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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

#111
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

21723, your last comment ("Unrelated...") borders on doxxing.

That wasn't my intent, and his username appears to be a real name (although I don't know).

Apologies if it seemed that was what I was trying to do. I wasn't. I assumed that he was a real-name account who wanted to be known by his real identity (an identity that was maliciously attacked by an ex-CEO). I wouldn't guess at the identity of an account obviously intended to be anonymous.

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#112
post #93

This article is remarkably light on substance. All we know by the end is what we knew from the headline - one of AI people at Google got fired because of some disagreement over some paper. Which paper, what it was about, what was the crux of the disagreement, anything useful to understand what is going on? Nothing. Also, some other people were at different time fired or left Google for reasons not related to anything…

Actually we don't even know that much. We know they disagreed with the paper, and they were fired. Maybe they were fired for not wearing pants on the bus.

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#113
post #14

In the corporate world, just like government funded research, science is only science if it aligns with the desires of its funding source unfortunately.

You may want to spend less time reading anti-intellectual media and more time talking to people who actually do academic scientific research. There are many challenges in academic science, but it does a remarkably good job of not falling prey to the strawman risks you believe in. Corporate research is of course subject to the economic interests of the corporation. Academic research is not held back from publishing in…

This is a laughably bad take, sorry. For example, the University of Chicago and its connected education institutions get a large portion of their funding by falling to the interests of the Chicago's mayor's office and the police department, which largely stems from rhetoric. They wouldn't be able to fund their projects if they didn't do that. Academic researchers can lose their funding if they, as individuals, publicly criticize certain organizations.

In other words, "validate our political rhetoric with a smile, or lose your funding." It skews academic research, and these incentives exist practically everywhere.

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#114
post #101
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give some example Tweets to where you concluded that these (Gebru in this example) are some of the most toxic individuals you could imagine? All of my searches are of random topics.

Saying a paraphrase of "I didn't quit, I gave my employer an ultimatum that they then rejected" [0] is a very toxic way to interact with people. 1) Ultimatums in general are not a healthy way to interact with others because they intentionally try to skew power dynamics towards the giver (Do what I say or else...) 2) To then act (upon failure of the ultimatum) as though her employer acted inappropriately implies that…

If you cannot give an ultimatum then you can always be pushed around.

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#115
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The AGI safety stuff is weird and silly. AFAICT that community is mostly filled with philosophy types anthropomorphizing ML models that they don't understand. It's a waste of time and money. But then, I feel the same way about like 80% of what NSF CISE funds and there's plenty of toxic types in academia. At least the AGI safety stuff is all private money. My whole reaction to that community is mostly "weird and not w…

I wonder if you've had an in-person conversation with someone who would identify as being a part of the AGI safety community. I've talked with several people and their arguments are a lot more sophisticated than an intuition that ML models would have human motivations.

This post isn't written by somebody inside the community but he presumably has access to them and has had conversations with them which shape his beliefs: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/deceptively-aligned-me...

I wonder if you also believe that post is just a wasteful collection of philosophy anthropomorphizing misunderstood ML models.

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know Timnit so I won't argue she is the most toxic or the events were correct/incorrect. However, your reply made me recall this thread from July 2020 (before Timnit and Google parted). https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1278565265135906816?t... I just cannot imagine calling someone in your company out like that on a public platform, especially for the crime of not speaking. Both are seniors and that beha…

I do wonder if mid 2020 will go down in history as peak cancel. I definitely have a sense that it is becoming less acceptable to publicly air one's grievances in the name of social justice. "Silence is violence" is another phrase that was very popular at that time. From my limited perspective, it seems like that same slogan today would be much less acceptable and get much less play. Of course, two years is far too sm…

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Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#117
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give some example Tweets to where you concluded that these (Gebru in this example) are some of the most toxic individuals you could imagine? All of my searches are of random topics.

I don't know Timnit so I won't argue she is the most toxic or the events were correct/incorrect. However, your reply made me recall this thread from July 2020 (before Timnit and Google parted). https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1278565265135906816?t... I just cannot imagine calling someone in your company out like that on a public platform, especially for the crime of not speaking. Both are seniors and that beha…

Calling both "seniors" is a bit of a misnomer, like it's technically true but at the time Jeff was, if memory serves, Timnit's manager's manager's manager (maybe one more?), the level of seniority is not the same.

And the callout was explicitly for (internally) claiming to want to be supportive, but failing to do so externally. It doesn't seem unreasonable in context.

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#118
The TF-Agents team replicated the RL training (with the corresponding teams' very deep collaboration) and open-sourced it here:

https://github.com/google-research/circuit_training

It pretty much gets the same results as found in the Nature paper.

The original codebase was heavily research-focused, used TF1, was impossible to run distributed training outside of Google's infra, and made it hard to try algorithms other than PPO. So it was reimplemented on top of TF2 and using some distributed training and collection technologies developed by the TF-Agents team at Google Brain and infra teams at DeepMind.

Everyone is welcome to poke at the training code and the model, and convince themselves that it does what it says on the box :)

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#119

> ...and the researchers hoped to bring the issue to CEO Sundar Pichai and Alphabet's board of directors. Um, what? The board of directors has no interest in this.

This is probably the most under-rated comment in the thread. Speaking as a scientist in industry, polluting executive attention with internal spats over publication clearance is cause enough for termination.

I wonder how much of this comes down to the researcher's expectations going from SVP at a 1k person trading firm to Senior Manager at a Google with 100k+ employees. Maybe they expected to punch in a much higher political weight class than they actually could and got burned.

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#120
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are supposedly some posts from ex-colleagues of hers: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k77sxz/com...

From that piece: > I do believe she actually thinks she is making the world a better place but in reality any interaction with her has been incredibly stressful having to carefully weigh every move made in her presence. What if what some vocal minority advocates say is correct, and they have to carefully weigh every move they make, throughout their whole lives? If living that carefully is incredibly stressful, what p…

I agree this is a difficult spot to be put in: be quiet (or nice) and nothing changes, or be loud and aggressive so that people are forced to take notice. I don't wish that kind of double-bind on anybody.

In this position, some people seem to find a third alternative: be fierce and yet unflinchingly kind. Make a lot of noise, but be charitable with your opponents so that their good side has the opportunity to come out. People change on their own time. We can't force it.

Truth be told, it takes considerable wisdom to pull this off, and it's unfair to expect that of most people. But the alternative is to become increasingly bitter and caustic. That ends up making you feel increasingly self-righteous, but also increasingly isolated (which then feeds the self-righteousness, in a vicious cycle). It doesn't actually help the cause.

She doesn't deserve contempt for falling into that trap. Like all of us, she deserves compassion. But it's okay to point out that her behavior is unhelpful. We, too, should not fall into the double bind of keeping quiet about it versus responding aggressively. We can be kind and firm.

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