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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

#161

Post by chaps »

yodon wrote: post #143
chaps wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

  The fact that you've heard someone in the media say these things doesn't make the aspersions true.
Good one. I'm a journalist who's done extensive research on this exact subject in Chicago and have spent hundreds of hours spent looking through leaked documents, FOIA request documents, network graphs, etc etc. I'm not going to write a long post about the subject for you, but I can point you in the right direction if you're actually curious about diving into this. I hope you are, because you seem to be very resistant to even attempting to believe.

A lot of it is hush-hush, mired in layers of obfuscation, but one of the better places to start is by looking into the funding of the University of Chicago's "Crime Lab" in connection with the Chicago Police Department's SDSC program.

https://news.uchicago.edu/story/10-million-grant-will-suppor...

Leaked documents between the Chicago Mayor's office and executive staff at University of Chicago is a great resource as well.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20639065-re_-quiet-t...

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20651206-re_-fundrai...

Do a search for "uchicago.org" here: https://www.documentcloud.org/app?q=%2Bproject%3Aemails-2028...

And have a look at how often Chicago's worked directly with the Uchicago over the past 15 years: https://observablehq.com/d/22a60bb00bade634

The funding organization that threatened to cut funding of a program after tweets were made can't be shared because they were deleted after they were bullied by their funders.

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#162

Post by anamax »

jeffbee wrote: post #110
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…

That's what kills me. A person in a privileged position inside a company with all the easily-accessed data available to make concrete conclusions about the actual energy consumption of these systems chooses to not learn from that, but instead to publicize wildly inaccurate guesses with no basis in reality. And this person is an "ethicist" somehow.

> And this person is an "ethicist" somehow.

In most cases, the role of ethicists in any field is to justify monstrous behavior by practitioners to outsiders.

In this case, "ethicists" have taken it upon themselves to determine monstrous.

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#163

Post by lupire »

oh_sigh wrote: post #126
21723 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think you can quantify any of the claims that you made in your post. Is your argument that the "Computers can design chip components better than humans" paper is so fundamental to Google that they're silencing any critics? Conspiracy theories work better if there is even a kernel of truth to them. Maybe I could accept this if Chatterjee was rebutting advertising as a whole or something, but who exactly is so…

If you write a paper, as happened here, claiming that your boss's greatest achievement is bogus, your employment might be in danger. Not because Sundar and the Board and large shareholders care, but because your boss cares.

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#164

Post by tssva »

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…

I have no background in ethics research so this is a layman's view but what strikes me as bizarre is that ethics researchers are trying to decide what is ethical. 2 reasonable people can look at the same set of ethical issues, weigh the potential pros and cons and come to different decisions about what course of action is the ethical one. It does not seem to be a field where an ultimate truth exists. I would think an ethics researcher should be examining AI technology to determine the ethical impacts a technology, implementation or use may generate both positive and negative, so that a decision maker can properly weigh them. Once you try to determine what you consider the ethical decision to be and insist that is the only acceptable decision for another to make, you are no longer a researcher but an advocate. Having a belief of what is ethical and advocating for it is fine but it shouldn't be framed as research.

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#165

Post by bluefirebrand »

Manuel_D wrote: post #137
dekhn wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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

This approach from her managers can be criticized because it immediately closes the door on the possibility of her changing her mind and walking things back.

However, it sounds like she was causing a lot of internal problems so perhaps they were already working to get rid of her. Accepting the implied resignation may have just been expedient, and saved the company a bunch of severance money.

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#166

Post by SubiculumCode »

prepend wrote: post #92
SubiculumCode wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. We need to support increase funding and pay for public scientists. It is not even remotely competitive to the private market, and it is frustrating to know that I could earn substantially more if I left my academic research position.

Actually the pay is pretty good considering $100k+ to do actual science. I think the issue is these are non-scientist roles at Google and whatnot that pay more because they are paying scientists to not be scientists. It’s like the highest pay for a geologist is in government unless you want to stop doing science and work for oil.

It takes 5-7 years to get your PhD, 3-5 years as a postdoc, then starting pay is usually 85-90, but set to grow fairly quickly but to out at 145+benefits. That extra decade in "training" is a lot of missed economic opportunity

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#167

Post by yodon »

chaps wrote: post #161
yodon wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The fact that you've heard someone in the media say these things doesn't make the aspersions true. Good one. I'm a journalist who's done extensive research on this exact subject in Chicago and have spent hundreds of hours spent looking through leaked documents, FOIA request documents, network graphs, etc etc. I'm not going to write a long post about the subject for you, but I can point you in the right direction if y…

I'm not seeing the smoking gun here in your documents.

I'm aware of many academics who work with city governments, including at least one researcher not from Chicago who works closely with the city of Chicago. He does so precisely because there are big problems there. The city of Chicago may even contribute to the funding of the work he does (it's helpful for the city to have skin in the game), but they certainly don't provide the lion's share of the funding and if the city were uncooperative he'd simply shift his work to another urban area. He's not going to waste his time and career as some sort of controlled victim of an evil governmental moneybags, particularly when he's the one bringing funding to the projects.

Happy to continue reading docs, but thus far I'm not seeing the conspiracy.

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#168

Post by civilized »

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…

The top voted reply is implied to be from a Googler, and it claims this is inaccurate: https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k77sxz/d_t...

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#169

Post by mcguire »

"Google fired machine learning scientist Satrajit Chatterjee in March, soon after it refused to publish a paper Chatterjee and others wrote challenging earlier findings that computers could design some chip components more effectively than humans. The scientist was reportedly allowed to collaborate on a paper disputing those claims after he and fellow authors expressed reservations, but was dismissed after a resolution committee rejected the paper and the researchers hoped to bring the issue to CEO Sundar Pichai and Alphabet's board of directors."

Google refused to allow a paper that was critical of a previous paper to be published? That would be scientific misconduct at the organization level, no? The kind of thing that got the Trump administration in trouble, right?

Re: Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

#170

Post by Manuel_D »

godelski wrote: post #140
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…

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 datase…

The "white Obama" pictures didn't even seem biased. They took a brightly lit photo of Obama and the output face has the same skin tone.

Compare Obama's skin tone in this photo: https://video-images.vice.com/test-uploads/articles/5ef216e9...:*

With other photos. E.g: https://www.obama.org/wp-content/uploads/ar_obama_sq.jpg

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