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

#431

Post by paganel » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 2:57 PM UTC

Of course that Jeff Dean is white, male and I presume hetero, coming from (I also presume) at least a middle-class family, there's no chance he will understand the fact that

> AI-generated language will be homogenized, reflecting the practices of the richest countries and communities.

because this hasn't ever had any negative effect on him or on the people which he represents. Bonus points for him being "revered" for being an excellent engineer (which I bet he his), so small chances of any humility coming back from him.

If this looks like a "calling out names" post that's because it is such a post, people who hold power (in this case Dean) in this type of situations and who use it contrary to society's needs (which demands more inclusiveness, less social friction) need to be called out.

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

#432

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 2:59 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

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

#433

Post by mdale » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 3:00 PM UTC

tclancy wrote: post #397

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.

Its a dangerous assumption that a company can conduct ethics research to begin with no? One should just assume it's a highly paid PR group.

Academy has it's challenges with ethics and issues of representation in research even without direct influence of share holders and academia supposedly makes huge investments in this area.

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

#434

Post by kevinventullo » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 3:00 PM UTC

thu2111 wrote: post #376

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…

Why? It sounds like ideologically driven circular reasoning. If you train an AI on the largest dataset it's possible to obtain then you have, almost by definition, done the most you can to avoid bias of any sort: the model will learn the most accurate representation of reality it can given the data available. Gebru is the type of person who defines "bias" as anything that isn't sufficiently positive towards people wh…

If you train an AI on the largest dataset it's possible to obtain then you have, almost by definition, done the most you can to avoid bias of any sort

All politics aside, this is not even true for toy ML problems. If I’m trying to do digit recognition and “all the data I can find” is a billion hand-written 0’s and a million hand-written 1’s through 9’s, naively training on that data will yield a model that’s pretty close to guessing 0 every time.

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

#435

Post by the-rc » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 3:01 PM UTC

confuseshrink wrote: post #388

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…

The Strubell paper which is the origin of this "5 cars" number isn't even in the right ballpark for this stuff. What they did was take desktop GPU power consumption running the model in fp32, extrapolate to a 240x GPU (P100) setup that would run for a year straight at 100% power consumption. Yes if you do run 240x p100s at literally 100% 24/7 for a year you get the power consumption of 5 cars. This run never happened…

As I already mentioned, the paper also uses an industry average PUE factor of 1.58, when Google's is 1.1. Other large tech companies can't be too far behind.

Which makes me wonder how far removed AI researchers are from actual production environments. I'm not faulting them, because there's only so much time in your life; the more realistic problem is when someone else takes a paper as gospel and runs headlines with it. Kinda like the trolley problem. Imagine the absurd extreme in this case of governments wanting to regulate large language models because of pollution or to level the competition playing field.

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

#436

Post by paganel » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 3:01 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…

> Why is this?

Because there are lots of FAANG engineers in here (i.e. working at Google, or with friends working at Google, or working at companies who do the same nasty AI stuff as Google) so them unconditionally supporting Gebru on this would be against their direct financial interests. It's as simple as that.

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

#437

Post by fortran77 » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 3:02 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #26

> An AI model taught to view racist language as normal is obviously bad. The researchers, though, point out a couple of more subtle problems. One is that shifts in language play an important role in social change; the MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, for example, have tried to establish a new anti-sexist and anti-racist vocabulary. An AI model trained on vast swaths of the internet won’t be attuned to the nuan…

My native language has "gendered" nouns, verbs, and adjectives. I think it's culturally insensitive to try to eliminate these.

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

#438

Post by fortran77 » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 3:03 PM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #204

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…

I am honestly disappointed to see this kind of response at the top of comments here. Every time we have some sort of social issue come up people here come in to pick apart the person involved, and I think it’s one of the bigger reasons why some maintain a generally negative view of Hacker News. Can you imagine being Timnit and stopping by this thread, where the top comment, in colorful language, reduces you to a soci…

Think of the blowback if the paper was published!

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

#439

Post by FartyMcFarter » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 3:06 PM UTC

paganel wrote: post #431

Of course that Jeff Dean is white, male and I presume hetero, coming from (I also presume) at least a middle-class family, there's no chance he will understand the fact that > AI-generated language will be homogenized, reflecting the practices of the richest countries and communities. because this hasn't ever had any negative effect on him or on the people which he represents. Bonus points for him being "revered" for…

If it's OK to assume that Jeff Dean cannot understand certain things because of his ethnicity, is it also OK to assume that people of other ethnicities cannot do or understand certain things? Is this the kind of culture we should be encouraging?

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

#440

Post by paganel » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 3:10 PM UTC

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #439

paganel wrote: post #431

Of course that Jeff Dean is white, male and I presume hetero, coming from (I also presume) at least a middle-class family, there's no chance he will understand the fact that > AI-generated language will be homogenized, reflecting the practices of the richest countries and communities. because this hasn't ever had any negative effect on him or on the people which he represents. Bonus points for him being "revered" for…

If it's OK to assume that Jeff Dean cannot understand certain things because of his ethnicity, is it also OK to assume that people of other ethnicities cannot do or understand certain things? Is this the kind of culture we should be encouraging?

> other ethnicities cannot do or understand certain things? I

I don't think that those ethnicities have been in the same position of power as the one represented by Dean, so your point is moot.