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The LLM warnings Google fired Timnit Gebru over have all come true

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Re: The LLM warnings Google fired Timnit Gebru over have all come true

#11
post #9

This paper has not held up, like, at all. The first half of it recites Woke 1.0 principles, like a concern that LMs will thwart efforts to "decolonialize education by shifting to oral histories" in order to avoid the biases of "text". The second half of it makes predictions from axioms about LMs not truly understanding text that nobody would take seriously today. There's philosophical grappling to be done, as with th…

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Re: The LLM warnings Google fired Timnit Gebru over have all come true

#12
I don't want to say this has not happened, but where's the evidence of anything in this article?

According to the article she resigned, which is very different from getting fired, so what is the information the author has to substantiate this claim?

Re: The LLM warnings Google fired Timnit Gebru over have all come true

#13

The warnings: > The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. > The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints…

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Perhaps there is a less aggressive way to say what you want here. If I were the OP, I would ignore you.

Re: The LLM warnings Google fired Timnit Gebru over have all come true

#14
post #8

The warnings: > The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. > The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints…

More than not being entirely sure what the impact is, I don't see any suggestion at what to do about it?

Why should the person identifying the problem provide a solution? This doesn't make sense.

Re: The LLM warnings Google fired Timnit Gebru over have all come true

#18

The warnings: > The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. > The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints…

During the time that this paper was written agents were not really a thing. I would be more concerned about centralisation of work itself as a bigger concern

Re: The LLM warnings Google fired Timnit Gebru over have all come true

#19

The warnings: > The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. > The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints…

Careful, you're responding to a summary of the Stochastic Parrot paper, but not the paper itself, which isn't structured this way.

For instance, the paper doesn't raises model collapse (not using that term) as a risk, a possibility. It doesn't predict it with certainty, unlike this summary, which appears to believe something like it has actually occurred.

Re: The LLM warnings Google fired Timnit Gebru over have all come true

#20
The first issue I have with the article is the title. I followed this whole saga very closely when it happened, and while I definitely understand the nuance of her separation, I agree with Google that Gebru wasn't fired - she quit.

I do not understand what universe you must live in to think you can come to your employer and make a large list of demands (including demands that can easily be taken as subtle or not so subtle threats to your colleagues), say "if you don't meet these demands then I'm going to quit, and quit loudly", and then when the company accepts your proposal by saying "OK, fine, we don't accept your demands so we're accepting your resignation", and then you try to backtrack with a surprised Pikachu face and then cry loudly about how Google fired you. Seriously, where I come from the response would be "get bent."

I also would highlight that the biggest complaint in the paper was how LLMs amplified bias. Google was laughed at for one of its Gemini releases from just a few years back (can't remember if it was called Gemini then) where one commenter noted "it is extremely difficult to get Google's AI to believe white people exist", as they so obviously overcorrected on the racial bias issue where image generation was creating black Nazis and Asian medieval kings of England.

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