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

#401

Post by ghaff » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 2:22 PM UTC

jpm_sd wrote: post #391

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…

I don't really have a perspective on this particular case. But yeah. "Companies" (really senior people within those companies) hire people who are known in their field, bring an outside perspective, have an independent voice, etc. And then those people (or perhaps different senior people) get unhappy when the individual who was hired doesn't go through channels or otherwise toe the party line. Either both sides find a middle ground by some combination of putting certain opinions in a box and choosing to ignore the use of channels or messages outside of official guidelines--or you part ways.

I have some experience with this. Not to nearly the same degree. But I had something of a tiff with an exec my second day on the job in a prior role.

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

#402

Post by Nimitz14 » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 2:22 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…

All one has to do to see she is obviously a nightmare employee is read her (public!) twitter. In my view it's obvious this was just an excuse to get rid of her.

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

#403

Post by christophilus » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 2:25 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…

I find that the average HN thread demonstrates a broader diversity of thought, and generally deeper, more critical, more scientific thought than the average Twitter feed. So it’s not surprising that Twitter would be near unanimous and HN would be more nuanced.

This is one of the reasons I prefer HN to just about any other online forum.

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

#404

Post by mustuhfa » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 2:26 PM UTC

lallysingh wrote: post #375

mustuhfa wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes reasons for firing are the last straw, not all the other things that led to that point.

Another inference

Google let her go early claiming her actions were "inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager".

As per the above comment

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

#405

Post by CydeWeys » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 2:26 PM UTC

onedognight wrote: post #359

pseudalopex wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Her manager said "effective today". That means no gardening leave.

If she was cut off without “gardening leave”, then she was fired. It can then be true that she both quit (two weeks notice) and she was fired (no two weeks for you). I’d be surprised if the latter was true as it would be petty on Google’s part. More likely would be gardening without access which would still be gardening.

It's really just academic and not germane to the larger overall discussion whether or not she got that one pay period's worth of money.

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

#406

Post by refactor_master » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 2:27 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…

Still though, it’s good that these numbers are brought into light, along with other “hidden” costs in the IT industry. Otherwise we’ll just spiral into whataboutism and “my own carbon footprint is totally fine, because somewhere out there a model is doing worse things”. It also goes to show the sheer scale of this research field (arguably in a double-edges sword way) if the general public was still thinking “nerds in a basement recognizing cats”.

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

#407

Post by confuseshrink » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 2:29 PM UTC

ramraj07 wrote: post #400

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?

Yes it's something I often see ignored as "common knowledge" dictates that in ML inference is way cheaper than training. But if you're running a model in production at google with loads of google searches hitting it every second. At what point does the inference costs start to outweigh the training costs?

I simply have no idea where the hinge point is. This could inform other questions like, could it be worth to scale up to get a more accurate model (pay up-front in training) to avoid further searches (inference)?

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

#408

Post by qsort » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 2:29 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 exactly the problem I have with naive environmentalism. The most recent data I could find for the United States total carbon footprint was 5 billion (metric) tons in 2016.

Total energy consumption of all computers, mobile phones, datacenters, servers etc, combined, isn't even a percentage point of that.

Yes, CO2 emissions are a problem. You are not going to solve that problem by targeting sectors which entire footprint is not even a significant digit.

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

#409

Post by mustuhfa » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 2:31 PM UTC

tmotwu wrote: post #355

mustuhfa wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Again, Managers are not the only person nor do they have to wait for someone’s direct manager to fire someone. If someone’s behavior is not acceptable, anyone authorized person in the company can fire them. Your link is irrelevant to facts. 2. Do you really think lecun wouldn’t have left Twitter if he didn’t find that conversation enjoyable? Do you discount the many other people who found her interactions with lec…

That’s not the point. Being removed by executives you rarely interact with because they want you to retract a paper is extremely suspicious. And the community has responded with disappointment. You are the only person postulating the intention of her firing. I am merely calling out your assumptions because the consensus from the entire community involved has declared otherwise. Most other people who found her refutat…

Again, you are assuming that this incident was the only thing that led to her firing. If she behaves like this in public, how does she behave and interact with individuals inside the company? It doesnt matter if she interacts with senior management. If I saw someone i never interacted with harass someone, as a manager, should I just let her direct manager deal with it? Absolutely not. HR would fire that person if it was deemed against expected management behaviour. Google even explicitly stated that she was fired for unexpected management behavior.

You dont have to grasp a topic to know if someone is debating respectfully. I dont have to be a doctor to know that the person is an asshole if they act like an asshole towards me.

I think lets just agree to disagree. Focus on the behavior. Not what she is writing about in her papers. And imaging someone acted like that towards you in a workplace. Imagine you are a CEO or a manager and someone comes to you and says 'Do x y or z otherwise im leaving'. Id be like wtf, sure, if thats how you deal with disagreements, cya'. Everyone is replaceable especially toxic people.

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

#410

Post by eecks » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 2:33 PM UTC

AI ethics research is funny. It's obviously important but it's also kind of ... obvious. I am surprised they get paid so much.

* Lots of processing uses more energy..

* Large amounts of data might contain bad data (garbage in, garbage out)

* Wealthy countries/communities have the most 'content' online so less wealthy countries/communities will be unrepresented.

here's some more:

* AI being forced to chose between two "bad" scenarios will result in an unfavorable outcome for one party

* AI could reveal truths people don't want to hear e.g. it might say the best team for a project is an all white male team between 25 - 30 rather than a more diverse team. It might say that a 'perfect' society needs a homogeneous population.

* AI could disrupt a lot of lower paid jobs first without governments having proper supports and retraining structures in place