We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google • Hacker News Board

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

#391

Post by jpm_sd » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 2:04 PM UTC

Here's why I have absolutely no sympathy for Google in this situation.

They hired Gebru as a professional thorn in their side. "Come up in here and be a pain in the ass! Tell us what we're doing wrong!", they said. "We're Enlightened Corporate America, after all!" She is a chess piece in the game of Wokeness Street Cred.

She then proceeded to do the job she was hired for, and now they're all "Hey lady, Here At Google that's not how we do things".

That said, as a manager, I would have "accepted her resignation" and/or fired her without hesitation.

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

#392

Post by CydeWeys » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 2:06 PM UTC

choeger wrote: post #201

While I will not dive into the extremes here, this is yet another battle in the fight over language, right? The most important point of criticism seems to be that the language models are "unethical", i.e., not subject to control by a particular political standard. Am I the only one that finds this line of argumentation highly troubling? The idea that once you do something with language there should be someone proacti…

I don't agree with this characterization at all. This seems to be a much deeper battle about much more serious potential issues with AI. It's not just about language choice. One of the examples cited in the linked article is how facial recognition wasn't trained on as many examples of lower-albedo people and thus gave more false matches for them, thus potentially leading to false arrests for crimes they didn't commit. This is about a lot more than just language.

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

#393

Post by CydeWeys » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 2:12 PM UTC

ethical-ai wrote: post #349

dash2 wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it was submitted to a conference, that’s what they’re for. Not the same as submitting for publication.

In AI research conferences are main way to publish, if I understand you correctly. It is generally considered to be a bad practice to submit "such an early draft" for peer review. Moreover, if it was accepted, it would be "circulating online" in conference proceedings. Why is anyone surprised that the draft which is considered not good enough to share with public by authors themselves is banned from sharing (in form…

There's a lot of speculation going on here. The version of the paper I read did not feel like an early draft at all, but a final one. This is just the excuse Emily Bender is using to avoid providing Technology Review with a copy of the paper. You're right; they wouldn't have submitted an early rough draft for peer review at a conference (these aren't amateurs we're talking about here!).

The real reason I suspect she didn't want the paper published is that the other 4 colleagues are still employees at Google and could get in trouble, seeing as how Google doesn't want it published and all.

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

#394

Post by 0thgen » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 2:12 PM UTC

rococode wrote: post #118

sthatipamala wrote: post #10

Are these numbers the energy to train a model? The whole point of these new NLP models is transfer learning, meaning you train the big model once and fine-tune it for each use case with a lot less training data. 5 cars worth of carbon emissions is not a lot given that it is a fixed cost. Very few are retraining BERT from scratch. EDIT: The other two points are also disingenuous. * "[AI models] will also fail to captu…

Carbon emissions arguments tend to ignore the value of what's being done as well. BERT and other transformers were meaningful experiments that were valuable in furthering a major research direction and enabling more effective consumer and business applications. In that sense, it's like any other company doing R&D - of course energy will be used and of course there will be some inefficiencies. I think it's quite misle…

this is a great comment, and shows why the original author’s “opportunity cost” argument is a double-edged sword

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

#395

Post by wan23 » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 2:13 PM UTC

angry_octet wrote: post #129

creato wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like it should be buried because it's clickbait headline generating fluff that only would get attention because of where the authors come from. And I say that after reading a summary that sounds like the authors had a positive opinion of the paper. Google (probably) wanted to bury it because many of those clickbait headlines would have been negative to google.

You should read some other ethical AI research. This is par for the course. We're still suffering talks about killer robots.

We already have drones with cameras, drones with guns, and drones that are autonomous. How long until someone combines these?

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

#396

Post by karmasimida » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 2:16 PM UTC

sillysaurusx wrote: post #309

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…

Your feelings are justified. I felt the same way as you two days ago. You might be interested to know that I’ve changed my mind. The reasons are documented here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25308233 Basically, every one of those arguments evaporates when you dig into the details. She was doing her job. The paper was anodyne and perhaps even boring. She was rightfully pissed off that some middle manager was t…

> Because, as far as I can tell, the entire AI community is now on her side

Oh because how dare people judge. You would be instantly taken to court of public opinion for talking down a black female, AI, ethics, researcher.

If people have opposite opinion, they would keep it to themselves. But saying the entire AI community had rallied behind her is wrong.

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

#397

Post by tclancy » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 2:18 PM UTC

tinyhouse wrote: post #377

Last comment about it since I spent too much time on this story. As a researcher in the field I feel bad people don't give Google more credit (I have no affiliation with Google). They created a research environment where researchers have freedom to work on their own interests and publish papers (they publish more than any other company). You don't find many environments like that outside of academia. I still remember…

What? People should check their principles at the door? They literally hired an ethics researcher and then it appears they fired her unethically.

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

#398

Post by CydeWeys » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 2:18 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #92

baskire wrote: post #90

Earlier 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…

Analogously, I used to pooh-pooh the concerns about the total electrical usage of Bitcoin years ago, but it's since risen to an actually meaningful level. There's easily more money in AI in total than in crypto, and thus, you could see the total energy usage ending up a lot higher than crypto. That's not an insignificant amount of energy we're talking about here.

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

#399

Post by asdfrmrf » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 2:20 PM UTC

thinkingemote wrote: post #365

Anyone else see the narrative on Twitter to be so much different than Reddit and hacker news? On reddit and hacker news I have never seen any unconditional support for Timmit. Even amongst those anti Google and broadly in support of her, there's no whole agreement with all of what Timmit says; the assertion of her story, the reasons why and the conclusions. that a. She was fired b. That she was fired because of sexis…

Hackernews tends to be male.

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

#400

Post by ramraj07 » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 2:21 PM UTC

sthatipamala wrote: post #10

Are these numbers the energy to train a model? The whole point of these new NLP models is transfer learning, meaning you train the big model once and fine-tune it for each use case with a lot less training data. 5 cars worth of carbon emissions is not a lot given that it is a fixed cost. Very few are retraining BERT from scratch. EDIT: The other two points are also disingenuous. * "[AI models] will also fail to captu…

I'm more interested in the related nugget, which is the carbon footprint of a Google Search. Some estimates from a decade back put it at 7g (boil a cup of water), but since then it's probably only gotten larger. However if Google's dstacenters truly carbon neutral, does it even matter?