Apart for calling people racist for having a different argumented opinion, like she did with LeCun, what else is she known for?
Not much really. She had a really good PhD research paper but besides that she seems to just be playing racial politics.
Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google
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Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google
#92Here's a tweet with more details about her conditions and how that ties in to her resignation:
https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1334341991795142667
> Apparently my manager’s manager sent an email my direct reports saying she accepted my resignation. I hadn’t resigned—I had asked for simple conditions first and said I would respond when I’m back from vacation. But I guess she decided for me :) that’s the lawyer speak.
> I said here are the conditions. If you can meet them great I’ll take my name off this paper, if not then I can work on a last date. Then she sent an email to my direct reports saying she has accepted my resignation. So that is google for you folks. You saw it happen right here.
In the email she posted, it seems that they "accelerated the timeline" for her termination because "certain aspects of the email you sent last night to non-management employees in the brain group reflect behavior that is inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager", i.e. a separate email from her conditions email.
It seems like she was ready to leave if they didn't meet her conditions, and that this would have been a reasonable outcome for her. However, it bothers me that they wouldn't even come to the table about the non-condition email.
Like OK, "inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager". That's some weak shit. It had better be something pretty fucking severe for them to fire her immediately and not, I don't know, do some planning around transitioning her projects? Work out what to do with the team she herself managed? Be given the grace of leaving on a good note that an engineer of her caliber deserves?
She's a leader of their ethical AI group. What happens to that group and all of their research and direction now? Who do they hire to replace her? This isn't the same level of impact as firing a cog in the wheel IC who gets too uppity with organizing.
This stinks like a convenient excuse to shoo an AI ethics researcher asking some inconvenient questions out the door.
Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
According to her, Yann LeCun is a racist just because he said that a specific ML model was biased due to a bias in the data and not because ML learning as a research field was racist. Such an inspiration!
She didn't call him a racist. She pointed out that there's more to addressing bias than just acknowledging that it's there. If you are going to say "Well, garbage-in, garbage-out!", why do you keep putting the racist garbage in? Why do you, knowing of the problem, keep using biased sources of data, knowing of the potential harms? That's the deeper question ML research/industry has to grapple with. When these models a…
I think this is a great comment, that would do a lot of people a lot of good to read.
That said, how should a person like Yann LeCun argue his case? Namely that biased models are the result of bad datasets more so than the result of bad algorithms.
I don't think Yann would disagree that biased datasets is a large systemic issue. How should a person like Yann make his point?
It doesn't seem to me that Yann and Timnit disagree all that much. They both agree biased datasets is a problem. They both agree it's a systemic problem. They both agree it does tremendous harm when these biased models are deployed.
I'm very confused as to why there even could be debate between these two people. I cannot find any meaningful difference in their views.
Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google
#94Here's a tweet with more details about her conditions and how that ties in to her resignation: https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1334341991795142667 > Apparently my manager’s manager sent an email my direct reports saying she accepted my resignation. I hadn’t resigned—I had asked for simple conditions first and said I would respond when I’m back from vacation. But I guess she decided for me :) that’s the lawyer…
To me, it stinks like a convenient excuse to remove someone who was difficult to work with. Only last week she slandered her bosses on Twitter, which is a public forum.
Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google
#95All this says is, she sent a mail to Brain Women and Allies that resulted in her immediate termination. Does anyone else remember when she picked a fight with Yann LeCunn by deliberately misinterpreting his remarks to cast him as a racist? Seems reasonable to assume she picked another fight. Reading the Twitter threat, it reads like she made demands in a way visible to a large number of employees (something about aut…
Says she deliberately attempts to cast LeCunn as a racist is a very uncharitable framing, but putting that aside, it doesn’t actually seem reasonable to assume she picked a fight. We have no idea what was in the email.
She has been advancing her agenda for a while by strategically picking fights, and winning them because she's been on the right side of a political wave and knew how to ride it. Then she got blinded by her own success and overplayed her hand, a classic cautionary tale. Fun fact: many people, not necessarily managers, won't be shedding tears seeing her go.
Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google
#96> So I've been immediately fired :-) Who ends that sentence with a smiley?
Somoene who's career relies up, and grows by, finding ways to stay relevant.
Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
> LeCunn calmly and rationally explained that a particular model produced biased results, and that that this was due to the bias in its training data. But this claim is certainly not necessarily correct, and he shouldn't have been so confident about it. Any part of a system can contribute to bias and that includes the model design, not just the data. If they want the system to work then they need to actually demonstr…
I think it is reasonable for one of the founders and most highly respected members of the field to make confident claims about something that is as open and shut as this. The paper in question was training a network to upres faces. The researchers trained it on a dataset containing primarily White faces and released it on GitHub for reproducibility. Subsequent people used it on Black faces and found it make them whit…
>This is not surprising. Black faces and White faces are not the same data manifold.
in particular because features contrast (dynamic range) is lower for darker faces.
>Is the width of their convolutions racist?
Not width. As a result of the above mentioned lower contrast, the racist here is the sensitivity of the resulting Gabor filters produced by the training in the first convolution layers and the Gauss filters in the next layer's. I suspect to deal with that problem one would have to normalize dynamic range of the faces, i.e. it would look something like kind of lightening of the dark faces and/or darkening of the white ones.
Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google
#98Here's a tweet with more details about her conditions and how that ties in to her resignation: https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1334341991795142667 > Apparently my manager’s manager sent an email my direct reports saying she accepted my resignation. I hadn’t resigned—I had asked for simple conditions first and said I would respond when I’m back from vacation. But I guess she decided for me :) that’s the lawyer…
To me, it stinks like a convenient excuse to remove someone who was difficult to work with. Only last week she slandered her bosses on Twitter, which is a public forum.
Matthew Garrett, a senior security researcher at Google, is very critical about Google on his Twitter all the time. As he has pointed out, he's still very employed.
https://twitter.com/mjg59/status/1334382463498391557
Neither of us are on her team at Google. (I'm certainly not and I doubt you are.) We have no idea how easy it is to work with her.
Certainly if I were working with an AI ethics researcher I would expect them to ask difficult and uncomfortable questions. I think that's part of the job description.
Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Threat of resignation is not a resignation. Either they follow due termination process, or she might still be employed or have good legal case.
There's no legal requirement for a termination process in the US. A company may choose to give notice, but with a few rare exceptions, they can fire you on the spot at any time for any reason if they want to.
Is that true? Is there not any laws protecting the employees or setting time limits for the notice and the actual end of the contract?
Re: Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=timnit+gebru
Very typical for a scientist to have a list of publications. Do you point to some specific piece of work?
The link sorts papers by number of citations so the most famous piece of work is literally the first one you see when the page loads.