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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

#131

Post by khazhoux »

21723 wrote: post #111
khazhoux wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think doxxing is not just uncovering an anonymous user's real name, but any form of tying someone's real-world presence into online discussion, when it's not directly related to the discussion. Here, you were referring to an unpleasant event in the other user's real life, which they did not bring up themselves. That crosses the boundary. That user may not want that connection established here.

But I'm not the HN police, just trying to help...

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#132

Post by gwern »

joshuamorton wrote: post #62
oh_sigh wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Really? Because people claiming to be the reviewers at the time said that the version they reviewed was a lot worse than the final version published much later. (And that version wasn't too great either.)

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#133

Post by octonion »

hintymad wrote: post #105
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…

And it's strange no one in media questioned Gebru's paper. For instance, her calculation of carbon footprint of training BERT is ridiculous, as she assumes that companies will train BERT 24x7. I think Gebru is a disgrace to the community because she always, I mean literally always, attacks her critics by motives. You think bias is a data problem? You're a bigot (See her dispute with LeCun). You disagree with my asses…

No post body was provided.

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#134

Post by [deleted] »

hintymad wrote: post #105
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…

And it's strange no one in media questioned Gebru's paper. For instance, her calculation of carbon footprint of training BERT is ridiculous, as she assumes that companies will train BERT 24x7. I think Gebru is a disgrace to the community because she always, I mean literally always, attacks her critics by motives. You think bias is a data problem? You're a bigot (See her dispute with LeCun). You disagree with my asses…

[deleted]

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#135

Post by petters »

throwawaygh wrote: post #77
dekhn wrote: 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…

"anthropomorphizing ML models" seems like the complete opposite of what AI safety people do.

They often point out that just because you are intelligent, you don't have to seem human. I think they call it the "orthogonality thesis".

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#136

Post by gwern »

dekhn wrote: post #52
ghaff wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Publicly "fired for cause" would seem like a pretty spectacular overreaction to someone having an academic disagreement with ML vs. human performance in some domain of chip design. Sufficiently spectacular that I'm essentially certain there's more to the story. Timnit was at least in a more... fraught area.

Timnit was fired for cause- the cause was being a jerk to coworkers repeatedly (she repeatedly attacked internal researchers on internally public mailing lists in an unprofessional way). I still don't understand why Megan and jeff tried to pitch it as a resignation or that it was about that specific paper not being withdrawn (Megan didn't even understand the difference between a submitted paper being withdrawn, and a…

> the cause was being a jerk to coworkers repeatedly (she repeatedly attacked internal researchers on internally public mailing lists in an unprofessional way).

No, the cause was her ultimatum email demanding the names of the reviewers among several other things (which she refers to as "simple conditions") or she quit, and then also emailing Googlers telling them to stop working. The first was the email her manager replied to saying they weren't going to meet her demand and her resignation was accepted immediately given her other email, rather than after a leisurely vacation and few months of wrapup like she wanted. (This is how Gebru apologists justify defining it as 'firing' rather than 'quitting', to make her look like more of a victim.)

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#137

Post by Manuel_D »

dekhn wrote: post #128
Manuel_D wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, if you say "do X or I quit" and the company responds "we're not doing X, bye" is it incorrect to say that the employee quit? That's the situation here, Gebru issued demands and said she'd quit if they weren't met. Google said, "we accept your resignation".

Yes, that's not a resignation. At google, to technically resign involves filling out a form on a website, it's not something you can verbally state to your (manager's) manager. Again, Google can still say this and probably even thinks internally that's what happened, but having resigned twice from Google, that's not how it really works.

I'm pretty sure if you say to your manager "I quit" and stop showing up to work, regardless of what internet forms you fill out, it's a resignation. The fact that Gebru gave her resignation in the form of an ultimatum rather than whatever website form you're talking about is a pedantic point.

"I resign if you don't do X."

"We're not doing X, we accept your resignation."

This is a resignation the way I understand it.

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#138

Post by BeetleB »

21723 wrote: post #42
oh_sigh wrote: post #11

Were they fired because they challenged the findings, or were they fired for their behavior after being told their paper wasn't up to snuff for some reason? Same thing with Timnit...was she fired(or "resignation accepted") because of a paper she was writing, or was she fired because of her behavior after being told the paper needed more review(or whatever)? I really doubt that Google is so wrapped up in the "computer…

Scientists are pretty used to the idea of having their papers rejected. It happens all the time for all sorts of reasons. Never say never, but the likelihood that someone who's already gone through a PhD program would act out in some extreme way is low. Usually, these terminations have more to do with "He's getting close to something untouchable" than anything else. It happens to journalists, when they do their job a…

> Scientists are pretty used to the idea of having their papers rejected.

By journals, not by their employers. It's actually quite unusual for researchers in industry have their papers blocked by their employers, as many have testified after that affair.

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#139

Post by ghaff »

throwedawayed69 wrote: post #121
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…

The Times article has some eyebrow-raising details including a written statement from a lead author of the original paper who describes years of harassment and undercutting. > Ms. Goldie said that Dr. Chatterjee had asked to manage their project in 2019 and that they had declined. When he later criticized it, she said, he could not substantiate his complaints and ignored the evidence they presented in response. > “Sa…

Whoever is in the right, wrong, or somewhere in the middle, it's hard not to come away from the NYT article with any impression other than there's been serious internal squabbling and nastiness going on for a good couple of years.

The reasonable supposition is someone higher up just got sick of the whole thing and/or Chatterjee stepped over some line.

It's odd. 95% of the time if a company fired someone (except maybe at the very highest levels) and was asked for comment, they'd say the person is no longer employed by us (or we don't comment on personnel matters) and leave it at that.

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#140

Post by godelski »

hintymad wrote: post #105
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…

And it's strange no one in media questioned Gebru's paper. For instance, her calculation of carbon footprint of training BERT is ridiculous, as she assumes that companies will train BERT 24x7. I think Gebru is a disgrace to the community because she always, I mean literally always, attacks her critics by motives. You think bias is a data problem? You're a bigot (See her dispute with LeCun). You disagree with my asses…

Are we talking about the LeCun fight where they were discussing Pulse (the white Obama super-resolution paper)? Didn't Pulse update their paper and show that it was in fact a dataset bias? A lot of these datasets have bias and it is frequently hard to train an unbiased model on a biased dataset. It also isn't the goal for many, though of course there is work on this. Bias is everywhere in a ML system, from the dataset to the model itself. We should be concerned with all these steps but that fight just felt like everyone didn't care about fixing the issue. A lot didn't even consider that the image was decently faithful but that it was our human bias of knowing Obama is black.
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