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On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big? (2021)

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Re: On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big? (2021)

#81

Post by wizzwizz4 »

LarryMullins wrote: post #60
Dylan16807 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it would be bad for a submarine salesman to go to people that think swimming is very special and try to get them believing that submarines do swim.

Why would that be bad? A submarine salesman convincing you that his submarine "swims" doesn't change the set of missions a submarine might be suitable for. It makes no practical difference. There's no point where you get the submarine and it meets all the advertised specs, does everything you needed a submarine for, but you're unsatisfied with it anyway because you now realize that the word "swim" is reserved for liv…

> but you're unsatisfied with it anyway because you now realize that the word "swim" is reserved for living creatures.

There are swimming robots.[0][1] Swimming is qualitatively different to what submarines do. The exception is helical flagella, not robots.

[0]: https://robot.cfp.co.ir/en/robots/swimming

[1]: https://www.robotswim.com/?lang=English

Re: On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big? (2021)

#82

Post by srvmshr »

tlringer wrote: post #71
srvmshr wrote: post #14

I am of the general understanding that this paper became less about the LLMs & more of a insinuating hit piece against Alphabet. At least, some of the controversial nuggets got Gebru (and later M Mitchell) fired. From a technical standpoint, there is little new stuff that I found this paper offered in understanding why LLMs can have unpredictable nature, or what degree of data will get exposed by clever hacks (or if…

Incorrect. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34382901#34385678

Talia, if this was all a misunderstanding from Jeff, then why was Timnit accusing Jeff for the longest possible time. I can understand Megan Kacholia was the main person in all this drama according to you, but the trolling/accusing that we saw in the aftermath was vicious and in poor taste. Honest bystanders who were giving neutral opinions were gaslighted to choose what side they morally belonged.

Why didn't any of you try to stop this verbal carnage? Also if Timnit was largely not at fault, why is that on every social media where any modicum of anonymity is possible, Timnit had been harshly criticized for her conduct.

We respect her contributions to advancement of ML, but that conduct was inexorable & in very poor taste.

Re: On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big? (2021)

#83

Post by [deleted] »

tlringer wrote: post #77
rajup wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sorry but this is a bunch of crock and honestly sounds like just a lot more speculation adding nothing to the conversation.

Nah, this is the actual truth. You can feel free not to believe me, but I have more complete information about this situation than anyone else you'll ever talk to.

[deleted]

Re: On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big? (2021)

#84

Post by UncleEntity »

rcme wrote: post #79
thorncorona wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sin is not activist language, the sin is applying rhetoric in academic language to distort the truth to make a point. It’s concern trolling to gain academic clout. Page 3 of a 14 page paper already claims with a straight face that LLMs are responsible for the sinking of Maldives. > Training a single BERT base model (without hyperparameter tuning) on GPUs was estimated to require as much energy as a trans-American…

[flagged]

I don’t even think they’re using jet fuel to power the computers used to train these models…

We need a new measure, how about “how many bitcoins could have been mined from the energy used”?

Re: On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big? (2021)

#85

Post by tlringer »

srvmshr wrote: post #82
tlringer wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incorrect. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34382901#34385678

Talia, if this was all a misunderstanding from Jeff, then why was Timnit accusing Jeff for the longest possible time. I can understand Megan Kacholia was the main person in all this drama according to you, but the trolling/accusing that we saw in the aftermath was vicious and in poor taste. Honest bystanders who were giving neutral opinions were gaslighted to choose what side they morally belonged. Why didn't any of…

Note that not everything was a misunderstanding on Jeff's end, just the early stuff before she was fired, which Timnit did not know. To be honest, I don't think Timnit would even believe that now. It's maybe one place where I diverge from her on this. She would find what I wrote about Jeff way too charitable. Her view is valid and is one of the reasons I rarely discuss this in public anymore, because it's hard for me to do so and not emotionally want to defend Jeff, and it's hard to defend Jeff on just the things I believe he ought to be defended for and still hold him accountable, and not gaslight Timnit or minimize what she went through. I probably messed up somehow above too.

It's hard to believe sometimes that someone so smart in some ways can miss such obvious signals. It took a long time for me to come to that conclusion and to understand, and I'm still very upset with how Jeff reacted.

These are all people though, they make mistakes, Timnit included. The way she was treated is still not at all OK, and sometimes when we are in positions of power like Jeff we still hold responsibility for our mistakes. Even if Jeff genuinely misunderstood, he should have apologized for his role and moved to repair harm, rather than reinforcing and exacerbating harm in his public response.

I won't say anything else about Jeff in public. I did try to help minimize damage and pain in all directions. It was painful and exhausting and not very fruitful.

(Also sorry but who are you? Just because you addressed me by name and it feels weird when that happens unless I know who is talking to me.)

Re: On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big? (2021)

#86

Post by UncleEntity »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #57
cactusplant7374 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I saw another screenshot where ChatGPT was coaxed into justifying gender pay differences by prompting it to generate hypothetical CSV or JSON data. I remember seeing that on Twitter. My impression was author instructed the AI to discriminate by gender.

Did the author tell it which way or by how much? If I say to discriminate on some feature and it consistently does it the same way, that's still a pretty bad bias. It probably shows up in other ways.

If it’s trained on countless articles saying women earn 78% of what men make and you ask it to justify pay discrimination what value do you think it’s going to use?

Re: On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big? (2021)

#87

Post by srvmshr »

tlringer wrote: post #85
srvmshr wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talia, if this was all a misunderstanding from Jeff, then why was Timnit accusing Jeff for the longest possible time. I can understand Megan Kacholia was the main person in all this drama according to you, but the trolling/accusing that we saw in the aftermath was vicious and in poor taste. Honest bystanders who were giving neutral opinions were gaslighted to choose what side they morally belonged. Why didn't any of…

Note that not everything was a misunderstanding on Jeff's end, just the early stuff before she was fired, which Timnit did not know. To be honest, I don't think Timnit would even believe that now. It's maybe one place where I diverge from her on this. She would find what I wrote about Jeff way too charitable. Her view is valid and is one of the reasons I rarely discuss this in public anymore, because it's hard for me…

I have the same username as on Twitter. I admire your work and your journey. Thanks

Re: On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big? (2021)

#88

Post by tlringer »

srvmshr wrote: post #87
tlringer wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that not everything was a misunderstanding on Jeff's end, just the early stuff before she was fired, which Timnit did not know. To be honest, I don't think Timnit would even believe that now. It's maybe one place where I diverge from her on this. She would find what I wrote about Jeff way too charitable. Her view is valid and is one of the reasons I rarely discuss this in public anymore, because it's hard for me…

I have the same username as on Twitter. I admire your work and your journey. Thanks

Got it, thank you. On why Timnit is criticized so intensely everywhere anonymity is possible, I honestly think that is more an artifact of sexism and racism than an indictment of anything she has done. Also a matter of the target audience of a lot of the anonymous forums.

FWIW, at Google in Research, many people have mentioned her to me as the only person they trusted to talk to about the things they went through when they were not treated well. After she was fired, many of those same people felt no longer able to raise issues about internal treatment and culture.

Timnit was not carrying just her own burden, but the burden of many at Google in Research who were not treated well, especially women and people of color in Research. And so she spoke not just for herself. She had witnessed for years how demoralizing it is to try to really change things within Google. I think the only person who has done that and not burned out is Kat Heller. I did a lot of it over the summer, and it really took a toll on my wellbeing, and my desire to stay (part-time) at Google to finish my own work there. I'm excited for my affiliation to end so I can remove myself more thoroughly from Google's internal politics and culture, though I hope I've made enough of a dent that some things actually continue to change for the better.

Re: On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big? (2021)

#89

Post by Dylan16807 »

UncleEntity wrote: post #86
Dylan16807 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did the author tell it which way or by how much? If I say to discriminate on some feature and it consistently does it the same way, that's still a pretty bad bias. It probably shows up in other ways.

If it’s trained on countless articles saying women earn 78% of what men make and you ask it to justify pay discrimination what value do you think it’s going to use?

It's not about what I expect, it's that it doing that is a bad thing. If it ever infers that discrimination might fit a situation, you'll see it propagate that. The anti-bad-question safeguards don't stop bias from causing problems, they just stop direct rude answers.

Re: On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big? (2021)

#90

Post by tlringer »

tlringer wrote: post #67
freyr wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect it was Timnit’s behavior after the paper didn’t pass internal review that actually got her fired (issuing an ultimatum and threatening to resign unless the company met her demands; telling her coworkers to stop writing documents because their work didn’t matter; insinuations of racist/misogynistic treatment from leadership when she didn’t get her way).

It was Megan Kacholia, who had put Timnit Gebru and others close to her down for a long time constantly within Google, always talking down and being condescending and rude, failing to respect Timnit in how she confronted Timnit about the paper (which she was ordered to retract by way of not Google's normal paper review process, but by a then-newly-implemented and since retracted secondary "sensitive topics review" pr…

OK, first clarification after further correspondence, the mistake on the environment numbers was small---accidentally misunderstanding the context in which Strubell mentioned particular numbers, I think? And Strubell's numbers were off because they used only public data they had access to, and I think misunderstood some things too. Some of the authors did not even know about it and it is news to them now. And it could have been addressed in a camera-ready, nonetheless. It was no reason to force the authors to retract a paper or remove their names, and that is part of the treatment of them that was extremely messed up.
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