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Is Google’s AI research about to implode?

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Re: Is Google’s AI research about to implode?

#121

Post by aardvarkr »

c-cube wrote: post #108
throwaway316943 wrote: post #87

Nice 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…

> Please. Yes, NN are still in their infancy but they are clearly foundational to general intelligence. This calls for a big fat "citation needed". What we call neural networks have very little to do with actual neurons, so I fail to see how this is supposed to be "clear". And it's in its infancy since the sixties, really?

What about electric cars, since they've been around for 180 years? Is it wrong to say that EV tech is in its infancy? We're seeing significant innovation in electric vehicles and there's so much room for it to continue improving.

Technology goes through periods of explosive innovation as well as periods of very little growth. NN's were dead until they weren't, and now they are having quite the renaissance ever since 2012. Currently they seem to be getting us closest to general intelligence and I'm excited to see where they go from here and if anything else comes along to supplant it's place on the throne.

Re: Is Google’s AI research about to implode?

#122

Post by jack_riminton »

tinyhouse wrote: post #96
bo1024 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the research community and I think you're significantly underetsimating the effect of firing Gebru and Mitchell. Machine learning is the hottest research area in computer science and ethics of ML is possibly its hottest subfield. And people pay attention to employers' actions. I think Microsoft Research is still feeling reputation effects from closing down its Silicon Valley lab 10 years ago with no warning. I…

I think you're very wrong. Yes, there's hype around ML etichs. Trends in ML come and go. Do you see any VC investing in etichs in ML startups? As I said, it's an esoteric academic field. How do you even compare between the two? MSR closed an entire lab out of the blue of some great researchers who didn't do anything wrong. Here you have two employees going against their company and shitting on it publicly. The only r…

Why would a VC invest in an ethics startup?

How much money something can make is not a good arbiter of how important it is

e.g. the hippocratic oath

Re: Is Google’s AI research about to implode?

#123

Post by uniqueid »

dealforager wrote: post #9

No. 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…

  highest quality research with real results
Did you mean "highest quality research with real [risotto]"?

Re: Is Google’s AI research about to implode?

#124

Post by manux »

tinyhouse wrote: post #96
bo1024 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the research community and I think you're significantly underetsimating the effect of firing Gebru and Mitchell. Machine learning is the hottest research area in computer science and ethics of ML is possibly its hottest subfield. And people pay attention to employers' actions. I think Microsoft Research is still feeling reputation effects from closing down its Silicon Valley lab 10 years ago with no warning. I…

I think you're very wrong. Yes, there's hype around ML etichs. Trends in ML come and go. Do you see any VC investing in etichs in ML startups? As I said, it's an esoteric academic field. How do you even compare between the two? MSR closed an entire lab out of the blue of some great researchers who didn't do anything wrong. Here you have two employees going against their company and shitting on it publicly. The only r…

> Do you see any VC investing in etichs in ML startups?

Perhaps you should pay less attention to VCs and more attention to governments and academic institutions, who for example in Canada are investing 10s of millions of dollars into AI ethics/FATE/AI for good research.

Sometimes, the point isn't just to make money, it's to actually improve humanity.

Re: Is Google’s AI research about to implode?

#125

Post by ausbah »

paulsutter wrote: post #73
dealforager wrote: post #9

No. 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…

Of general interest, Jeff Dean’s comment on why the Gebru paper didn’t meet Google’s publication guidelines: “Highlighting risks without pointing out methods for researchers and developers to understand and mitigate those risks misses the mark on helping with these problems” from https://docs.google.com/document/d/1f2kYWDXwhzYnq8ebVtuk9CqQ...

wasn't the real issue that the standards they cited were quoted later in the process than normal

Re: Is Google’s AI research about to implode?

#126

Post by pyrale »

tinyhouse wrote: post #96
bo1024 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the research community and I think you're significantly underetsimating the effect of firing Gebru and Mitchell. Machine learning is the hottest research area in computer science and ethics of ML is possibly its hottest subfield. And people pay attention to employers' actions. I think Microsoft Research is still feeling reputation effects from closing down its Silicon Valley lab 10 years ago with no warning. I…

I think you're very wrong. Yes, there's hype around ML etichs. Trends in ML come and go. Do you see any VC investing in etichs in ML startups? As I said, it's an esoteric academic field. How do you even compare between the two? MSR closed an entire lab out of the blue of some great researchers who didn't do anything wrong. Here you have two employees going against their company and shitting on it publicly. The only r…

You seem to have an already strongly formed opinion on the topic, and it seems it would be very hard for people to have you even acknowledge that they may have valuable diverging views.

Starting from that point, what do you expect from a discussion? What kind of information would lead you to think again about the situation?

Re: Is Google’s AI research about to implode?

#127

Post by ausbah »

refenestrator wrote: post #110
dominotw wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that asking too much. How would a researcher also know how mitigate the problems they identified.

The problems they identified have been known for years and there are lots of papers exploring how to mitigate. The whole paper was a nothing burger wrapped in social justice language with asides about how global warming is Actually Racism because of disparate impact (interesting, not an ML topic). If the problems aren't novel and you're proposing zero solutions, it shouldn't be a paper.

survey papers, reproducibility papers, and the like are still valid contributions to science

Re: Is Google’s AI research about to implode?

#128

Post by lrhegeba »

bo1024 wrote: post #91
tinyhouse wrote: post #60

Earlier 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.

I'm in the research community and I think you're significantly underetsimating the effect of firing Gebru and Mitchell. Machine learning is the hottest research area in computer science and ethics of ML is possibly its hottest subfield. And people pay attention to employers' actions. I think Microsoft Research is still feeling reputation effects from closing down its Silicon Valley lab 10 years ago with no warning. I…

i guess you are right that potential employees will consider this behaviour in their calculations. for the most part by adjusting their salary demands with an additional "risk adjustment bonus". as the FAANG can easily swallow that additional cost and are still incredibly attractive i doubt there will be a big effect besides loosing some value-oriented people. i doubt this will make a difference numbers-wise. nonetheless i applaud employees sharing their view of a companies inner workings for us others to have more information to make an informed decision themselves - yeah transparency

Re: Is Google’s AI research about to implode?

#129

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

tkgally wrote: post #85
fmajid wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One of the core issues in AI ethics, really the core issue currently, is that any product you launch or service you run will be found by some subset of the population to unfairly favor certain groups of people. No amount of research will allow Google to build a model so neutral everyone has to agree with it, because people want different things and have different ideas and assumptions about what's fair. As they found in 2019 with their AI ethics board, even basic ideas like "let's listen to everyone" are subject to this dilemma, because some groups feel that it's unfair to listen to other groups.
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