Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google

technologyreview.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

511–520 of 683 posts

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

#511

Post by Tyr42 »

qsort wrote: post #467
ionwake wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to ask, but I don't understand the points you are making. Could you please elaborate on them? I had trouble with the last 2 paragraphs. Thanks

AI explainability is a concept that's being thrown around frequently these days; it revolves around the idea that machine learning models should be "explainable", that is, their predictions should be traceable not just to the mathematical operations that define it, but also to some properties of the input which should be understandable by a human. While I won't deny that the concept is interesting, it's terribly diff…

I think it's a little better than that.

An example from class. Suppose you are building a ML decider which can stop a production line if it sees defective products. If you are choosing between a decision tree and a neural net, one of the things to consider is that with a DT you can look at the tree the model comes up with a d say, okay if the mass of the widget is low, we reject.

With a NN, you can't see why things are rejected in the same way.

Some tasks benefit from having more explainable models, some it doesn't matter. But I don't think it's just a buzzword or trying to enforce political control.

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

#512

Post by thu2111 »

kevinventullo wrote: post #434
thu2111 wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

We're talking about tech firms that have access to the entire internet and use it. Hypothetical examples involving imaginary datasets that nobody would use don't prove anything relevant. And note that my argument is not about whether you actually avoid bias, it's about whether you've done the most you can do to avoid it. If you used all the data you've got, then you've done the most you can, even if for some reason the data you've got isn't any good.

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

#513

Post by rundigen12 »

hezag wrote: post #22
juanbyrge wrote: post #16

I 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.

> I was little disappointed in the quality of this research But the research is not even published yet

I naively expected this article to include a link to the paper somewhere in it, so we could decide for ourselves. Oh well.

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

#514

Post by slim »

eecks wrote: post #410

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…

maybe there's less obvious and more interesting findings in the paper that the blog post author have chosen to ignore.

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

#515

Post by mikaeluman »

akie wrote: post #230
mikaeluman wrote: post #219

The problem I find with this has much to do with character. I will not comment on the research (because I do not know the field) but rather comment on why character matters and why motivation is important. Having read her email and tweets; it is quite clear that she is as much a political activist for a far-left “woke” interpretation of the world that I view as of immediate threat to our way of living, democracy and…

> a far-left “woke” interpretation of the world that I view as of immediate threat to our way of living, democracy and free speech. WTF dude. The core argument as to what you say is a "woke" interpretation of the world is to reshape the world in such a way that inherent privilege (for example being rich, being white, being male) does not completely predetermine anyone's outcomes. So that you can still "make it" even…

If you are not sure why, then please read about what has happened before when far-left revolutions occurred based on these concepts of supposed “privilege”.

For example in Lenin’s Soviet Union. People were judged by their class membership rather than their individual behavior.

This ideology of group-membership based society is harmful to everything I consider liberal and free.

Don’t judge people by their appearance, judge them by their character.

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

#516

Post by kenjackson »

rayiner wrote: post #504
kenjackson wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem here is that AI and race now intersect in non trivial ways. It’s like having privacy as political discourse when you are scanning emails for marketing purposes. There’s a line at which not having the discussion is equivalent to taking a political stance.

This is true. And the research raised an important point which was worth discussing. But it seems, based on the totality of the information, that Google received an ultimatum demanding that it take particular action with respect to the issue. That’s going beyond an ethics researcher’s role.

The ultimatum was about the review process and not the paper per se. I do think the ultimatum was a bad idea, but I don’t think I’d fire an employee over one. Id just tell them no, on their demand.

That said a blind internal review process that apparently blocked a paper for the first time in Googles history probably deserves more explanation than simply “we will take your resignation”.

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

#517

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#518

Post by sokoloff »

CydeWeys wrote: post #508
sokoloff wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO, it’s germane. “I quit. My last day will be sometime in late Dec.” “We’ll pay you and recognize your employment through that date, but you are relieved of all duties effective immediately” is quite different from “Nope; your job ends today.”

How is that really a big difference? She's gone either way, because they wouldn't let her publish the paper. This way I guess she's more eligible for unemployment, but beyond that?

To me (and I suspect the courts): In the second case, she was fired today prior to her offered last day. In the first case, Google accepted her resignation and just didn’t require her to work through her last day.

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

#519

Post by spunker540 »

nashalo wrote: post #457

Not totally on topic, but on threads about researchers, I see this trend that when we're talking about a male researcher we only mention the family name but when talking about a female researcher we're using mostly the first name. Case in point, at time of writing there are 26 mentions of "Timnit" vs 16 mentions of "Gebru" on this thread. I don't think there are bad intentions behind this, but it really comes off as…

I’d love to see the HN discussion on a study titled “An analysis of unconscious bias on HN”!

Great point though

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

#520

Post by hintymad »

nathanlied wrote: post #444
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…

Agreed; but this isn't just a Google problem. Seems to me like a lot of SF (and SF-inspired) "big tech" wants to be known for their "wokeness"[1], which leads to hires like Timnit and other "politically-outspoken" people, which in turn leads to situations like this, James Damore, and other individuals/situations that amount to workplace political activism. I am wholly uncomfortable with any discussion of politics in…

It's more than politics. It's more about moralizing things as in Animal Farm's "Humans are bad, animals are good". If it is politics, it is the worst kind of politics, as history in Cambodia/China/Europe repeated showed.
Post reply on HN