Interesting thesis. Is it me or does the author compare Gebru to Einstein?
Is Google’s AI research about to implode?
81–90 of 188 posts
Re: Is Google’s AI research about to implode?
#82No. Every time someone makes a big stink about someone getting fired at one of the top tech companies, it is promptly followed by an article like this. A trillion dollar company that hires thousands of researchers and consistently produces some of the highest quality research with real results is not going to implode from one person being gone. Another pattern I've seen is someone leaving a company, followed by writi…
To be fair, the article is not about the firing. In any case, the two researchers who got fired did more harm to Google than good. Internally no one cares they left. AI etichs is an esoteric academic research field.
>AI etichs is an esoteric academic research field.
I don't agree in general but I do think these two researchers, and this whole saga have just hurt the AI ethics field.
Re: Is Google’s AI research about to implode?
#83Google AI would only implode when Google, or the corporate world finding that AI can't deliver the financial promise that was hyped.
And it is happening regardless of the drama, from the perspective of job market.
Re: Is Google’s AI research about to implode?
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alright. 99.999% of us are replaceable.
Also this is a management illusion. There is no evidence for this assumption. You don't even know the probability distribution. There is no reason to assume that the percentage is equally distributed across all firms or countries. And anyway, the article is about something else.
No, it's an axiom. It defines a way to make collective/collaborative entities hopefully bigger than the sum of their parts. I think of these things (corporations, groups, movements) as aggregate people, and that's very much what Google is about.
Google deals almost entirely with aggregate people: statistics, algorithms, collective behaviors, machine learning, implementation that's never about individuals but is about larger population trends. Aggregates, not special unique snowflakes.
As such this is not an illusion but an axiom. Google and entities like it (themselves humongous aggregate 'people') MAKE individuals replaceable, the better to be dealing with other entities like themselves. This is only going to accelerate the more they get to bring AI and machine learning into the mix… which by now is long established, nowhere more than at Google.
Re: Is Google’s AI research about to implode?
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, the article is not about the firing. In any case, the two researchers who got fired did more harm to Google than good. Internally no one cares they left. AI etichs is an esoteric academic research field.
More importantly it has no connection to the bottom line, which is why Google management doesn't seem particularly concerned with disquiet in that research group, as long as it doesn't spread to the rest of the company.
Google and other companies should regard rigorous research and discussion about AI ethics as long-term protection of their bottom lines. If they start launching products and selling services that are found to unfairly favor or disfavor certain groups of people, they will be vulnerable to lawsuits, government regulation, and damage to their reputations.
Re: Is Google’s AI research about to implode?
#86> I don’t want to downplay the deep instutionalised sexism and racism that is at play in Gebru’s firing — that is there for all to see. Really, where is that to see. You weaken your whole case with this kind of casual reference to "oh and she was also a black women" so racism and sexism apply. Its a type of crying wolf that loses you more people in what is the potentially important issue at hand, her work at google.…
It's tough to draw a straight line from "deep institution" (redundant?) to specific examples. It shows up more in background statistic than anecdotes. When we're focusing on N=1, I'd rather see concrete complaints (and no, internal forum posts do not count).
Re: Is Google’s AI research about to implode?
#87Nice try, but still a miss. Building assumptions into NN won’t work for anything complex like ladders and keys which according to this author are built in to human brains? Please. Yes, NN are still in their infancy but they are clearly foundational to general intelligence. They will probably require many additional discoveries about how they need to be connected and maybe even a few updates to the model of the neuron but they aren’t going away. Secondly, of course a language model is going to parrot back the data it is trained on, that’s a major goal ie given a giant dataset answer these questions. It’s also how a lot of casual human conversation works, we generally just parrot back things we’ve read or heard. The interesting parts are the new syntheses that human brains come up with but even those are standing on the shoulders of the dataset so to speak. You’ll never get a truly neutral view of the data, I don’t even know what such a thing would look like maybe just pure ignorance of the data could be considered neutral? Biases aka heuristics are a a core part of learned intelligence, they can of course be flawed or entirely incorrect for a given environment but they serve a purpose and you can’t do away with them or the ability to form them based on observed data. You can optimize them for specific goals but you can’t get by with just one.
Re: Is Google’s AI research about to implode?
#88No. Every time someone makes a big stink about someone getting fired at one of the top tech companies, it is promptly followed by an article like this. A trillion dollar company that hires thousands of researchers and consistently produces some of the highest quality research with real results is not going to implode from one person being gone. Another pattern I've seen is someone leaving a company, followed by writi…
You must not have read the article, which isn't about Gebru's (and now Mitchell's) firing. There would be a lot to say about the ongoing credibility of any of Google's statements or research concerning ethical AI at this point, and lots of folks have said those things.
This article is an analysis of the extreme weaknesses in the current seemingly-productive approach to ML language model research. The intro anecdote about the failure of game-playing models to handle games with representational elements or indirect rewards is extremely important. But the failure of the Big AI community to recognize those same failures in its approach to building language models is the pending crisis that the article's title refers to. Gebru's firing is not the cause of the impending implosion of Google's AI research, but rather a leading indicator and warning sign.
Re: Is Google’s AI research about to implode?
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you read the article? Gebru's firing isn't the focus of it.
Yes, I stopped reading when it mentioned the last good paper was from 2017. This is simply not true. I don't have time to go through all of their papers right now, but as someone else mentioned the protein folding one was a real breakthrough. They also have lots of great stuff in the NLP space (something similar to gpt-3 like 2 years earlier). Also tons of stuff on the actual training architecture/methods. Edit: I wa…
The title, which does not mention anyone's firing, has everything to do with the article...
Anyway, you stopped reading in the first sentence? That's essentially the same as not reading it.
Re: Is Google’s AI research about to implode?
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also this is a management illusion. There is no evidence for this assumption. You don't even know the probability distribution. There is no reason to assume that the percentage is equally distributed across all firms or countries. And anyway, the article is about something else.
No, it's an axiom. It defines a way to make collective/collaborative entities hopefully bigger than the sum of their parts. I think of these things (corporations, groups, movements) as aggregate people, and that's very much what Google is about. Google deals almost entirely with aggregate people: statistics, algorithms, collective behaviors, machine learning, implementation that's never about individuals but is about…
> it's an axiom
An axiom which only applies to a certain percentage of cases?