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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

#151

Post by pas »

21723 wrote: post #38
prepend wrote: post #5

I think this a challenge that seems pretty obvious as scientists working for for profit organizations that don’t have binding ethical frameworks aren’t really free to pursue truth. Just like you wouldn’t expect an Exxon staff scientist to be free to publish a paper independent of Exxon. I think that people who want to properly practice science should avoid working for corporations. Academia and government aren’t comp…

This. And if an AGI is built (unlikely in the next 100 years, IMO) by a for-profit corporation, we are dangerously, dangerously fucked.

100 years is a realllllly long time.

Things that happened since 1922: atomic bomb, space program, detection of gravitational waves, imaging of a black hole('s accretion disk), gene editing, all of the computer era.

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#152

Post by [deleted] »

DashAnimal wrote: post #107
civilized wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no strong opinion on Gebru, but... it's so easy for a random person to make a throwaway account on Reddit, and these comments don't have any specific info to suggest they are anything more than that.

One of the replies further down had a more concrete example. I did not see any Googlers refute it: To give a concrete example of what it is like to work with her I will describe something that has not come to light until now. When GPT-3 came out a discussion thread was started in the brain papers group. Timnit was one of the first to respond with some of her thoughts. Almost immediately a very high profile figure has…

[deleted]

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#153

Post by hintymad »

DashAnimal wrote: post #107
civilized wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no strong opinion on Gebru, but... it's so easy for a random person to make a throwaway account on Reddit, and these comments don't have any specific info to suggest they are anything more than that.

One of the replies further down had a more concrete example. I did not see any Googlers refute it: To give a concrete example of what it is like to work with her I will describe something that has not come to light until now. When GPT-3 came out a discussion thread was started in the brain papers group. Timnit was one of the first to respond with some of her thoughts. Almost immediately a very high profile figure has…

It's appalling "everyone just bent over backwards apologizing to her ". It shows how detrimental the extreme "progressiveness" can be.

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#154

Post by pastacacioepepe »

skoskie wrote: post #25
pastacacioepepe wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But...but...there's nothing private investors and the free market can't do! Seriously, who thought that science for profit would net the best results for the collective benefit? You take science but replace truth with profit as the ultimate objective. I'm sure that's going to work well. The day we stop seeking profit in endeavors that can only be pursued properly at a complete economic loss, we're going to solve so m…

> Seriously, who thought that science for profit would net the best results for the collective benefit? Nobody, and I don’t think “best results” or “collective benefit” were the goal when science started getting more commercialized. The idea that good inventions would benefit all rather than patent holders must drive a true capitalist crazy.

Yet even Adam Smith bases his entire theory on the supposed collective benefit of the invisible hand. Without collective benefit, there's nothing positive left to it.

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#155

Post by TheMagicHorsey »

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…

Agree strongly with you on the Gebru firing. I followed it closely. The Press was pretty dishonest in the way they portrayed it.

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#156

Post by TheMagicHorsey »

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…

The quality of her work was also not the best. Just read the AI bias analysis she did. It would not pass scrutiny with an undergrad audience, and yet she does an exaggerated SIGH and acts like she is beyond reproach because she has CREDENTIALS. Nobody cares about credentials. Your study has to stand on its own.

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#157

Post by lupire »

DoneWithAllThat wrote: post #57
21723 wrote: post #43

The really brazen thing here is that Google is claiming he was fired "with cause". People get let go all the time: layoffs, management changes, redundnacies. Usually, the company and manager try to avoid any legal or PR risk by saying nothing and letting the departing employee own the story. The fact that they're not doing this--that they're going out of their way to 9/11 someone's reputation after he's gone--suggest…

What? No it doesn’t suggest that at all. When employees make the choice to make their termination public it’s very common for companies to offer reasoning. Any company. The takeaway that “someone in power is really, really pissed off” is nonsense.

Still, of someone is terminated with cause, that legally means that the company was severely offended, to the point that they have decided to prevent unemployment insurance payout. It's serious.

It's not just "we don't think it's profitable for you to work here".

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#158

Post by joshuamorton »

oh_sigh wrote: post #149
joshuamorton wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

With the full context of the letter, no not at all, unless you think that Documents are the ultimate work product of DEI and not like improvements in diversity, equity, and inclusion in the company.

It's very clearly a call to stop focusing on ineffective things and to focus on more effective methods.

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#159

Post by guhidalg »

dekhn wrote: post #48
guhidalg wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it? I picked the first professor from MIT's CSAIL group (Hal Abelson), found their latest published paper ( https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/irrodl/2022-v23-n1-irrodl... ) and found that they are funded by a Chinese governmental organization. Tell me how the research isn't being influenced by the needs and desires of the funder?

Taiwan governmental organization (note, the coauthor who received the funding works in Taiwan). Details matter- Taiwan and China are two completely different entities.

I agree Taiwan and China are different entities, looking at the acknowledgement of the paper: "This study was supported in part by the Ministry of Science and Technology under contract numbers MOST 108-2511-H-003 -056 -MY3 and by the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust". I read Hong Kong and assumed it was China.

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#160

Post by lupire »

inasio wrote: post #122

I remember reading the original paper [0] when it came out last year, and honestly I found it pretty weak compared to other google or deepmind papers, particularly the comparison to Simulated Annealing methods and the lack of data to enable reproducibility. Felt more like a marketing paper based on proprietary data (the paper reported how they were able to produce an efficient floorplan for one of google's internal p…

AI research is kind of like Social sciences. There is a lot of subjective statistical fiddling and parameter selection when setting up comparisons, that goes into making a paper. This isn't like cryptography/algebra where results are definitively clear.
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