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

Google staff rally behind fired AI researcher

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 326 posts

Re: Google staff rally behind fired AI researcher

#131

Post by jpttsn »

dheera wrote: post #6

Ultimatums never work, and threatening to resign is never a good strategy (compared to either trying to amicably work things out OR just resigning). However Google's passive-aggressive response wasn't terribly great either ("We respect your decision to leave Google ... and we are accepting your resignation.") It's a firing packaged up as fake "respect". I wish both sides learned more about how to de-escalate situatio…

They could have written “we won’t meet your ultimatum but we don’t think you’ll resign like you threatened, so see you after vacation”. Would that be better?

Re: Google staff rally behind fired AI researcher

#132

Post by ogre_codes »

She quit. The reason she quit is legitimate, but it's pretty clear that she quit here.

If you say "I quit unless...", and they don't agree to the conditions—you've quit. If I'm running a business, I certainly have no use for an employee who has quit under fairly unfriendly conditions. I definitely wouldn't want someone who has quit spending another month or so using corporate resources for what is now their own personal agenda.

I don't think Google is in the clear here either, but don't I think calling her a fired AI researcher is realistic. The story here is an AI researcher quit because Google wouldn't let her publish.

Re: Google staff rally behind fired AI researcher

#133

Post by Veedrac »

contemporary343 wrote: post #112
Veedrac wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is incredibly anodyne I don't get why anyone is surprised that Google doesn't want a paper saying ‘we should spend less money on ML’ published under their name, when the whole company is ML driven and pushing for growth there. What other large company would allow that sort of thing?

I'm not sure where you get 'we should spend less money on ML' from the abstract. If anything it suggests investing more in ML, from data curation to architecture development, that would be perfectly within Google's general aim to convey itself as being thoughtful about how to use the capabilities they're developing.

> We end with recommendations including weighing the environmental and financial costs first

‘Train for less time,’

> investing resources into curating and carefully documenting datasets rather than ingesting everything on the web

‘on less data,’

> carrying out pre-development exercises evaluating how the planned approach [...] supports stakeholder values

‘while spending less’

> and encouraging research directions beyond ever larger language models

‘on smaller models.’

Re: Google staff rally behind fired AI researcher

#134

Post by actuator »

akarma wrote: post #124
tmotwu wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If she was truly removed for her abrasiveness, we would have a completely separate discussion entirely. What transpired, from both her disclosures and Google's leaderships response, has justifiably reigned in a lot of concern and skeptism from the broader research community.

> "You are not worth having any conversations about this, since you are not someone whose humanity... is acknowledged or valued in this company," she said in the email. "Stop writing your documents because it doesn't make a difference." This was the email she sent, as a manager at the company.

She might be really great at her work but personally I would never want to work with someone like this. Even if the current issue gets resolved, this will just sow acrimony for future.

Re: Google staff rally behind fired AI researcher

#135

Post by temp667 »

Do google employees actually do work or just rallies, protests and walkouts.

Seriously, google staff are walking out / protesting / rallying behind stuff every week. How can you afford to pay 120,000 folks who seem to be focused on being outraged, striking and walking out all the time.

I participated in a walkout ONCE when I was much younger, over an issue that was pretty clean cut (this was before me too, things had to go WAY WAY over the line - we'd call it a crime now - to get a walkout going). It was still a bit cheesy, but ...

Do I have this right - a google employee doing public attacks against other google staff / how to apologize etc? And googlers want this kind of culture, where having a discussion get's you social media blasted? It just seems these cultures are getting very unhealthy. Why do this all working for google?

Google must just have boatloads of cash to be able to afford this all. Do customers for GCP ever worry that some staff will protest what they are doing and take some kind of direct action?

Re: Google staff rally behind fired AI researcher

#137

Post by ralusek »

root_axis wrote: post #64
king_magic wrote: post #4

After reading everything that has come out (e.g. her email) and her history of highly toxic Twitter behavior, I honestly can't blame Google for accepting her resignation (she was not fired).

I don't buy this line. Toxic personality types are a hallmark of the technology sphere and they are typically given a free pass on such behavior in the name of meritocracy. The problem for Gebru is that her particular type of toxicity is not palatable to the entrenched culture, merit be damned.

Her particular type of toxicity is the only reason she remained employed for as long as she did.

Re: Google staff rally behind fired AI researcher

#138

Post by srean »

whatshisface wrote: post #101
teen wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She was, they said her email was not befitting of a manager. Which is clearly true

The case being made in this thread is that that was how they got her, not why they fired her. I know none of the facts and am perfectly ignorant about this situation, but I have seen people get kicked out for semi-justifiable surface reasons that were totally unrelated to why their superiors didn't like them. So a-priori, the theory that the difference between someone's not-so-significant faults being tolerated or no…

> The case being made in this thread is that that was how they got her, not why they fired her

Conjecturing what could be the real reason, person A conjecturing why a person B does what he does (hates our freedom, for example) and why one should not take B's own explanation of his own actions -- these to me are an avoidable form of discourse. Nothing good comes of it other than an obligate outrage.

Re: Google staff rally behind fired AI researcher

#139

Post by [deleted] »

elefanten wrote: post #32
tmotwu wrote: post #18

It is unfortunate that way too many commenters on a prior threads dismissed her as a some twitter personality and trivialized her body of work in spite of the fact that she is well regarded and reputable in the ML community. It's becoming clear a rising number of her colleagues are in support of what she was seeking to publish. A reviewer on reddit mentioned the authors have plenty of time to make revisions if there…

Body of work aside, she absolutely is an aggressive-ranging-into-toxic Twitter personality and a very strident proponent of a divisive and dogmatic strain of diversity advocacy.

[deleted]

Re: Google staff rally behind fired AI researcher

#140

Post by throwaway2245 »

devy wrote: post #65
elefanten wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Body of work aside, she absolutely is an aggressive-ranging-into-toxic Twitter personality and a very strident proponent of a divisive and dogmatic strain of diversity advocacy.

This above is very intolerable in Corporate America. First and foremost, she works for the corporation and get paid, no matter how great she is, she has to follow the corporate culture and norms or she won't be surviving in Corporate America. Stanford Business School professor Jeffrey Pfeffer wrote a book about this[1] in particular. [1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24331490-leadership-bs

>she works for the corporation and get paid, no matter how great she is, she has to follow the corporate culture and norms

Doesn't this cut both ways? Google employed her to critique the company's ethics; she is critiquing the company's ethics - as such, she is literally doing the job she was employed to do.

If Google doesn't want that role to exist or wants a puppet to do it, why did Google employ her in the first place?

Post reply on HN