Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

engadget.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 238 posts

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#141

Post by joshuamorton »

gwern wrote: post #132
joshuamorton wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

That's because the paper received additional external peer review as part of the normal academic publishing process at FAccT.

The internal special topics review process that wasn't formalized at the time but was pseudo-formalized later in response to this issue also supposedly allowed revision, but in practice this authors weren't given the opportunity to respond to the feedback, they were only give the option to remove their names from the paper.

So both your statement and mine can be true, as their were multiple reviewers in multiple review processes. To further disambiguate, the FAccT reviewers have noted that the paper improved during the academic peer review process. This is likely true. But that's wholly irrelevant to the line of discussion I was having, because that criticism wasn't "internal", and we can be sure it wasn't relevant because we know the internal reviewers have never identified themselves or made comment on the internal review process.

I recognize that this is complicated, and it doesn't help that afaict, Google has tried to blur the lines between their process and the normal academic peer review process.

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#142

Post by dekhn »

gwern wrote: post #136
dekhn wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

Those were all proximal causes, not ultimate causes. I don't think she was a victim, I'm not an apologist, but the way google fired her was still rather unprofessional and had some severe consequences for the people who did it which are obviously still playing out today. What's amazing is that if they're put her on a pip for textually assaulting her coworkers, she would have been gone in 6-12 months without as much noise.

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#143

Post by yodon »

chaps wrote: post #113
yodon wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, public…

The University of Chicago is a private institution with a research budget of many billions of dollars per year. Given the extreme difficulty of believing the government of the city of Chicago provides even a tiny fraction of those billions of dollars in research funding, I'll have to ask you for citations or data to support those aspersions you're casting on the university and it's researchers.

We live in a time when there are strong anti-intellectual threads and forces among some parts of the media. It's easy to cast aspersions against researchers. The fact that you've heard someone in the media say these things doesn't make the aspersions true.

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#144

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

brian_cloutier wrote: post #115
throwawaygh wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 beli…

The core thing I (and I suspect the original commenter) struggle to get past is the invetiable twist that in this post happens halfway through this post's part II.

> If it’s a very smart mesa-optimizer, it might think “If I throw the strawberry at the streetlight, I will be caught and trained to have different goals."

It seems to me that this is a category error, like having the very smart mesa-optimizer start thinking about how it can find other models to marry. Why would gradient descent produce this very specific concept of goals-based identity? It's not even a human universal - many people don't have a particularly strong attachment to their current set of goals and hope for God or Buddha to help them get different ones.

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#145

Post by hintymad »

octonion wrote: post #133
hintymad wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Quoted post unavailable.

What do you mean by zero-content? I mentioned the paper, her attack on LeCun, and her attack on her co-worker as documented in the reddit megathread. Please feel to verify the facts.

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#146

Post by robonerd »

registeredcorn wrote: post #130
hintymad wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> weaponizes political correctness I'm sorry to be nitpick-y. I understand what you are saying, but to be clear: Political correctness is a weapon. The idea is that there is a correct answer (fact), and a separate, unrelated politically advantageous answer (group approval). Following the tactic of political correctness, to any degree, is using the concept for personal gain. There is no way to be political correct wit…

Political correctness means adherence to a political ideology. Whether something is politically correct or politically incorrect is relative to the political ideology in question. Subjective value statements like "X deserves more funding than Y", which don't have objective answers, may be considered politically correct or incorrect depending on the ideological context being considered.

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#147

Post by hintymad »

registeredcorn wrote: post #130
hintymad wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> weaponizes political correctness I'm sorry to be nitpick-y. I understand what you are saying, but to be clear: Political correctness is a weapon. The idea is that there is a correct answer (fact), and a separate, unrelated politically advantageous answer (group approval). Following the tactic of political correctness, to any degree, is using the concept for personal gain. There is no way to be political correct wit…

I'm not sure PC itself a weapon, but I get your point. PC is so ingrained in American culture that we implicitly accept that certain degree of PC is needed.

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#148

Post by sjg007 »

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…

Big Tobacco, Big Oil, Big Data.

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#149

Post by oh_sigh »

joshuamorton wrote: post #129
oh_sigh wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the argument is Timnit was fired for her Stochastic Parrots paper, why weren't the Google authors that referred to her papers fired as well? Instead, maybe Timnit was fired/resignation accepted not because of her paper, but because 1) she was in management, and 2) she explicitly told her reports to stop the work they're doing, for "reasons", to the point where Jeff Dean had to come in and ask the employees to cont…

I simply repeated Jeff Dean's own words that he claims the paper "didn’t meet our bar", yet continued to be cited (even by Dean himself, though arguably he's citing it to disagree...but then that's the way academia should work!). I didn't claim to know why exactly she was fired. I'm just claiming that Jeff's objection to her paper seems dubious. And keep in mind her coauthor (Mitchell) was eventually fired. But yes,…

Does "What I want to say is stop writing your documents because it doesn’t make a difference" sound like stop working on DEI to you? With the context that the documents are their work products about DEI...

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#150

Post by choppaface »

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 Google Legal profits the most from turning these cases into “personal Rorschach tests.”

In the case of Glasson’s pregnancy discrimination case, she had to wait two years and go through Google-requested health screenings just to reach a settlement. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/apr/09/she-sued-...

Google Legal wants these cases to reach settlement or some other point of deterrence because they don’t want the real evidence and merits to enter public discussion.

Google not just saves reputation value but also counter-party price discovery. Whenever Corp Legal fires an employee like this, they always ask “will this case blow the budget on severance + litigation this year?” They don’t want anybody else to know what this number is, and it could effectively leak if a case doesn’t get settled.

While the linked article may not give many details on the merit of this case, what also is not reported is the realities of large well-funded corporate legal teams.

Post reply on HN