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

Google told its scientists to ‘strike a positive tone’ in AI research

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 307 posts

Re: Google told its scientists to ‘strike a positive tone’ in AI research

#251

Post by yummypaint »

WaitWaitWha wrote: post #201

There are many comments that identify the work by corporate sponsored researchers as fraud and not research. I have the unpopular opinion, and I vehemently disagree. There is no altruistic, sponsored research, no matter of the sponsor, be it corporate, government, non profit, or the Holy See. There is always a specific outcome the sponsor hopes for. The question is, how much pressure the sponsor puts on the researche…

This is nonsense. Publically funded research does not have the same issues as commercially funded research, full stop. A properly designed experiment (one capable of receiving public funds from the DOE, for example) will produce useful data regardless of the outcome. Not observing something vs observing something with a well-quantified uncertainty in either case are equally important results.

If a certain experimental result means the experiment is less worthy of publication, then it should not have been funded in the first place. Publically funded research must meet this standard, and in fact receiving funds from all the governmental sources im familiar with have reporting requirements attached.

Good research is interesting regardless of the result. This is the core concept the corporate world fails to grasp.

Re: Google told its scientists to ‘strike a positive tone’ in AI research

#252

Post by ska »

shadowgovt wrote: post #227
ska wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is a useful distinction to be made between the impact that financial support has just by existing, and the leverage that can give the sponsor if they choose to use it. If I offer a 1mm grant the use of X drug on Y disease, I am being opinionated about where time should be spent and what diseases are "important". This is not neutral, and can be very political. However, this is in a different universe tha…

Offering a grant on Y disease at all also biases research in favor of pursuing that over other diseases, possibly diseases of more pressing urgency to cure in the realm of improving human quality of life.

I made that point, I thought; but think it is fundamentally a different effect than editorializing or filtering the outputs.

Re: Google told its scientists to ‘strike a positive tone’ in AI research

#253

Post by prox »

shadowgovt wrote: post #224
WaitWaitWha wrote: post #201

There are many comments that identify the work by corporate sponsored researchers as fraud and not research. I have the unpopular opinion, and I vehemently disagree. There is no altruistic, sponsored research, no matter of the sponsor, be it corporate, government, non profit, or the Holy See. There is always a specific outcome the sponsor hopes for. The question is, how much pressure the sponsor puts on the researche…

I've definitely seen this in academia. Some institutions will bias in favor of supporting high-visibility research over "meat and potatoes" base-line research (such as reproduction of other experimenters' results, or chasing down un-sexy problems of elaboration or exploration of an information space). Their incentives are to chase grant money and get published, even if the published results aren't thorough or rigorou…

This is why we need government to issue laws to have X money in meat and potatoes research. It was kind of embarrassing with Covid that the last known thorough droplet research was from the 50’s or 60’s as I recall.

Re: Google told its scientists to ‘strike a positive tone’ in AI research

#254

Post by pseudalopex »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #173
s3r3nity wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Google wants their cake + to eat it to by hiring the best in class Ph.D's with the allure of doing "academic research" but paid a big-tech salary. Turns out it's mostly PR and buying yourself credibility at this point.

Honestly find it confusing how almost everyone from the outside could see that teams reason for existing was PR but the team itself seemed totally oblivious to the fact.

You think it's impossible management factions had different agendas? Or researchers didn't expect to spend their whole careers there?

Re: Google told its scientists to ‘strike a positive tone’ in AI research

#255

Post by joshuamorton »

free_rms wrote: post #249
joshuamorton wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it make sense to mention Google's carbon mitigation program in a paper not specifically about Google? "Large language models can have an outsized carbon emissions impact, but not Google's, those are carbon neutral".

They'd probably want to finess it a little bit more than that, but yeah? If you're going to bring carbon emissions into it, mentioning current mitigations as well seems relevant unless you're writing an op/ed piece.

> mentioning current mitigations

The "mitigation" in question is buying carbon offsets (I mean there are improvements in DC efficiency also, but those only do so much, and language models ballooning 100x isn't going to be fixed with 10 or 50% efficiency improvements). For the moment "carbon neutrality" is only achieved through the purchase of energy offsets.

That doesn't mitigate. It offsets. Don't get me wrong, still better than nothing, but its not a mitigation.

Re: Google told its scientists to ‘strike a positive tone’ in AI research

#256

Post by dls2016 »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #148
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe then he would not have to tow every pr line in fear of being dismissed

Heaven help him, though, if he says anything critical of the union. Tire slashing and other forms of intimidation routinely made newspaper headlines in UAW territory in the era before the Big 3 automakers collapsed. At least dismissal doesn't involve people following you to your home. It isn't businesses that make US unions look bad, they did it to themselves.

What other balance to corporate power do workers have?

Re: Google told its scientists to ‘strike a positive tone’ in AI research

#257

Post by dls2016 »

throw_m239339 wrote: post #10
dls2016 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I didn't talk bad about the company that I was getting my paycheck from Have you ever been in a union workplace?

> Have you ever been in a union workplace? why would he want to be in a union when he is a top earner compared to great majority of people in the same country? and aside from a relative freedom of speech he works in very favourable conditions with a lot of perks and a generous severance package if he gets fired? working at google is the very definition of privilege.

> why would he want to be in a union when he is a top earner compared to great majority of people in the same country?

Didn't Google get busted fixing wages along with other tech companies?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

Re: Google told its scientists to ‘strike a positive tone’ in AI research

#258

Post by rightbyte »

shadowgovt wrote: post #230
googlethrow3134 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When have trillion dollar companies not been authoritarian in protecting and furthering their own corporate interests?

All too true. The biggest challenge Google is struggling through right now is that it's not just impractical, but dangerous for it to continue to behave like a small and scrappy startup. Behavior patterns that are beneficial for a small company are harmful to a big company. To give a concrete example, "move fast and break things" is fine when you have 100 people relying on you, and should probably be sanctionable (th…

> To give a concrete example, "move fast and break things" is fine when you have 100 people relying on you,

If you are OK with things to break you are not relying on it, I would say.

Re: Google told its scientists to ‘strike a positive tone’ in AI research

#259

Post by bonoboTP »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #244
bonoboTP wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has leaked. Activism masquerading as science. Yes, people also call critical race theory and intersectional theory academic disciplines. They hold conferences, have titles and credentials, are professors, etc. So yes the paper is high quality for a certain niche. It's not a technical paper for not a technical conference. It's a "raising awareness" paper on identity politics beating the same drum, without much nove…

Can you share a link to it? I’ve followed the situation but not seen the paper itself yet. Very interested to read it and judge for myself.

https://www.docdroid.net/HZvDVwN/sp1-pdf or https://bunkerchan.xyz/.media/de21413543c09ac6d02aa5eeb08424...

Re: Google told its scientists to ‘strike a positive tone’ in AI research

#260

Post by free_rms »

joshuamorton wrote: post #255
free_rms wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They'd probably want to finess it a little bit more than that, but yeah? If you're going to bring carbon emissions into it, mentioning current mitigations as well seems relevant unless you're writing an op/ed piece.

> mentioning current mitigations The "mitigation" in question is buying carbon offsets (I mean there are improvements in DC efficiency also, but those only do so much, and language models ballooning 100x isn't going to be fixed with 10 or 50% efficiency improvements). For the moment "carbon neutrality" is only achieved through the purchase of energy offsets. That doesn't mitigate . It offsets . Don't get me wrong, st…

There's also

* this generation of language models leaning into transfer learning reducing the total number of training runs for different applications

* TPUs being more power efficient than GPUs (the numbers they used in the paper were based on GPUs)

* other energy-centric stuff that's not just offsets, efficiency like you mention in addition to sourcing from renewable

Post reply on HN