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Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

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Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#61

Post by [deleted] »

leephillips wrote: post #58
yodon wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MIT CSAIL is not hard up for funding, nor is Hal Abelson. They can choose who they want to take money from. Funding sources that restrain a researcher's ability to publish damage that researcher's ability to advance their own career. Many people here on HN have, for example, an irrational hatred and distrust of Microsoft. Microsoft Research, however is one of the biggest sources of computer science research funding i…

“Many people here on HN have, for example, an irrational hatred and distrust of Microsoft”. Perhaps. Many people here on HN also have an entirely rational hatred and distrust of Microsoft. Some of those people are also capable of appreciating their support for research.

[deleted]

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#62

Post by joshuamorton »

oh_sigh wrote: post #16
tedivm wrote: post #4

What really kills me is that Google claimed previous papers weren't up to their standard, but then ended up citing them in later papers that they've had press events around. It's really unfortunate that so much of our science is being done at large companies rather than universities, since the companies have a bias towards their bottom line which keeps them from publishing things that might damage that.

What papers are you talking about specifically? Were they reworked at all after being told they weren't up to standard? Does Google have a standard where only papers they would publish can be cited? Imagine if Google had a standard that all papers they publish must be in Comic Sans font. Researcher refuses, publishes paper independently, and then someone at Google publishes a paper in Comic Sans referring to that pap…

The controversy here is specifically around Stochastic Parrots, by among others Timnit Gebru and "Schmargaret Smitchell". Timnit had recently been fired by Google for a controversy that started when leadership prevented her and Margaret from being coauthors on the paper (which is critical of Google in some ways) and Mitchell was fired a few months later.

Google[0] claims the paper didn't meet the bar for publication and ignored too much relevant research. The authors obviously dispute these claims (I generally side with the authors that the "ignored research" line is a stretch).

The then amusing thing is that a number of Google authored or coauthored papers still cite it, for various reasons[1][2] (but there's another like half dozen or so Google papers at least in the ~500 citations). So the entire controversy is that the paper wasn't up to academic standards, except that empirically it clearly was.

> Were they reworked at all after being told they weren't up to standard?

There was an attempt by the authors to respond to the internal criticism, but this wasn't met constructively.

[0]: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1f2kYWDXwhzYnq8ebVtuk9CqQ... [1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2107.06499.pdf [2]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.01652.pdf

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#63

Post by dekhn »

21723 wrote: post #45
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #22

Obviously don't know the full context of why Satrajit Chatterjee was fired, but I can say that I followed the Timnit Gebru story quite closely, and there was a gigantic chasm, IMO, between what actually happened (and by "what actually happened" I mean that I'm conservatively just considering Gebru's own statements and tweets) and how things were reported in the wider press. The press will always be incentivized to re…

It sounds like you're alleging that Timnit Gebru (whom I've never met, but who seems like a fine person from what I have read) is "toxic" and that working with her would be "a nightmare" to you. Am I correct in inferring this?

I'd have a hard time working with her because she says that the techbros of silicon valley are eugenicists. timnit's repsonse to https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/22/1050394/artifici... was "this was a beautiful article to read after spending all weekend reading about the modern day eugenics movement underlying much of the whole AGI stuff."

She sort of godwins her arguments.

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#64

Post by protomyth »

N1H1L wrote: post #55
protomyth wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I take it you never had a grant director run afoul of one of the consulting firms on I Street who didn't get the follow-on evaluation contract? 25 years and I'm still a bit peeved about how politics and who gets what makes government research such a pain in the butt. Every agency has its prejudices also which leads to some shenanigans. Sorta off topic tip: if you are writing government grants and are in a position to…

What?

Grants are often government originated in the US and politics and people can affect the results and funding.

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#66

Post by citilife »

I'm not going to comment on the firing. What I can say, is that all research papers should be questioned heavily. Generally, the review process is very incestuous and creates perverse incentives to not threaten publications. It wouldn't surprise me if firings are related to questioning research.

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#67

Post by advisedwang »

teakettle42 wrote: post #18

There is insufficient information here to make any judgement. It’s clear that the journalists involved want us to make a set of suppositions that support their narrative about Timnit, but the reporting doesn’t support that conclusion — or really, any conclusion at all. It’s vapor — outrage bait.

There might be insufficient data to make judgement or cause outrage, but it's still news worth reporting that this is going on.

Tangent: Often conspiracy theories start from an actual "that's weird" moment. There might be nothing to answer that weirdness one way or another, and for some folks its impossible to leave the question mark hanging forever, so they either dismiss it or construct a complete (and often silly) narrative around it. I wish we were better at taking in information without a final judgement to slot it into immediately.

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#68

Post by karpierz »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #22

Obviously don't know the full context of why Satrajit Chatterjee was fired, but I can say that I followed the Timnit Gebru story quite closely, and there was a gigantic chasm, IMO, between what actually happened (and by "what actually happened" I mean that I'm conservatively just considering Gebru's own statements and tweets) and how things were reported in the wider press. The press will always be incentivized to re…

Google is free to publish whatever information they'd like to vindicate themselves. The fact that they don't is information.

Google is also free to sue for libel/defamation, but for some reason choose not to. This is also information.

You can say "well, we don't have the full picture, so we can't draw conclusions", but this will lead to never draw conclusions about the behaviour of anything, as you'll never have a full picture.

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#69

Post by yodon »

trompetenaccoun wrote: post #59
yodon wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But if your conclusions do not align with the funders desires, would your research see the light of day? If you are in academic science doing publicly funded academic research, as most academics do, then yes, your funding agency does want you to get the results published, period. The conspiracy theories you've been led to believe are just that, conspiracy theories, not the objective realities of those doing the wor…

It's not a matter of publishing, it's a matter of funding the research in the first place. What academic field are you in where this isn't a problem? Even something as seemingly inconspicuous as physics research is highly political. Researchers know the ideas that one better doesn't question if one cares about job security. Or put in a more positive way: You better look into -current list of hype topics- if you want…

Funding is always going to be preferentially available for the things that people are interested in. That's true in all aspects of life, not just in science. If you want to challenge the Standard Model in Physics, of course you're going to have to work harder to get funding. That's because the betting money is of the opinion it's probably at least mostly correct. That rational allocation of funds bias doesn't prevent you from doing research or from getting it published, it just says that yes, if you want to challenge the prevailing wisdom you're going to have to work pretty hard to pull it off and convince people the standard model of the field is wrong.

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#70

Post by tmp_anon_22 »

Y-bar wrote: post #60
robonerd wrote: post #53

Google AI ethicists and other researchers would be wise to recognize the delta between why Google ostensibly has them, and why Google actually has them. If they aren't tailoring their research to whatever Google executives want to hear, then they aren't doing what they're actually being paid for. And if they want to be honest researchers instead of corporate whores, they picked the wrong company to work for. Would an…

Maybe they thought Google was a mostly okay company with good potential and were under the impression that what they were hired for was to help them improve? There was after all a time when many of us really believed Google was a good kind of company and that it generally adhered to the "don't be evil" ethos. I can see myself falling into a similar trap of wishful thinking, especially if corporate communication reinf…

> Maybe they thought

Pretty sure the thoughts that existed before they viewed their offer letter were different from the thoughts they had afterwards. And there's nothing wrong with it unless you for some reason want to ignore the biggest bias in the room.

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