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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?

#131

Post by nonameiguess »

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?

Technically, the perceptron was developed in the 50s, and it's kind of hilarious to read the original press release which claimed it was going to be conscious of its own existence.

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

#132

Post by pyrale »

fmajid wrote: post #66
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.

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.

This may not change end of year results, but this kind of research is what gives Google a credible voice when it comes to shaping public discourse and influencing legislative process, for instance.

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

#133

Post by krallistic »

jgalt212 wrote: post #113
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.

Isn't that what the "directions for future research" section is for?

Sure if no methods/work exists. In this case there already has been some work done, to mitigate these issues. So either mention them in related work and/or highlight why theses methods arent enough.

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

#134

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

dominotw wrote: post #94
paulsutter wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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

No, it is not too much to ask in the specific case of Gebru’s bad paper. Several of the arguments are specious, like comparing the total energy consumption for training GPT with car trips, or demanding that NLP researchers have to keep up with rapidly changing activist “woke” vocabulary and ensure their models are respecting it.

These are ridiculous claims, and it’s fair to respond to them by saying, “well, what exactly do you imagine a solution or mitigation looks like?”

Essentially, by the nature of how specious Gebru’s stated problems are, they demand clarity over what an “ethical solution” even is, conceptually, and why everyone would have to agree.

For example, you could discuss economies of scale or train-once-finetune-everywhere approaches with GPT that reduce total energy needs. Or you could discuss how researchers can register the corpus they use and the snapshot of time it was grabbed, with an open understanding that as long as the methods and data are reproducible, there is no research ethical issue with studying that corpus, no matter how much bias or lack of woke vocab a given person believes it has. (And also, nobody is required to just accept activist language as important or valid.)

Gebru did none of this. The article could literally be summed up by Gebru saying, “I think is bad, therefore its connection to something in ML is bad.”

E.g. “I think, subjectively, that the raw energy use to train GPT is bad. Here are some shocking comparisons. Therefore GPT is bad.”

It’s incredibly unrigorous and juvenile. Dean’s comments that it needs to clearly state mitigations is actually a super generous, polite way of saying the paper is just subjective amateur hour.

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

#135

Post by Bakary »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #102
Bakary wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both are true: there are supernaturally talented people and also an incredibly wide world. If you take an intellect so impressive that they are one in ten million, there will be still be almost eight hundred of those people in the world. We are also reasoning from the POV of our own reality. We see the people we did get, but it could be the case that we missed some brilliant minds that do exist in some alternative un…

> If you take an intellect so impressive that they are one in ten million, there will be still be almost eight hundred of those people in the world. Intellects aren’t fungible. Even if there are 800 Fabrice Ballard-level minds out there, I doubt most of them have honed their brain on the exact problems he’s worked on. You can’t just find another one-in-ten-million mind and put them to work on the problems of another…

Essentially it's a clash between the Great Man conception of history and the process version. The Great Man version is easier to understand. You can look at a specific individual and easily conclude that their actions had an enormous impact. For people such as Mao who had sway over billions, it is certainly a conclusion that seems to withstand quite a bit of scrutiny. But any person is a product of their context and we have to deal with multi-factored forces that might be impossible for a single human mind to model or grasp given the quantity of data. This is particularly relevant for scientific pursuits as opposed to political decisions. Newton and Leibniz sound irreplaceable if you read their biographies, but they came up with calculus separately around the same time. The same goes for Darwin and Wallace. If the conditions are ripe, individuals matter less. Technology isn't a predefined ladder like in the civ games, but every civ is at a juncture where so and so technology has a probability of being discovered. It's not unrealistic to assume that if certain lab conditions exist, it's only a matter of time until someone stumbles on to penicillin even if from a historical and emotional perspective it seems like a freak accident.

I can't draw a conclusive answer to these questions following the logical consequence of my own arguments, but at least we have to come at the problem with the knowledge that our own minds are drawn to simple narratives and to individual achievements. Hence assuming replaceability in the absence of very strong evidence to the contrary

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

#136

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

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…

In terms of attracting AI researchers, think of this:

Gebru has very publicly got into fights with Yann LeCunn and now with Jeff Dean. If you are building AI, who would you rather build your team around, Dean/LeCunn or Gebru? If you are an AI researcher, do you want a join a team where one of the team members is in the habit of aggressively accusing other researchers of racism? Would you be worried that your research might fall within their crosshairs for some reason or another? For example, if you are working on natural language research, and your model ends up doing better with Indo-European languages versus those from other families, do you want to be accused of propagating racist power structures on Twitter?

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

#137

Post by PaulHoule »

It reminds me of the recent Paul Graham essay where he talked about discovering, in graduate school, that the "knowledge based" A.I. (e.g. SHRDLU) was a "fraud."

Specifically: we could make small worlds in which syntax and semantics lined up (like the Zork parser) to seem like it understood natural language, but there was a point you couldn't go further.

I think some graduate students now will be disillusioned by the claims being made for deep learning today for the same reason that those systems will quickly master the things they are good at and leave a residue of even more difficult problems for the 2050s and beyond.

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

#138

Post by marshmallow_12 »

tiahura wrote: post #112
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.

AI etichs is an esoteric academic research field. I would argue it’s a Public Relations field.

i agree. Ethics means nothing. It's just an emotional security blanket. They are no more qualified than a 5 year old to invent ethical standards.

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

#139

Post by Rochus »

ctrlp wrote: post #117
Rochus wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All of us are replaceable That's a management illusion. Try to replace e.g. someone like Fabrice Bellard, Mike Pall or Claude Shannon. Of course such things happen in big companies, but mostly because management is too limited to properly assess the true value of certain individuals. But the article is actually about a different topic.

Brings to mind De Gaulle saying "the graveyards are filled with indispensable men."

And yet so many people consider themselves important enough e.g. to post comments here. It just seems that it is always the others who are dispensable. For people who make it into management, this tendency even seems to intensify (or it was the prerequisite why they wanted to be in management).

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

#140

Post by sgt101 »

danielscrubs wrote: post #48
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…

I believe you, but just for the sake of it: What AI research has had business value from Google in the last years that you could sell?

Alphafold is transformational for life sciences. I find it hard to articulate how much it's worth - maybe the sum of the top three life sciences companies today?

Honestly - the discussion is over, the AI folks won.

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