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We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

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Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#191

Post by lsiebert »

CyberRabbi wrote: post #133
ardit33 wrote: post #125

Ok, so basically she is a bullshit social engineer, masquerading as an 'AI ethics researcher' "Gebru’s draft paper points out that the sheer resources required to build and sustain such large AI models means they tend to benefit wealthy organizations, while climate change hits marginalized communities hardest. “It is past time for researchers to prioritize energy efficiency and cost to reduce negative environmental i…

Yeah it seems like her paper was light in technical substance and high in social justice activism. Pointing out that google emits carbon is worth consideration in the appropriate venues but it doesn’t really advance the state of the art.

We haven't read her paper, just an article about it. We can't read it, because google won't let us. That you don't see that as a problem is a little concerning.

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#192

Post by Baetylraig7 »

TnkBldr wrote: post #27

what’s the energy expense of training GPT-3? It should be very high. Eager to know the upside of such models. Environmental and social impacts of tech are becoming more direct and mainstream in today’s world!

How exactly is the environmental impact of tech becoming more "direct and mainstream" [citation needed]?

Data centers around the world account only for a tiny fraction of electricity consumption or carbon emissions. Do you even account for the reduced car and air travel due to remote working and online shopping?

How are advanced few-shot learners like GPT-3 even remotely a problem, training less models is somehow worse? Do they even know what they are taking about?

Its all very confusing, but a lot of the work done by grievance studies becomes immediately easier to understand once you realize they are arguing in bad faith.

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#193

Post by rualca »

einarfd wrote: post #188
rualca wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems to me that it would be impossible to do any social science research, and specifically any research on racism. With this kind of attitude. I think this sort of veiled personal attack resorting to baseless extrapolation is not a productive line of public discourse. You should take a step back and think about a) the field of study, b) how the main argument completely ignores the basis of said technical field…

> I think this sort of veiled personal attack resorting to baseless extrapolation is not a productive line of public discourse. I thought that my comment was fitting to the tone of the text I replied too, but fair enough, maybe I shouldn't have included that paragraph. > You should take a step back and think about a) the field of study, b) how the main argument completely ignores the basis of said technical field and…

> I thought that my comment was fitting to the tone of the text (...)

Yes, that was one of the problems.

> It is unclear to me what this means, is it arguing that studying bias in AI and specifically deep learning is not germane?

Let me make it clear for you so that a) we are able to talk about things objectively, b) your options to continue using veiled personal attacks is curtailed.

Either your goal is to model reality and real life, or your goal is to model your idealization of what you feel real life should be.

If you pick option #2 then your model does not reflect real life.

Bias is by definition the way the model returns results that don't match the real world and real life, in frequency and in proportion.

If your goal is to use your model to manipulate and control society based on your own personal criteria, by manipulating it to return results that distort the real world and real life, then call it something else, because bias is not it.

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#194

Post by lsiebert »

Spooky23 wrote: post #46
machinelabo wrote: post #24

I 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…

It doesn’t matter because aggrieved employees with a compelling story will always have going public with real or imagined grievances as an option. The persons protected class is just another attribute — this is a story because the subjects are notable. If a company is responsible in how they manage, follows policies, etc they are fine. If executives or others are allowed to misbehave and the company is too cheap to b…

I think the real story is that Google wanted to muzzle a researcher.

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#195

Post by bartread »

kmlx wrote: post #166
bartread wrote: post #158

Good grief - this terrible clickbaity headline writing: "We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google. Here’s what it says" The paper DID NOT force her out of Google. Her subsequent behaviour - submitting without approval, rant, ultimatum, and resignation - did. And she wasn't "forced out": she resigned of her own volition. She could have chosen to make improvements to the paper based on the feedback she…

> Seriously, what happened to journalistic standards and integrity? Why are the actual events being so forcefully twisted to fit a particular narrative? clicks. after a decade during which they lost money over fist not knowing how to monetise their product on the internet, they all went to the lowest common denominator: clicks. this in turn forced them to start bending the truth (something that tabloids where known f…

> the interesting bit is that publication such as Nikkei or the FT are still top-notch, but these are niches, not general audience publications. (also my FT subscription is £30/month and that’s a lot of money if you’re not in that niche)

Indeed. £30/mo sounds like quite a lot of money in an era where a teenager doesn't come to your house every morning and shove the newspaper through your door (as I used to many years ago) but, adjusted for inflation, it's probably less than the cost of that older delivery mechanism.

It's hard to persuade people of that point of view though so they stick with free, ad-supported "news". Not that paid news wasn't historically ad supported as well, but at least they had more diversified revenue streams.

And you are, of course, correct: it's all about the clicks and ad revenue. And, given most peoples' preference for free over paid news, I don't have any great ideas on how to fix that.

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#196

Post by visarga »

hezag wrote: post #49

I did not read the paper (just like most people here), but by the title — “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” — it does not look like the CO2 emissions thing is the main topic of this research. BTW, "Stochastic Parrots" is a very descriptive name for the problem > Moreover, because the training datasets are so large, it’s hard to audit them to check for these embedded biases. “A me…

> BTW, "Stochastic Parrots" is a very descriptive name for the problem

Meh, both parrots and language models are inferior to humans in producing language, but one is more useful than the other. And real parrots are also stochastic, like all living things.

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#197

Post by [deleted] »

rualca wrote: post #177
Jabbles wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has she calculated the oposite alternatives? They didn't say they shouldn't make them, they said "prioritize energy efficiency". normal language, that people use As they said, language changes. Do we want a model that acts like the average person of the last 20 years? Or do we want a model that acts like a person who has just been through 2020?

> Do we want a model that acts like the average person of the last 20 years? Or do we want a model that acts like a person who has just been through 2020? You're free to use the model you believe is best for your goals. I you use real world data from the last 20 years to generate the model then your model will reflect an amalgamation of the real world data collected in the last 20 years. If you prefer to focus on las…

[deleted]

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#198

Post by [deleted] »

rualca wrote: post #186
foota wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Her previous papers look pretty serious to me, along with her resume. I see nothing to suggest she's not qualified. https://ai.stanford.edu/~tgebru/

> I see nothing to suggest she's not qualified. Your argument sounds like a red herring. Qualified for what? I didn't noticed the OP making any remark on the author's qualifications. And by the way, you should think things through before pulling appeals to authority to try to defend the credibility of researchers. See James Watson, a nobel laureate and a founder of modern genetics, and his comments on race and gender…

[deleted]

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#199

Post by rualca »

adar wrote: post #190
rualca wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I see nothing to suggest she's not qualified. Your argument sounds like a red herring. Qualified for what? I didn't noticed the OP making any remark on the author's qualifications. And by the way, you should think things through before pulling appeals to authority to try to defend the credibility of researchers. See James Watson, a nobel laureate and a founder of modern genetics, and his comments on race and gender…

> I didn't noticed the OP making any remark on the author's qualifications. Did you not read the first sentence of OP's post? "Ok, so basically she is a bullshit social engineer, masquerading as an 'AI ethics researcher'"

If you take a step back and read the snippet you cherry-picked, I believe you'll be able to understand that it referred to how the author is trying to pass opinions on social engineering under the guise of research on AI ethics.

That does not mean at all that the author lacks qualifications.

Re: We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

#200

Post by [deleted] »

darawk wrote: post #127
danielheath wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She didn’t “refuse to fix it when asked”. She agreed with the proviso that she could have a meeting to figure out what she was and was not permitted to publish. The response was to decline to meet and fire her. It’s entirely plausible that the paper is bunk; however, when someone is willing to come down that hard to prevent an idea being published, I tend to err on the side of “worth finding out what”.

> She didn’t “refuse to fix it when asked”. She agreed with the proviso that she could have a meeting to figure out what she was and was not permitted to publish. I think that is in dispute. Jeff Dean claims she did refuse to fix it. > It’s entirely plausible that the paper is bunk; however, when someone is willing to come down that hard to prevent an idea being published, I tend to err on the side of “worth finding…

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