Earlier quoted context omitted.
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No, I am not, and I don't see how you came to believe that I might be
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We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google
91–100 of 683 posts
Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
The issue isn't how much BERT uses, the issue is the trend over time in how much models use, with BERT being a recent data point. The whole point of having AI ethicists is to identify current indicators of potential future ethical problems so that they can be considered in guiding the direction of development, so that you minimize acute ethical crisis.
You do realize just how small this co2 output is compared to the human co2 output it replaces. You realize the shear scale of co2 output the office the engineers who wrote the model, drove to work, education, etc produced. I’m actually suprised just how small of a co2 output it was.
> You do realize just how small this co2 output is compared to the human co2 output it replaces.
Sure, the issue is that the scale of models is increasing by orders of magnitude in a fairly short span of years, as well as the range of applications rapidly expanding. It doesn't take long for that kind of growth to go from a trivial issue to catastrophic one, and it's the exact kind of risk you have ethicists in a field to call out while it still is trivial so that some of the energy of people doing technical development gets directed to mitigate the risk of it ever reaching the catastrophic stage.
Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google
#93Is this what esteemed PhD AI ethicists spend their time on? It sounds like a useless grad school paper. I think much less of everyone now.
This is exactly what I would expect from an “AI ethicist” to be honest.
The thing is, that's about all an AI ethicist can say. The problem is there isn't that much to modern "AI"/machine learning. It's just brute force approximation/simulation/curve-fitting. There's a lot of tweaking, a lot of data and a lot of processing power. It does a lot but fails unpredictably and has unpredictable (or predictable) biases and leaves you at the mercy of a black box.
There, I've repeated the paper without reading it. But Google did hire her to be an AI ethicist so what else would they expect?
Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google
#94What is the energy expended on training GPT-3? Eager to know the upsides of such models. The environmental and social impacts of tech are more direct and mainstream in today’s world.
You realize the energy and co2 production to release the paper is greater than the training itself.
Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google
#95I have a genuine question: If a person of color (I am myself non-white) is not performing, what does it take to fire them without the entire world playing the race card on you? Are we creating a society that makes it impossible to fire a person of color? You know there are bad apples in every race, right? How do we handle such scenarios? Seems unfair to me, myself being a person of color - I don't want the world to t…
Here we're talking about something different: suppressing the speech of a person of color raising some well-thought out arguments about racism that are problematic to the employer's core business. Google has set up a research organization that ostensibly is empowered to ask and ultimately work to openly resolve difficult questions like these... but when the rubber hits the road, they instead throw the researcher unde…
What are the arguments about racism that were suppressed? The paper that didn't pass internal review was about the external costs of training large models (correction: the paper also discussed language models not adhering to anti-racist language standards).
Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here we're talking about something different: suppressing the speech of a person of color raising some well-thought out arguments about racism that are problematic to the employer's core business. Google has set up a research organization that ostensibly is empowered to ask and ultimately work to openly resolve difficult questions like these... but when the rubber hits the road, they instead throw the researcher unde…
What are the arguments about racism that were suppressed? The paper that didn't pass internal review was about the external costs of training large models (correction: the paper also discussed language models not adhering to anti-racist language standards).
Race comes up several times in the article. Did you miss it?
Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
You do realize just how small this co2 output is compared to the human co2 output it replaces. You realize the shear scale of co2 output the office the engineers who wrote the model, drove to work, education, etc produced. I’m actually suprised just how small of a co2 output it was.
> You do realize just how small this co2 output is compared to the human co2 output it replaces. Sure, the issue is that the scale of models is increasing by orders of magnitude in a fairly short span of years, as well as the range of applications rapidly expanding. It doesn't take long for that kind of growth to go from a trivial issue to catastrophic one, and it's the exact kind of risk you have ethicists in a fiel…
Energy has a cost. Using 100$ of energy is much different than 1 million.
Capitalism actually mitigates the risk. Companies won’t pay 1 million in R&D to replace 100k of salary.
Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google
#98I have a genuine question: If a person of color (I am myself non-white) is not performing, what does it take to fire them without the entire world playing the race card on you? Are we creating a society that makes it impossible to fire a person of color? You know there are bad apples in every race, right? How do we handle such scenarios? Seems unfair to me, myself being a person of color - I don't want the world to t…
Wow, let me get this straight: Are you claiming that she got fired because she couldn't perform and she used her race as the cause for that?
Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’re going to be downvoted, not because of your questions, but because you decided to put “please bring the downvotes” at the end of your comment. Why would you undermine yourself by sticking such an antagonistic comment at the end of your post?
I removed it. I know its going to be downvoted though. Because it is going against the grain on HN. But, I am being respectful. We've created an atmosphere of fear. I don't feel comfortable voicing my opinions even after being anonymous on the internet. That's pretty fucked up.
Sorry, I know this is somewhat off-topic, but I feel like it is important to engage on a human level for a minute.
I’m genuinely sorry to hear that you feel uncomfortable voicing your opinions. I know from personal experience how hard it is to feel like you have to keep yourself closed off to the world. As a species generally, and as technologists specifically, we have some way to go to create non-toxic spaces for people to share ideas.
Still, you are engaging in fortune telling[0]—you really can’t know that your comments will be downvoted before you make them. Feeling compelled to add notes to the end of your posts encouraging others to downvote is your brain tricking you into tilting the scales to “confirm” what you “knew” to be true. It may feel like a helpful strategy to blunt the emotional pain of discovering that people don’t agree with you all the time, but from what little you’ve said, it sure seems like it’s just reinforcing your negative outlook. I don’t want you to feel bad all the time, and I suspect it is not actually true that most people here are going to disagree and downvote you to oblivion all the time so long as you avoid self-sabotaging.
I know it can be incredibly hard not to take downvotes personally, and, I hope you are able to try to reframe them as what they are: some random people, some of whom are thoughtful and some of whom are not, pushing a button. It’s not a personal attack, even though our brains can make it feel very much like it is. If you truly are getting downvoted a lot, it may be a signal that some of your opinions aren’t fully thought through and need to be re-evaluated, or perhaps that you just didn’t present your ideas well. On the other hand, your brain can and will exaggerate the negative experiences, make them seem like they are happening a lot more than they are, and make you feel bad even though you’re actually doing just fine.
Anyway, while I’m sure it happens (I don’t think there’s any space that is totally immune to bandwagons), I don’t get the sense that genuine and thoughtful comments regularly get downvoted to oblivion here. It’s trickier than ever these days since there is a lot of bad-faith argumentation going on everywhere online under the guise of innocently “just asking questions”[1], and I think it’s fair to say that there is an growing immune-like reaction which is sometimes attacking genuine posters because it’s just impossible to tell who’s being honest and who’s being a shitty troll.
So just keep doing your best, anonymous internet commenter. :-) If you feel like you can’t, I hope you can find a counsellor or friend who will listen and help you into a more positive head space. At the least, your post has generated some reasonable and civil discussion, and that’s what we’re here for, right?
Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google
#100I was a little disappointed in the quality of this research. I can see where Google is coming from. Some of these topics seem regurgitated (e.g. bias in online text) and some are just irrelevant (CO2 emissions). Training language models does not contribute in any meaningful way to global CO2 emissions. Overall not a very strong paper in contrast to the other reactions I've been seeing online.
Training language models does not contribute in any meaningful way to global CO2 emissions.
Google consumes a vast amount of energy: "10.6 terawatt hours in 2018, up from 2.86 terawatt hours in 2011."[1]
If training and retraining models is a significant and inefficient part of google's energy consumption, the point doesn't seem insignificant(edit: The most advanced AI model involve as much as computing and energy any programs ever created [2], btw). I'm biased by the impression Google's actual search results haven't improved very much but I don't think I'm alone in that impression.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/788540/energy-consumptio...