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AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

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Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#831

Post by FeepingCreature »

kazamaloo wrote: post #792
tfehring wrote: post #690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From Dean's email: > Unfortunately, this particular paper was only shared with a day’s notice before its deadline — we require two weeks for this sort of review — and then instead of awaiting reviewer feedback, it was approved for submission and submitted. Not sure what to make of that - maybe that Gebru submitted the paper and then immediately clicked the "approve" button herself?

it is sort of a placeholder approval. The actual reviews may be done by a legal team, HR/PR, other researchers in the field etc.

A "placeholder approval" is also known as an "approval". If they didn't want to approve it, they shouldn't have done it.

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#832

Post by 4bpp »

jsmith45 wrote: post #486
sjs382 wrote: post #397

It's hard to make too much sense about what happened. Here's what I made of it, if anyone can point out any important mistakes/inaccuracies/details: 1. She and her co-authors submitted a paper for review 1 day before its (external, for publication?) due date. It's supposed to be submitted to Google 2 weeks prior, so they can review. 2. The authors submitted it externally before the review was returned. 3. Google deci…

It sounds to me like Google has a policy that papers must be internally reviewed before they can be "published". She understood publish in the academic sense, while Google views sending the paper out for conference review as publishing. The paper ends up failing internal review, so per policy it must be promptly retracted. This is confusing to the academic who expects to get access to the raw review responses so that…

> This is confusing to the academic who expects to get access to the raw review responses so that the paper can be fixed.

At most CS conferences, there is no second round of reviews (apart from a few PL ones that have been experimenting lately). If you get rejected, it's with the expectation that you make whatever changes you see fit and then submit anew to a different conference. In addition, there is generally no way to update a submitted paper after the submission deadline in such a way that the changes can still be taken into account in the single round of reviews, and making major changes after the accepting venue's review stage is very much frowned upon (as those changes would then not be reviewed). So her options would have been:

1. retract the paper;

2. get the paper rejected from the conference, and resubmit it later;

3. get the paper accepted and have it published without the major changes requested by Google, thus violating Google's policy/interests;

4. get the paper accepted and perform the major changes requested by Google at the camera-ready stage, thus violating academic convention and possibly even specific rules set out by the accepting conference.

2 is mostly 1 with more of everyone's time wasted, and 3 and 4 both violate some obligation or another. From Google's point of view, she might also well have gone for 3 without keeping them in the loop to present them with a fait accompli, and her enormous amount of social capital may have made it easy to get away with. Demanding 1 therefore seems like the most reasonable choice if they want to retain a credible norm of subjecting publications of people who work for them to prior review.

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#833

Post by VHRanger »

Here's the timeline I get:

- Timnit submits a paper to a conference about environmental costs of large language models like BERT. Note Google invested massively in BERT for their infrastructure this year.

- Right before the external deadline, she submits it for internal review

- Internal review asks for revisions, they want mitigations they worked on mentionned at minimum in the paper.

- She responds to these with an effective "publish or I QUIT" email

- However you put it, she gets terminated.

- Gebru is somehow shocked at this and posts her half on social media

Seeing this develop over the last day, I've grown less empathetic to her side of this affair. She created an unwinnable situation, then responded with an ultimatum.

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#834

Post by woko »

ethical-ai wrote: post #794
sjs382 wrote: post #397

It's hard to make too much sense about what happened. Here's what I made of it, if anyone can point out any important mistakes/inaccuracies/details: 1. She and her co-authors submitted a paper for review 1 day before its (external, for publication?) due date. It's supposed to be submitted to Google 2 weeks prior, so they can review. 2. The authors submitted it externally before the review was returned. 3. Google deci…

What I really cannot understand is how someone who works on ethics can think that revealing names of anonymous reviewer is OK? Why would they need those names anyway? I'm also unable to think of any reason they might need the identities of the reviewers.

My guess would be that they took the issue as a personal offence, and they believe that someone higher in the power structure has some personal beef against them as a person, rather than against parts of their work. They want to confront that person.

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#835

Post by chokeartist »

sudosysgen wrote: post #416
chokeartist wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Her point is more than that. I think that she was trying to say that ML systems have an inherent bias that is independent of their data. In general I take these types of tropes to be cloaked (politically correct) way of saying "fuck x group".

I'm not sure I understood your comment correctly, so I'll apologize in advance if I misunderstood. That statement is contained in a paper I linked that dates from 1980. I'm pretty sure it's factually correct, because I'm trying to make nothing but a demonstration that an idée reçue, that ML systems are only based due to their data, is incorrect. There's really no cloaked message behind it, and I'm not sure why one wo…

> That statement is contained in a paper I linked that dates from 1980. I'm pretty sure it's factually correct, because I'm trying to make nothing but a demonstration that an idée reçue, that ML systems are only based due to their data, is incorrect.

That's reasonable. I may have taken the initial text in the wrong context. Thanks for clarifying.

To expand on my prior comment of "Fuck x group", perhaps the tone of prior tweets by Timnit Gebru short-cut me mentally, namely this one: https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1274809418475950080

> Even amidst of world wide protests people don’t hear our voices and try to learn from us, they assume they’re experts in everything. Let us lead her and you follow. Just listen. And learn from scholars like @ruha9 We even brought her to your house, your conference.

It strikes me as very unprofessional, and frankly I believe her anti-white bias shone through in that instance.

Racism is racism, even for "good" purposes.

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#836

Post by johbjo »

dheera wrote: post #711
jsmith45 wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds to me like Google has a policy that papers must be internally reviewed before they can be "published". She understood publish in the academic sense, while Google views sending the paper out for conference review as publishing. The paper ends up failing internal review, so per policy it must be promptly retracted. This is confusing to the academic who expects to get access to the raw review responses so that…

That sounds like a horrible use of human hours, especially at Google salary level. Paper writing is painstaking and mentally tiring. It would be much more efficient if they reviewed results and an abstract and then decided based on that "Go ahead and write the paper and publish it" or "Don't waste time writing it up".

Money is not an issue at all. It's about protecting the perception of quality that comes from having Google co-authors, and ultimately the Google brand.

Otherwise, everyone and their mother would milk the Google name by submitting papers in every direction.

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#837

Post by CarelessExpert »

jseliger wrote: post #76
parliament32 wrote: post #26

I don't think "fired" is the right choice of words -- she gave an ultimatum offering to resign, and they accepted her resignation. Is accepting a resignation the same as firing someone? > Thanks for making your conditions clear. We cannot agree to #1 and #2 as you are requesting. We respect your decision to leave Google as a result, and we are accepting your resignation. https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1334364…

I recently re-read Noah Smith's essay "Leaders Who Act Like Outsiders Invite Trouble" https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-03/leader... . It's not directly on point, but one concept is: "This extraordinary trend of rank-and-file members challenging the leaders of their organizations goes beyond simple populism. There may be no word for this trend in the English language. But there is one in Japanese: ge…

> And I think we're learning, or going to have to re-learn, things like "Why did companies traditionally encourage people to leave politics and religion at the door?" and "What's the acceptable level of discourse within the institution, before you're not a part of it any more?"

And yet, decades ago, when labour had real power and unions were a force in the economy, we had no problems with labour driving change within organizations.

I think what we're seeing now is what happens when individuals are disenfranchised from the political process and labour has no way to organize to drive broader change: individuals, frustrated with their lack of power, speak out and there is retaliation. And where there is a lack of organization, this anger has no focus and what you see is a chaotic lashing out.

I think the same is true of populism in general: when you render individuals powerless you prime them to be welcoming to the populist who promises to fight for them.

Is that an excuse for either Gebru or Google's behaviour, here, specifically? I have no idea. None of us have enough of the details to really understand what happened.

But the idea that labour shouldn't challenge leadership, or that the public in general shouldn't challenge the establishment, is a product of decades of union busting and concentration of power in the political class that we shouldn't accept just because it's become the status quo.

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#838

Post by beervirus »

thundergolfer wrote: post #474
bww wrote: post #154

From her email: > So if you would like to change things, I suggest focusing on leadership accountability and thinking through what types of pressures can also be applied from the outside. For instance, I believe that the Congressional Black Caucus is the entity that started forcing tech companies to report their diversity numbers. This probably shouldn't need pointing out, but appealing to your colleagues to put pres…

In plenty of countries it would be illegal to fire someone for doing that. It’s clear that the results of Timnit’s actions were hardly unpredictable given the state of USA corporate labour relations, but one could still fault management.

They didn't fire her. She said that unless they met certain conditions, she was quitting. They didn't meet the conditions and accepted her resignation.

Re: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google

#839

Post by alentist »

qppo wrote: post #296
greatjack613 wrote: post #48

Unrelated, but hiring by race or gender is inherently racist. We should hire by skill alone whether the person is a Lesbian Black Female, or a White Male

Diversity initiatives are like a graduated social tax. As a passably straight white man I can afford to pay more than an LGBTQ person of color. Just like I can pay more in income taxes than people in different financial situations. It doesn't bother me if an applicant pool is made a bit bigger for marginalized people than myself, because I do not struggle to fall into any applicant pool whatsoever and have not for mo…

> It doesn't bother me

How fortunate for you. On the other hand, other people are hurt by the explicitly racist policies you endorse. You don’t speak for them.

> in my own caste

Why don’t you speak for yourself, instead of speaking for others and assuming they’re “in your caste”, whatever that means?

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