a superpaper. Most of the people doing paper reviews (just like in academia) are busy and doing them in their "spare time" (evenings, weekends).

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#855

Post by names_are_hard »

WalterBright wrote: post #333
effingwewt wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this isn't nearly so bad as forcing an early termination of two weeks notice. I had a job pretty recently, was senior tech and was eager to please, which ended up meaning having to take the hard/after hours calls no one else wanted to handle. It also meant I eventually became the only on-call tech for over 4 months straight. This in turn meant I knew the most about all of our accounts, knew the most about the…

The usual practice is to give 2 weeks notice, you get escorted out immediately, and you get paid for those 2 weeks. It's technically not early termination as you're still getting paid. There's no reason to be rude, talk down, belittle, however.

I've read this a lot, but in the four jobs I left i was never escorted out the door when I gave my notice. Maybe it depends on the role, but I've always stayed out my 2-4 week notice period and spent the time wrapping up my tasks, writing documentation, doing exit interviews, etc.

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#856

Post by IfOnlyYouKnew »

rubatuga wrote: post #318
IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it strange to take issue with the "I'm so tired" line. It would seem to be entirely appropriate for circumstances where you see an argument that you have replied to many times but that completely ignores your reply. It also just doesn't strike me as particularly hostile or profane. Quitting twitter and making a show of it strikes me as a far more emotional reaction, but nobody here seems to take any issue with…

What Yann said about data bias is a fact. He wasn’t dismissing your concerns nor distracting from it. A lot of people tried to extrapolate what Yann meant, but from the way I see it, if more people learn about the cause of this racial bias, the more people will be inclined to use fairer and diverse datasets in their future ML research.

"It's December" is also a fact. He chose to mention a different one. Why, if not as an explanation / excuse for the model's behaviour?

Every practitioner already knows that these models behave according to the data they are trained on. The general public has no use for this explanation because they aren't the one deciding on the training data. So the only practical purpose is to offer some superficial causal mechanism that sounds like an explanation to that public, presented as an unchanging fact of nature, and distract from the equally true fact a biased model is only published or used iff it is trained on biased data and someone decides to go ahead and publish/use it nonetheless.

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#857

Post by joshuamorton »

dekhn wrote: post #847
joshuamorton wrote: post #708

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nor did Timnit claim that he was. Her disagreement was about the causes of harms, not the existence of resulting harms.

and I believe that Yann knows 100X about the causes of harms than Timnit does- so lecturing him is just wasting everybody's time.

You've done a phd. Why on earth would you believe that someone, even an expert in the broad field, would know more about a particular topic than someone who specializes in that area is research?

Do you think Yann knows 100X more about every area of ML then everyone else, or is it just fairness, accountability, and transparency that he happens to be more knowledgeable in than arguably a founder of the subfield?

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#858

Post by [deleted] »

anon7725 wrote: post #801
NationalPark wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Er, if this is unrelated, why are you commenting something that you must be aware is certain to stir up unproductive, culture-war-y discussion? Anyone who's been within 10 feet of hiring responsibilities knows you can't even think about race and gender when considering a candidate.

Right, you can’t even consider it, just mandate that race and gender factor into the candidates interviewed for every open position, make the diversity of your workforce a performance goal for executives and report the racial and gender makeup of your workforce in quarterly company updates. But no, can’t take it into consideration when hiring, of course not.

[deleted]

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#859

Post by mehrdada »

kazamaloo wrote: post #792
tfehring wrote: post #690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From Dean's email: > Unfortunately, this particular paper was only shared with a day’s notice before its deadline — we require two weeks for this sort of review — and then instead of awaiting reviewer feedback, it was approved for submission and submitted. Not sure what to make of that - maybe that Gebru submitted the paper and then immediately clicked the "approve" button herself?

it is sort of a placeholder approval. The actual reviews may be done by a legal team, HR/PR, other researchers in the field etc.

Do you have actual information or just randomly speculating about the nature of that "approval" under a newly created anonymous HackerNews account?

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#860

Post by omgwtfbyobbq »

tinyhouse wrote: post #542
omgwtfbyobbq wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think she's saying she's marginalized because she's a well known researcher who people listen to, she's saying she's marginalized because one or more people, who have their identities concealed, asked her to retract a paper she already published via HR. Granted, because the process she described is anonymous and opaque by design, it could have happened to other people at the company and only they, HR, and the…

I didn't mean she is saying she's marginalized because she's a well known researcher. From her email: "Does that sound like a standard procedure to you or does it just happen to people like me who are constantly dehumanized" She is not happy with the process and she is taking it personal. She was hired as a lead researcher and manages a big group and project. She has the nerve to say she is constantly dehumanized? 99…

I'm not saying that you're saying that she's marginalized because she's a well known researcher.

I think she feels marginalized because the process she's going through is dehumanizing, especially given the topic she wrote about (bias in AI frameworks).

It's possible that 99% of Google employees would want to be in her position, but I think that's a bit high. I imagine even fewer would to be there after going through what she goes through, especially racism, which sucks.

I can see how you would think she's confrontational. I think she is to some degree, but I don't think it's unfounded.

She's a minority, and as such, has to deal with all of the explicit and systemic racism that's present in the US. She believes that there are intrinsic characteristics associated with the AI models used at Google that perpetuate the racism she has experienced. She was able to write a paper about the defects she believes were present in those models, which apparently passed whatever initial review processes are present at Google. Not long after that, someone at Google didn't like her paper and, through HR, used a "review" process, which isn't really a review process because there's no mechanism for her to discuss/debate anything with the reviewers, to effectively order her retract the paper under the guise of an anonymous review.

In effect, Google may be perpetuating racism indirectly via problems with their AI models, and directly by silencing her work via a process that sounds like a peer review, but is really just a way for someone to anonymously order her to retract her work.

I'd be angry too if my work implicitly supported frameworks that discriminated against me, and when I submitted valid criticism of those frameworks, my work ordered me to retract it under the guise of some anonymous review process.

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