[HN Gopher] Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly ch...
___________________________________________________________________
Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged
findings
Author : firstSpeaker
Score : 203 points
Date : 2022-05-02 13:54 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.engadget.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.engadget.com)
| tedivm wrote:
| What really kills me is that Google claimed previous papers
| weren't up to their standard, but then ended up citing them in
| later papers that they've had press events around. It's really
| unfortunate that so much of our science is being done at large
| companies rather than universities, since the companies have a
| bias towards their bottom line which keeps them from publishing
| things that might damage that.
| buzzthro wrote:
| I mean, for all we know, those papers could have been cited as
| "look here's how not to do it or here's how we're
| different/better". There are positive and negative citations in
| papers.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| What papers are you talking about specifically? Were they
| reworked at all after being told they weren't up to standard?
| Does Google have a standard where only papers they would
| publish can be cited?
|
| Imagine if Google had a standard that all papers they publish
| must be in Comic Sans font. Researcher refuses, publishes paper
| independently, and then someone at Google publishes a paper in
| Comic Sans referring to that paper. Is that wrong? After all,
| Google doesn't have a standard that all cited papers must be
| published in Comic Sans as well.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| The controversy here is specifically around Stochastic
| Parrots, by among others Timnit Gebru and "Schmargaret
| Smitchell". Timnit had recently been fired by Google for a
| controversy that started when leadership prevented her and
| Margaret from being coauthors on the paper (which is critical
| of Google in some ways) and Mitchell was fired a few months
| later.
|
| Google[0] claims the paper didn't meet the bar for
| publication and ignored too much relevant research. The
| authors obviously dispute these claims (I generally side with
| the authors that the "ignored research" line is a stretch).
|
| The then amusing thing is that a number of Google authored or
| coauthored papers still cite it, for various reasons[1][2]
| (but there's another like half dozen or so Google papers at
| least in the ~500 citations). So the entire controversy is
| that the paper wasn't up to academic standards, except that
| empirically it clearly was.
|
| > Were they reworked at all after being told they weren't up
| to standard?
|
| There was an attempt by the authors to respond to the
| internal criticism, but this wasn't met constructively.
|
| [0]: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1f2kYWDXwhzYnq8ebVtuk
| 9CqQ... [1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2107.06499.pdf [2]:
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.01652.pdf
| gwern wrote:
| > There was an attempt by the authors to respond to the
| internal criticism, but this wasn't met constructively.
|
| Really? Because people claiming to be the reviewers at the
| time said that the version they reviewed was a _lot_ worse
| than the final version published much later. (And that
| version wasn 't too great either.)
| joshuamorton wrote:
| That's because the paper received additional external
| peer review as part of the normal academic publishing
| process at FAccT.
|
| The internal special topics review process that wasn't
| formalized at the time but was pseudo-formalized later in
| response to this issue also supposedly allowed revision,
| but in practice this authors weren't given the
| opportunity to respond to the feedback, they were only
| give the option to remove their names from the paper.
|
| So both your statement and mine can be true, as their
| were multiple reviewers in multiple review processes. To
| further disambiguate, the FAccT reviewers have noted that
| the paper improved during the academic peer review
| process. This is likely true. But that's wholly
| irrelevant to the line of discussion I was having,
| because that criticism wasn't "internal", and we can be
| sure it wasn't relevant because we know the internal
| reviewers have never identified themselves or made
| comment on the internal review process.
|
| I recognize that this is complicated, and it doesn't help
| that afaict, Google has tried to blur the lines between
| their process and the normal academic peer review
| process.
| gwern wrote:
| Well OK then, but your point was that "the original
| version must have been acceptable because Googlers later
| cited the final version, gotcha!", and the more review
| and improvement it undergoes by whomever, the less sense
| your point makes.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| If the argument is Timnit was fired for her Stochastic
| Parrots paper, why weren't the Google authors that referred
| to her papers fired as well?
|
| Instead, maybe Timnit was fired/resignation accepted not
| because of her paper, but because 1) she was in management,
| and 2) she explicitly told her reports to stop the work
| they're doing, for "reasons", to the point where Jeff Dean
| had to come in and ask the employees to continue working on
| DEI programs: https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-
| email-that-got-a...
| joshuamorton wrote:
| I simply repeated Jeff Dean's own words that he claims
| the paper "didn't meet our bar", yet continued to be
| cited (even by Dean himself, though arguably he's citing
| it to disagree...but then that's the way academia should
| work!).
|
| I didn't claim to know why exactly she was fired. I'm
| just claiming that Jeff's objection to her paper seems
| dubious.
|
| And keep in mind her coauthor (Mitchell) _was_ eventually
| fired. But yes, the question you ask is a good one, and I
| think the answer is revealing (the paper did in fact meet
| the bar for publication, and it was killed for political
| reasons, making Gebru 's reactions quite reasonable!)
|
| > she explicitly told her reports to stop the work
| they're doing,
|
| No she didn't. She told them to refocus to be more
| effective. That's a completely reasonable! Quoting 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."
|
| That doesn't sound like "stop working on DEI" to me.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Does "What I want to say is stop writing your documents
| because it doesn't make a difference" sound like stop
| working on DEI to you? With the context that the
| documents are their work products about DEI...
| joshuamorton wrote:
| With the full context of the letter, no not at all,
| unless you think that Documents are the ultimate work
| product of DEI and not like improvements in diversity,
| equity, and inclusion in the company.
|
| It's very clearly a call to stop focusing on ineffective
| things and to focus on more effective methods.
| protastus wrote:
| From an author's perspective, citing a paper is not an
| endorsement.
|
| For example, a paper's intro might have an overview of how
| others have attempted to solve a problem before. Citations
| there will comprise a very concise summary of techniques from
| others, often pointing out limitations.
|
| From the perspective of a PR team or agency, they aren't in a
| position to independently evaluate papers, let alone disavow a
| paper that carries the name of the company.
| muh_gradle wrote:
| Which papers are you referring to?
| dekhn wrote:
| https://www.techrxiv.org/articles/preprint/The_Carbon_Footpr.
| .. cites Bender, E.M., et al., 2021, On the Dangers of
| Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?. ACM
| Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency.
|
| In short, Jeff Dean (and others at Google) cited the finally
| published (not by Google) version of the Parrots paper. The
| citation [20] is in the context of the paper:
|
| "The opening quote in Section 1 is based on a 2019 study from
| the University of Massachusetts (UMass) that estimated the
| environmental impact of training [2]. More than 1000 papers
| cite this paper as the source for the impact on carbon
| emissions of ML models, e.g., [1,6,7,17,18,19,20]."
|
| in which the authors of this paper point out that the Parrots
| paper used what is likely a large overestimate of the carbon
| emissions from training. This is consistent with my
| understanding (that the power/emissions part of the Parrots
| paper isn't well backed by evidence).
| muh_gradle wrote:
| Ahh thank you for the context. I was familiar with the
| Timnit Gebru incident, but I haven't followed up on it
| since it happened.
| pastacacioepepe wrote:
| But...but...there's nothing private investors and the free
| market can't do!
|
| Seriously, who thought that science for profit would net the
| best results for the collective benefit?
|
| You take science but replace truth with profit as the ultimate
| objective. I'm sure that's going to work well.
|
| The day we stop seeking profit in endeavors that can only be
| pursued properly at a complete economic loss, we're going to
| solve so many problems at once.
| skoskie wrote:
| > Seriously, who thought that science for profit would net
| the best results for the collective benefit?
|
| Nobody, and I don't think "best results" or "collective
| benefit" were the goal when science started getting more
| commercialized.
|
| The idea that good inventions would benefit all rather than
| patent holders must drive a true capitalist crazy.
| pastacacioepepe wrote:
| Yet even Adam Smith bases his entire theory on the supposed
| collective benefit of the invisible hand. Without
| collective benefit, there's nothing positive left to it.
| true_religion wrote:
| Can't you cite things that you disagree with? Or cite
| background material that you feel is subpar?
|
| That would be the norm especially if your research paper is
| focused on new technology. For example you would write Herbet
| et co, in Journal Blah found results of X with method Y.
| However method Y has flaws of A, B, and C...
|
| Even if a pervious study was utterly stupid in your opinion, if
| it's been widely publicized you still need to talk about it or
| else risk being accused of missing the basics.
| lupire wrote:
| You are right but the implication was that the citations were
| not rebuttals.
| true_religion wrote:
| Then the answer is that even papers that don't meet the
| "high" standard that every organization and journal likes
| to think they hold themselves to when publishing, still
| contain relevant data and explanations that are citable.
|
| Although let's be clear... this is bureaucratic issue. Some
| journals only publish English language papers. No matter
| how impactful your paper is, they'll never publish it if
| you wrote it in Tamil. Google only publishes papers that
| doesn't directly insult them, and spread fear about their
| own proprietary technology while providing no clear
| solutions. The paper may be brilliant but they definitely
| won't put their money and name behind it.
|
| Since they (Google) are ideologically opposed to the
| paper's findings, I can't imagine they are citing it to
| talk about how brilliant it is though...
| haswell wrote:
| This was my thought as well. Merely citing the material isn't
| necessarily a problem on its own.
|
| The nature of the citation and how that impacts the paper
| doing the citing would need to be examined to form a
| meaningful opinion about Google's behavior here.
| DashAnimal wrote:
| Do you have an example of Google citing a "below standard"
| paper? Curious to see.
| godelski wrote:
| Papers may not meet the standards for publication but still be
| useful. For example, I have a paper with 50 citations that is
| having difficulties getting published (either "not novel
| enough" or "not motivating"). There's also a randomness to
| review, as NeuralIPS has continually demonstrated.
|
| I should also mention that you can also pad your citations this
| way and build your h-index. It is metric hacking, but if it
| isn't too egregious this is normal. Classic example of
| Goodhart's law.
| mc32 wrote:
| Universities have their own biases as well --whether it's to
| pad one's CV, the PI's CV, or whatever, but they are also not
| free from interference against 'pure' research.
|
| There is a lot of "garbage" research that happens at
| universities. Yes, we do expect quite a bit of research to be
| dead-ends --that's the nature of research, but there is a lot
| of research that is knowingly fraudulent or uses very suspect
| data and or methodology.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| haswell wrote:
| While true, are these biases impactful in the same ways?
|
| Bias will always exist. The nature of that bias and the
| degree of impact will vary.
| skoskie wrote:
| Out of curiosity, are there any institutions that meets a
| "pure" research standard? NIST?
|
| Or is that standard unattainable because undue influence
| exists everywhere?
| guhidalg wrote:
| Get a private wealthy benefactor that likes your work, then
| you can avoid undue influence.
| thebean11 wrote:
| ..until the wealthy benefactor decides to exert it anyway
| rank0 wrote:
| Now the influence just comes from the wealthy benefactor
| and his interests
| lupire wrote:
| Works best when the benefactor is your dead parents.
| canaus wrote:
| Influence exists everywhere because without influence the
| studies wouldn't exist in the first place.
| azinman2 wrote:
| And people need careers, successful publications and
| grants make that possible.
|
| That isn't to say everything is trash-- lots of good
| stuff is still done with these requirements.
| lupire wrote:
| Unless you have a wealthy aristocracy and some of them
| are bored so they create a lot of the major science of
| past couple of centuries.
| emilfihlman wrote:
| Tangentially: who decided to make the links all purple, horrible
| ux.
| jwilk wrote:
| Archived copy without GDPR nag screen:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220502154044/https://www.engad...
| mcdermott wrote:
| In the corporate world, just like government funded research,
| science is only science if it aligns with the desires of its
| funding source unfortunately.
| xadhominemx wrote:
| I never experienced anything like this during the course of my
| government funded research. Nor did I hear of anyone else
| experiencing anything like this. Of course, your topic area has
| to align with government funders' interests... but in my
| experience the conclusions do not.
| protomyth wrote:
| I take it you never had a grant director run afoul of one of
| the consulting firms on I Street who didn't get the follow-on
| evaluation contract? 25 years and I'm still a bit peeved
| about how politics and who gets what makes government
| research such a pain in the butt. Every agency has its
| prejudices also which leads to some shenanigans.
|
| Sorta off topic tip: if you are writing government grants and
| are in a position to become a reader, then do so. It gives
| you an idea how they thinks, tells you what words / wording
| will get your grant down-voted, and it gives you some good
| contacts. Had relatives do that, but went a different career
| direction.
| N1H1L wrote:
| What?
| protomyth wrote:
| Grants are often government originated in the US and
| politics and people can affect the results and funding.
| verisimi wrote:
| But if your conclusions do not align with the funders
| desires, would your research see the light of day?
|
| If you have that much money that you can fund lots of
| studies, the only ones that will proceed are the ones in
| support of whatever-it-is.
| yodon wrote:
| > But if your conclusions do not align with the funders
| desires, would your research see the light of day?
|
| If you are in academic science doing publicly funded
| academic research, as most academics do, then yes, your
| funding agency does want you to get the results published,
| period. The conspiracy theories you've been led to believe
| are just that, conspiracy theories, not the objective
| realities of those doing the work.
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| It's not a matter of publishing, it's a matter of funding
| the research in the first place. What academic field are
| you in where this isn't a problem? Even something as
| seemingly inconspicuous as physics research is highly
| political.
|
| Researchers know the ideas that one better doesn't
| question if one cares about job security. Or put in a
| more positive way: You better look into -current list of
| hype topics- if you want to continue getting funded,
| being cited and staying relevant. The problem with
| "academic science" as you call it is that it's mostly
| academic and not enough science.
| yodon wrote:
| Funding is always going to be preferentially available
| for the things that people are interested in. That's true
| in all aspects of life, not just in science. If you want
| to challenge the Standard Model in Physics, of course
| you're going to have to work harder to get funding.
| That's because the betting money is of the opinion it's
| probably at least mostly correct. That rational
| allocation of funds bias doesn't prevent you from doing
| research or from getting it published, it just says that
| yes, if you want to challenge the prevailing wisdom
| you're going to have to work pretty hard to pull it off
| and convince people the standard model of the field is
| wrong.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > But if your conclusions do not align with the funders
| desires, would your research see the light of day?
|
| In academia: Yes. The number of grants that require pre-
| publishing approval from funding agency is extremely tiny.
| I never encountered one while in academia.
| xadhominemx wrote:
| If your topic area aligns with your government funders
| interests but your conclusions do not, it usually means you
| were working on a scientific dead end anyway
| yodon wrote:
| You may want to spend less time reading anti-intellectual media
| and more time talking to people who actually do academic
| scientific research. There are many challenges in academic
| science, but it does a remarkably good job of not falling prey
| to the strawman risks you believe in. Corporate research is of
| course subject to the economic interests of the corporation.
| Academic research is not held back from publishing in the same
| way.
| guhidalg wrote:
| Does it? I picked the first professor from MIT's CSAIL group
| (Hal Abelson), found their latest published paper (https://ww
| w.erudit.org/en/journals/irrodl/2022-v23-n1-irrodl...) and
| found that they are funded by a Chinese governmental
| organization. Tell me how the research isn't being influenced
| by the needs and desires of the funder?
| yodon wrote:
| MIT CSAIL is not hard up for funding, nor is Hal Abelson.
| They can choose who they want to take money from. Funding
| sources that restrain a researcher's ability to publish
| damage that researcher's ability to advance their own
| career.
|
| Many people here on HN have, for example, an irrational
| hatred and distrust of Microsoft. Microsoft Research,
| however is one of the biggest sources of computer science
| research funding in the world. If MSR funds you, they
| expect your work to result in publications and the primary
| factor in whether you get additional funding is whether
| your papers impact your field. Those characteristics make
| MSR funding highly desirable, precisely because it comes
| with no strings attached.
| leephillips wrote:
| "Many people here on HN have, for example, an irrational
| hatred and distrust of Microsoft".
|
| Perhaps. Many people here on HN also have an entirely
| rational hatred and distrust of Microsoft. Some of those
| people are also capable of appreciating their support for
| research.
| 0des wrote:
| > Many people here on HN also have an entirely rational
| hatred and distrust of Microsoft. Some of those people
| are also capable of appreciating their support for
| research.
|
| I am standing right here, you dont have to point.
| [deleted]
| dekhn wrote:
| Taiwan governmental organization (note, the coauthor who
| received the funding works in Taiwan). Details matter-
| Taiwan and China are two completely different entities.
| guhidalg wrote:
| I agree Taiwan and China are different entities, looking
| at the acknowledgement of the paper: "This study was
| supported in part by the Ministry of Science and
| Technology under contract numbers MOST 108-2511-H-003
| -056 -MY3 and by the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities
| Trust". I read Hong Kong and assumed it was China.
| chaps wrote:
| This is a laughably bad take, sorry. For example, the
| University of Chicago and its connected education
| institutions get a large portion of their funding by falling
| to the interests of the Chicago's mayor's office and the
| police department, which largely stems from rhetoric. They
| wouldn't be able to fund their projects if they didn't do
| that. Academic researchers can lose their funding if they, as
| individuals, publicly criticize certain organizations.
|
| In other words, "validate our political rhetoric with a
| smile, or lose your funding." It skews academic research, and
| these incentives exist practically everywhere.
| yodon wrote:
| The University of Chicago is a private institution with a
| research budget of many billions of dollars per year. Given
| the extreme difficulty of believing the government of the
| city of Chicago provides even a tiny fraction of those
| billions of dollars in research funding, I'll have to ask
| you for citations or data to support those aspersions
| you're casting on the university and it's researchers.
|
| We live in a time when there are strong anti-intellectual
| threads and forces among some parts of the media. It's easy
| to cast aspersions against researchers. The fact that
| you've heard someone in the media say these things doesn't
| make the aspersions true.
| chaps wrote:
| The fact that you've heard someone in the media say these
| things doesn't make the aspersions true.
|
| Good one. I'm a journalist who's done _extensive_
| research on this exact subject in Chicago and have spent
| hundreds of hours spent looking through leaked documents,
| FOIA request documents, network graphs, etc etc. I 'm not
| going to write a long post about the subject for you, but
| I can point you in the right direction if you're actually
| curious about diving into this. I hope you are, because
| you seem to be very resistant to even attempting to
| believe.
|
| A lot of it is hush-hush, mired in layers of obfuscation,
| but one of the better places to start is by looking into
| the funding of the University of Chicago's "Crime Lab" in
| connection with the Chicago Police Department's SDSC
| program.
|
| https://news.uchicago.edu/story/10-million-grant-will-
| suppor...
|
| Leaked documents between the Chicago Mayor's office and
| executive staff at University of Chicago is a great
| resource as well.
|
| https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20639065-re_-
| quiet-t...
|
| https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20651206-re_-
| fundrai...
|
| Do a search for "uchicago.org" here: https://www.document
| cloud.org/app?q=%2Bproject%3Aemails-2028...
|
| And have a look at how often Chicago's worked directly
| with the Uchicago over the past 15 years:
| https://observablehq.com/d/22a60bb00bade634
|
| The funding organization that threatened to cut funding
| of a program after tweets were made can't be shared
| because they were deleted after they were bullied by
| their funders.
| yodon wrote:
| I'm not seeing the smoking gun here in your documents.
|
| I'm aware of many academics who work with city
| governments, including at least one researcher not from
| Chicago who works closely with the city of Chicago. He
| does so precisely because there are big problems there.
| The city of Chicago may even contribute to the funding of
| the work he does (it's helpful for the city to have skin
| in the game), but they certainly don't provide the lion's
| share of the funding and if the city were uncooperative
| he'd simply shift his work to another urban area. He's
| not going to waste his time and career as some sort of
| controlled victim of an evil governmental moneybags,
| particularly when he's the one bringing funding to the
| projects.
|
| Happy to continue reading docs, but thus far I'm not
| seeing the conspiracy.
| chaps wrote:
| The point I'm hoping to show isn't a "smoking gun"
| (frankly, I doubt any single document, or set of
| documents, would meet your criteria), but to show that
| research is deeply motivated by funding rather than for
| "pure science". Bad results that don't fit the narrative
| of the funders or political body's interest either don't
| get published, or are downplayed to the extent that
| they're effectively unpublished. Anything remotely
| positive is exploded through the roof.
|
| I recommend checking out Robert Vargas on twitter. He's a
| tenured professor at University of Chicago who's written
| a lot about this subject. https://twitter.com/robvargas21
|
| This post describes a lot of the problems well:
| https://crimethoughts.com/year/04/24/readi-chicago-and-
| incon...
| yodon wrote:
| Reading your second set of links, it sounds like much
| more a case of "the media does a bad job of reporting on
| science" than "the research is corrupt." If you want to
| improve the quality of science reporting, that's probably
| better handled by criticizing the reporters than by
| criticizing the researchers (most researchers already
| work hard to keep their work out of the popular press,
| precisely because the popular press does such a bad job
| of reporting on research).
|
| Among the first tweets in the twitter stream you provided
| is a University of Chicago researcher actively
| criticizing the actions of the Chicago PD. That doesn't
| seem to support your narrative that the U of C research
| is corrupt and in the pocket of city government. I
| certainly can believe research is being poorly and
| inaccurately reported in the press, but again I think if
| you want to affect change you'll be more effective if you
| focus your efforts on the reporting press who seem by
| your own description to be the ones at fault.
| mc4ndr3 wrote:
| What a way to bias the network.
| prepend wrote:
| I think this a challenge that seems pretty obvious as scientists
| working for for profit organizations that don't have binding
| ethical frameworks aren't really free to pursue truth.
|
| Just like you wouldn't expect an Exxon staff scientist to be free
| to publish a paper independent of Exxon.
|
| I think that people who want to properly practice science should
| avoid working for corporations. Academia and government aren't
| completely free, but I think there would be laws broken if
| someone was fired over the contents of their peer reviewed paper.
| 21723 wrote:
| This. And if an AGI is built (unlikely in the next 100 years,
| IMO) by a for-profit corporation, we are dangerously,
| dangerously fucked.
| pas wrote:
| 100 years is a realllllly long time.
|
| Things that happened since 1922: atomic bomb, space program,
| detection of gravitational waves, imaging of a black hole('s
| accretion disk), gene editing, _all_ of the computer era.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Agreed. We need to support increase funding and pay for public
| scientists. It is not even remotely competitive to the private
| market, and it is frustrating to know that I could earn
| substantially more if I left my academic research position.
| prepend wrote:
| Actually the pay is pretty good considering $100k+ to do
| actual science. I think the issue is these are non-scientist
| roles at Google and whatnot that pay more because they are
| paying scientists to not be scientists.
|
| It's like the highest pay for a geologist is in government
| unless you want to stop doing science and work for oil.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| It takes 5-7 years to get your PhD, 3-5 years as a postdoc,
| then starting pay is usually 85-90, but set to grow fairly
| quickly but to out at 145+benefits. That extra decade in
| "training" is a lot of missed economic opportunity
| robonerd wrote:
| Google AI ethicists and other researchers would be wise to
| recognize the delta between why Google _ostensibly_ has them, and
| why Google _actually_ has them. If they aren 't tailoring their
| research to whatever Google executives want to hear, then they
| aren't doing what they're _actually_ being paid for. And if they
| want to be honest researchers instead of corporate whores, they
| picked the wrong company to work for.
|
| Would an honest climatologist last long working for Exxon? Would
| an honest cancer researcher last long working for Phillip Morris?
| tssva wrote:
| I have no background in ethics research so this is a layman's
| view but what strikes me as bizarre is that ethics researchers
| are trying to decide what is ethical. 2 reasonable people can
| look at the same set of ethical issues, weigh the potential
| pros and cons and come to different decisions about what course
| of action is the ethical one. It does not seem to be a field
| where an ultimate truth exists. I would think an ethics
| researcher should be examining AI technology to determine the
| ethical impacts a technology, implementation or use may
| generate both positive and negative, so that a decision maker
| can properly weigh them. Once you try to determine what you
| consider the ethical decision to be and insist that is the only
| acceptable decision for another to make, you are no longer a
| researcher but an advocate. Having a belief of what is ethical
| and advocating for it is fine but it shouldn't be framed as
| research.
| Y-bar wrote:
| Maybe they thought Google was a mostly okay company with good
| potential and were under the impression that what they were
| hired for was to help them improve? There was after all a time
| when many of us really believed Google was a good kind of
| company and that it generally adhered to the "don't be evil"
| ethos.
|
| I can see myself falling into a similar trap of wishful
| thinking, especially if corporate communication reinforces it
| (until the cold shower wakeup happens).
| tmp_anon_22 wrote:
| > Maybe they thought
|
| Pretty sure the thoughts that existed before they viewed
| their offer letter were different from the thoughts they had
| afterwards. And there's nothing wrong with it unless you for
| some reason want to ignore the biggest bias in the room.
| sjg007 wrote:
| Big Tobacco, Big Oil, Big Data.
| yablak wrote:
| The TF-Agents team replicated the RL training (with the
| corresponding teams' very deep collaboration) and open-sourced it
| here:
|
| https://github.com/google-research/circuit_training
|
| It pretty much gets the same results as found in the Nature
| paper.
|
| The original codebase was heavily research-focused, used TF1, was
| impossible to run distributed training outside of Google's infra,
| and made it hard to try algorithms other than PPO. So it was
| reimplemented on top of TF2 and using some distributed training
| and collection technologies developed by the TF-Agents team at
| Google Brain and infra teams at DeepMind.
|
| Everyone is welcome to poke at the training code and the model,
| and convince themselves that it does what it says on the box :)
| [deleted]
| Throw4w5y wrote:
| > the RL training
|
| Is RL necessary in this context or would other, simpler methods
| work as well to within statistical error? RL can be a heck of a
| random number generator if misapplied.
| teakettle42 wrote:
| There is insufficient information here to make any judgement.
|
| It's clear that the journalists involved want us to make a set of
| suppositions that support their narrative about Timnit, but the
| reporting doesn't support that conclusion -- or really, any
| conclusion at all.
|
| It's vapor -- outrage bait.
| the_biot wrote:
| advisedwang wrote:
| There might be insufficient data to make judgement or cause
| outrage, but it's still news worth reporting that this is going
| on.
|
| Tangent: Often conspiracy theories start from an actual "that's
| weird" moment. There might be nothing to answer that weirdness
| one way or another, and for some folks its impossible to leave
| the question mark hanging forever, so they either dismiss it or
| construct a complete (and often silly) narrative around it. I
| wish we were better at taking in information without a final
| judgement to slot it into immediately.
| adamrezich wrote:
| > I wish we were better at taking in information without a
| final judgement to slot it into immediately.
|
| agreed--I've said this here before but it seems like the
| human mind pretty much always wants to resolve/collapse
| uncertainty into something "knowable", and it takes practice
| and effort to allow yourself to mentally remain in the
| uncollapsed state when there isn't enough information to make
| a complete judgement.
| inasio wrote:
| I remember reading the original paper [0] when it came out last
| year, and honestly I found it pretty weak compared to other
| google or deepmind papers, particularly the comparison to
| Simulated Annealing methods and the lack of data to enable
| reproducibility. Felt more like a marketing paper based on
| proprietary data (the paper reported how they were able to
| produce an efficient floorplan for one of google's internal
| processors).
|
| Point being that aside from the controversy being stoked based on
| previous firings, I'm personally curious about the results
| showing problems on the original paper (whose senior author was
| Jeff Dean btw)
|
| [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03544-w (the
| endgadget story has a link to the full pdf)
| lupire wrote:
| AI research is kind of like Social sciences. There is a lot of
| subjective statistical fiddling and parameter selection when
| setting up comparisons, that goes into making a paper. This
| isn't like cryptography/algebra where results are definitively
| clear.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Obviously don't know the full context of why Satrajit Chatterjee
| was fired, but I _can_ say that I followed the Timnit Gebru story
| quite closely, and there was a gigantic chasm, IMO, between what
| actually happened (and by "what actually happened" I mean that
| I'm conservatively just considering Gebru's own statements and
| tweets) and how things were reported in the wider press.
|
| The press will always be incentivized to report on "big bad
| Google" and make any termination sound like a David vs. Goliath
| battle. And, of course, while sometimes that narrative _is_ true,
| there have been many cases where I 've thought "These are some of
| the most toxic individuals I can imagine (again, by their _own_
| statements), and working with them sounds like a nightmare. " To
| emphasize, I'm definitely not saying that's the case in the
| current example, but I am saying that nobody has enough info one
| way or the other unless they are more personally familiar with
| the details. Reactions based on what's written in the article are
| thus just personal Rorschach tests.
| choppaface wrote:
| And Google Legal profits the most from turning these cases into
| "personal Rorschach tests."
|
| In the case of Glasson's pregnancy discrimination case, she had
| to wait two years and go through Google-requested health
| screenings just to reach a settlement.
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/apr/09/she-sued-...
|
| Google Legal wants these cases to reach settlement or some
| other point of deterrence because they don't want the real
| evidence and merits to enter public discussion.
|
| Google not just saves reputation value but also counter-party
| price discovery. Whenever Corp Legal fires an employee like
| this, they always ask "will this case blow the budget on
| severance + litigation this year?" They don't want anybody else
| to know what this number is, and it could effectively leak if a
| case doesn't get settled.
|
| While the linked article may not give many details on the merit
| of this case, what also is not reported is the realities of
| large well-funded corporate legal teams.
| dehrmann wrote:
| I'm surprised news outlets still report that Timnit Gebru was
| fired. It's at best disputed.
|
| This case looks much clearer; he was terminated with cause.
| brimble wrote:
| That's... still a firing, no? What it's not, is a lay-off.
| robonerd wrote:
| The 'he' in _" he was terminated with cause"_ is not
| referring to Gebru, but rather to Chatterjee.
|
| That Chatterjee was fired is seemingly not in dispute, but
| there was a lot of disagreement on HN over whether Gebru
| was fired or quit (she offered an ultimatum, which Google
| accepted.)
| brimble wrote:
| Ah, OK, sorry, I misunderstood the context.
| [deleted]
| dekhn wrote:
| People argued about this a bunch. here's a simple summary
| that is consistent with the reality: Google (Jeff's docs)
| says that Timnit offered her resignation (over the paper
| withdrawl demand and a refusal to let Timnit confront her
| internal reviewers) and Megan accepted it. In reality,
| Megan terminated Timnit for cause, but used Timnit's offer
| to resign against her. At google, resignations are normally
| triggered by the employee explicitly resigning in a system,
| but experienced leaders at Google like Megan know how to
| get around this.
|
| I spoke to a wide range of managers at Google afterwards
| and the most commonly expressed opinion was "I'm amazed
| that Megan did that, it normally takes at least a year to
| fire individuals". What Jeff did led to a significant
| exodus of Google researchers (including some very
| preeminent ones) and Zoubin has to do all the cleanup.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| I mean, if you say "do X or I quit" and the company
| responds "we're not doing X, bye" is it incorrect to say
| that the employee quit? That's the situation here, Gebru
| issued demands and said she'd quit if they weren't met.
| Google said, "we accept your resignation".
| dekhn wrote:
| Yes, that's not a resignation. At google, to technically
| resign involves filling out a form on a website, it's not
| something you can verbally state to your (manager's)
| manager. Again, Google can still say this and probably
| even thinks internally that's what happened, but having
| resigned twice from Google, that's not how it really
| works.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| I'm pretty sure if you say to your manager "I quit" and
| stop showing up to work, regardless of what internet
| forms you fill out, it's a resignation. The fact that
| Gebru gave her resignation in the form of an ultimatum
| rather than whatever website form you're talking about is
| a pedantic point.
|
| "I resign if you don't do X."
|
| "We're not doing X, we accept your resignation."
|
| This is a resignation the way I understand it.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| That's not a resignation the way California understands
| it. If she said "I am resigning _NOW_ unless you do X"
| that WOULD count as a resignation.
|
| Let's think of a hypothetical. A student says "I'm going
| to quit eventually in order to attend classes" and the
| manager says "I accept your resignation, you are fired".
| This generally seems more like a firing because somebody
| was going to resign, more than it seems like a
| resignation no?
|
| In the Gebru case, Gebru didn't express WHEN she was
| going to resign, and that's google's issue. Maybe Gebru
| was, for all Google knew, threatening to quit in a month
| or a year or in 10 years. Gebru never actually made the
| time of her proposed resignation clear. As such, the law
| doesn't consider to actually have made a legally binding
| resignation.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > "I resign if you don't do X."
|
| > "We're not doing X, we accept your resignation."
|
| This approach from her managers can be criticized because
| it immediately closes the door on the possibility of her
| changing her mind and walking things back.
|
| However, it sounds like she was causing a lot of internal
| problems so perhaps they were already working to get rid
| of her. Accepting the implied resignation may have just
| been expedient, and saved the company a bunch of
| severance money.
| abduhl wrote:
| You can certainly criticize Google for taking someone at
| their word when that person issues an ultimatum, but then
| you're tacitly admitting that the person offering the
| ultimatum is approaching the negotiation in bad faith.
| Google should not have to assume its employees are acting
| in bad faith when they communicate internally, especially
| when it comes to the future of that employee's career.
|
| The real question for your framing is: Should Google have
| to say, "ok that's it for real this time, no take-
| backsies"? I think that google should never have to say
| this any time someone says "or else I quit" because the
| threat of quitting tells us that they're not willing to
| continue operating within Google. I honestly don't see
| the reasoning behind drawing the line anywhere else.
| themacguffinman wrote:
| She never gave Google any reason to believe that she had
| wanted to walk things back or change her mind. That's the
| nature of delivering an ultimatum by threatening to
| resign: you are explicitly offering an immediate end to
| the negotiation. Don't be surprised if management takes
| you at your word, they're not mind readers. If she wanted
| to signal to managers that she might not actually quit
| over this, then she shouldn't explicitly say that she
| will quit over this.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| Yes, under California law a legal notice of resignation
| requires an end date. She did not legally resign, and
| thus she was fired.
| 21723 wrote:
| khazhoux wrote:
| 21723, your last comment ("Unrelated...") borders on
| doxxing.
| 21723 wrote:
| That wasn't my intent, and his username appears to be a
| real name (although I don't know).
|
| Apologies if it seemed that was what I was trying to do.
| I wasn't. I assumed that he was a real-name account who
| wanted to be known by his real identity (an identity that
| was maliciously attacked by an ex-CEO). I wouldn't guess
| at the identity of an account obviously intended to be
| anonymous.
| khazhoux wrote:
| I think doxxing is not just uncovering an anonymous
| user's real name, but any form of tying someone's real-
| world presence into online discussion, when it's not
| directly related to the discussion. Here, you were
| referring to an unpleasant event in the other user's real
| life, which they did not bring up themselves. That
| crosses the boundary. That user may not want that
| connection established here.
|
| But I'm not the HN police, just trying to help...
| 21723 wrote:
| Fair point. I thought I was being helpful but I won't do
| it again.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| It's not disputed by anything other than googles PR. By well
| established California law legal resignations include an end
| date, she did not ever specify an end date when threatening
| resignation, and thus she never legally resigned. She was
| thus fired.
|
| It would be bias in googles favor to act as though she were
| not fired which is what any court would find. Sort of a
| "discuss the controversy" sort of thing over a very clear cut
| legal issue.
| [deleted]
| ZanyProgrammer wrote:
| canaus wrote:
| Can you give some example Tweets to where you concluded that
| these (Gebru in this example) are some of the most toxic
| individuals you could imagine? All of my searches are of random
| topics.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| Saying a paraphrase of "I didn't quit, I gave my employer an
| ultimatum that they then rejected" [0] is a very toxic way to
| interact with people.
|
| 1) Ultimatums in general are not a healthy way to interact
| with others because they intentionally try to skew power
| dynamics towards the giver (Do what I say or else...)
|
| 2) To then act (upon failure of the ultimatum) as though her
| employer acted inappropriately implies that she really didn't
| even give an ultimatum, so much as made a demand that she
| couched as an ultimatum.
|
| You can agree or disagree about whether she was entitled to
| act this way (academia is a unique field where toxic behavior
| like this is often normalized), but I think most people agree
| that if given the option, they'd prefer to not work with
| someone who approaches conflict in this way.
|
| [0]https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1334343577044979712
| ?r...
| pharmakom wrote:
| If you cannot give an ultimatum then you can always be
| pushed around.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > If you cannot give an ultimatum then you can always be
| pushed around.
|
| No finer example of false dichotomy than this.
|
| Hers is a textbook example of how not to negotiate. By
| textbook, I mean _literally every textbook on
| negotiations_ that I 've read.
|
| Ultimatums are a tool of last resort, and they all
| caution their high failure rate. It also is typically a
| signal of a weak person.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| _Unless you stop making comments like that, I will never
| upvote a comment you write ever again._
|
| ^that is certainly more 'toxic' than:
|
| _I disagree with your point. I think disagreements and
| negotiation with an employer are fine (to your point, one
| can even use the threat of quitting as part of said
| negotiation), but ultimatums just serve as an opportunity
| for the giver to imply that they have more power than the
| receiver, which is 'toxic' behavior_
| andromeduck wrote:
| There was a huge divide between r/machinelearning threads and
| twitter. I'd start with the megathread.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k77sxz/d_t.
| ..
| 0des wrote:
| Can you be more specific?
| chaps wrote:
| Here are supposedly some posts from ex-colleagues of
| hers: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k
| 77sxz/com...
| sethherr wrote:
| From that piece:
|
| > I do believe she actually thinks she is making the
| world a better place but in reality any interaction with
| her has been incredibly stressful having to carefully
| weigh every move made in her presence.
|
| What if what some vocal minority advocates say is
| correct, and they have to carefully weigh every move they
| make, throughout their whole lives? If living that
| carefully is incredibly stressful, what percentage chance
| of it being the lived experience of minorities in tech
| justifies someone fighting aggressively to make things
| easier for minorities?
| monktastic1 wrote:
| I agree this is a difficult spot to be put in: be quiet
| (or nice) and nothing changes, or be loud and aggressive
| so that people are forced to take notice. I don't wish
| that kind of double-bind on anybody.
|
| In this position, some people seem to find a third
| alternative: be fierce and yet unflinchingly kind. Make a
| lot of noise, but be charitable with your opponents so
| that their good side has the opportunity to come out.
| People change on their own time. We can't force it.
|
| Truth be told, it takes considerable wisdom to pull this
| off, and it's unfair to expect that of most people. But
| the alternative is to become increasingly bitter and
| caustic. That ends up making you feel increasingly self-
| righteous, but also increasingly isolated (which then
| feeds the self-righteousness, in a vicious cycle). It
| doesn't actually help the cause.
|
| She doesn't deserve contempt for falling into that trap.
| Like all of us, she deserves compassion. But it's okay to
| point out that her behavior is unhelpful. We, too, should
| not fall into the double bind of keeping quiet about it
| versus responding aggressively. We can be kind and firm.
| 0des wrote:
| Thanks for finding that one for me. If true, that does
| sound like a complicated situation.
| civilized wrote:
| I have no strong opinion on Gebru, but... it's so easy
| for a random person to make a throwaway account on
| Reddit, and these comments don't have any specific info
| to suggest they are anything more than that.
| DashAnimal wrote:
| One of the replies further down had a more concrete
| example. I did not see any Googlers refute it:
|
| To give a concrete example of what it is like to work
| with her I will describe something that has not come to
| light until now. When GPT-3 came out a discussion thread
| was started in the brain papers group. Timnit was one of
| the first to respond with some of her thoughts. Almost
| immediately a very high profile figure has also also
| responded with his thoughts. He is not Lecun or Dean but
| he is close. What followed for the rest of the thread was
| Timnit blasting privileged white men for ignoring the
| voice of a black woman. Nevermind that it was painfully
| clear they were writing their responses at the same time.
| Message after message she would blast both the high
| profile figure and anyone who so much as implied it could
| have been a misunderstanding. In the end everyone just
| bent over backwards apologizing to her and the thread was
| abandoned along with the whole brain papers group which
| was relatively active up to that point. She has
| effectively robbed thousands of colleagues of insights
| into their seniors thought process just because she
| didn't immediately get attention.
|
| The thread is still up there so any googler can see it
| for themselves and verify I am telling the truth.
| civilized wrote:
| The top voted reply is implied to be from a Googler, and
| it claims this is inaccurate: https://old.reddit.com/r/Ma
| chineLearning/comments/k77sxz/d_t...
| [deleted]
| hintymad wrote:
| It's appalling "everyone just bent over backwards
| apologizing to her ". It shows how detrimental the
| extreme "progressiveness" can be.
| kettleballroll wrote:
| As those comments say, any googler can verify that the
| mentioned email threads exist. And someone would've
| spoken up if that was a lie.
| DashAnimal wrote:
| I don't know Timnit so I won't argue she is the most toxic or
| the events were correct/incorrect. However, your reply made
| me recall this thread from July 2020 (before Timnit and
| Google parted).
|
| https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1278565265135906816?t.
| ..
|
| I just cannot imagine calling someone in your company out
| like that on a public platform, especially for the crime of
| not speaking. Both are seniors and that behavior seemed
| anything but, to me anyway.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| Calling both "seniors" is a bit of a misnomer, like it's
| technically true but at the time Jeff was, if memory
| serves, Timnit's manager's manager's manager (maybe one
| more?), the level of seniority is not the same.
|
| And the callout was explicitly for (internally) claiming to
| want to be supportive, but failing to do so externally. It
| doesn't seem unreasonable in context.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| I do wonder if mid 2020 will go down in history as peak
| cancel. I definitely have a sense that it is becoming less
| acceptable to publicly air one's grievances in the name of
| social justice. "Silence is violence" is another phrase
| that was very popular at that time. From my limited
| perspective, it seems like that same slogan today would be
| much less acceptable and get much less play.
|
| Of course, two years is far too small a lag to do any real
| historical analysis of the situation. But it seems like the
| winds are blowing in a different direction now. I wonder
| where they will take us. Surely we live in exciting and
| interesting times.
| ZanyProgrammer wrote:
| mikkergp wrote:
| In the David vs Goliath battle David is incentivized to do
| exactly what Google is accusing this researcher of. Put out a
| controversial finding that supports your beliefs, regardless of
| whether or not it has been fully vetted. As a David you may not
| have the resources to fully vet the story anyways, particularly
| when the vetting process is defined by Goliath.
|
| Goliath of course has as an ocean of toxic incentives to
| maintain the status quo, promote their own Agenda, and Gatekeep
| David. I understand why researchers want to work at these giant
| institutions. It's harder to influence the narrative if these
| giant institutions can operate unhindered. On top of that as
| you mention the press is incentivized to side with David since
| it's a more compelling story.
|
| It 's part of the challenge of analyzing incentives, and means
| most people come to conclusions based on their prior beliefs.
| To come to the right conclusions you have to be able to dig
| deeper in the story than we have information to do so.
| throwedawayed69 wrote:
| The Times article has some eyebrow-raising details including a
| written statement from a lead author of the original paper who
| describes years of harassment and undercutting.
|
| > Ms. Goldie said that Dr. Chatterjee had asked to manage their
| project in 2019 and that they had declined. When he later
| criticized it, she said, he could not substantiate his
| complaints and ignored the evidence they presented in response.
|
| > "Sat Chatterjee has waged a campaign of misinformation
| against me and Azalia for over two years now," Ms. Goldie said
| in a written statement.
|
| > She said the work had been peer-reviewed by Nature, one of
| the most prestigious scientific publications. And she added
| that Google had used their methods to build new chips and that
| these chips were currently used in Google's computer data
| centers.
|
| Yet another blot on the Rorschach test, to be sure, but perhaps
| useful to highlight to consider the total possibility space.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/02/technology/google-fires-a...
| ghaff wrote:
| Whoever is in the right, wrong, or somewhere in the middle,
| it's hard not to come away from the NYT article with any
| impression other than there's been serious internal
| squabbling and nastiness going on for a good couple of years.
|
| The reasonable supposition is someone higher up just got sick
| of the whole thing and/or Chatterjee stepped over some line.
|
| It's odd. 95% of the time if a company fired someone (except
| maybe at the very highest levels) and was asked for comment,
| they'd say the person is no longer employed by us (or we
| don't comment on personnel matters) and leave it at that.
| hintymad wrote:
| And it's strange no one in media questioned Gebru's paper. For
| instance, her calculation of carbon footprint of training BERT
| is ridiculous, as she assumes that companies will train BERT
| 24x7. I think Gebru is a disgrace to the community because she
| always, I mean literally always, attacks her critics by
| motives. You think bias is a data problem? You're a bigot (See
| her dispute with LeCun). You disagree with my assessment on an
| ML model? You are white male oppressor (her attacking a
| Google's SVP).
|
| Gebru is not a researcher. She is a modern-age Trofim Lysenko,
| who politicizes everything and weaponizes political
| correctness.
| TheMagicHorsey wrote:
| The quality of her work was also not the best. Just read the
| AI bias analysis she did. It would not pass scrutiny with an
| undergrad audience, and yet she does an exaggerated SIGH and
| acts like she is beyond reproach because she has CREDENTIALS.
| Nobody cares about credentials. Your study has to stand on
| its own.
| jeffbee wrote:
| That's what kills me. A person in a privileged position
| inside a company with all the easily-accessed data available
| to make concrete conclusions about the actual energy
| consumption of these systems chooses to not learn from that,
| but instead to publicize wildly inaccurate guesses with no
| basis in reality. And this person is an "ethicist" somehow.
| anamax wrote:
| > And this person is an "ethicist" somehow.
|
| In most cases, the role of ethicists in any field is to
| justify monstrous behavior by practitioners to outsiders.
|
| In this case, "ethicists" have taken it upon themselves to
| determine monstrous.
| godelski wrote:
| Are we talking about the LeCun fight where they were
| discussing Pulse (the white Obama super-resolution paper)?
| Didn't Pulse update their paper and show that it was in fact
| a dataset bias? A lot of these datasets have bias and it is
| frequently hard to train an unbiased model on a biased
| dataset. It also isn't the goal for many, though of course
| there is work on this. Bias is everywhere in a ML system,
| from the dataset to the model itself. We should be concerned
| with all these steps but that fight just felt like everyone
| didn't care about fixing the issue. A lot didn't even
| consider that the image was decently faithful but that it was
| our human bias of knowing Obama is black.
| nostrademons wrote:
| > it was our human bias of knowing Obama is black
|
| As a side note - Obama is multiracial (white mother). As a
| multiracial person who makes no effort to fit into American
| racial categories and whose general attitude toward them is
| "Your social construction of race is fucked up, man", it
| astounds me that people would expect an AI to see what's
| _not actually there_. Biologically, Barack Obama is half-
| black and half-white, and probably a whole lot more
| complicated than that because "black" and "white" are
| themselves leaky abstractions that we've imposed on the
| immense variability of human skin tones. Why wouldn't you
| expect him to autocomplete to a white man 50% of the time
| and a black man 50% of the time?
| godelski wrote:
| Well the goal is that the reconstruction would be "him".
| Obviously the reconstruction isn't Obama. Limiting the
| discussion to race isn't a productive means to resolve
| the errors. There are more than race and they are likely
| coupled.
| rg111 wrote:
| I saw an actual Tweet by Gebru that said some loss
| functions are more racist than others. (I am not making
| this up.)
|
| Yes, she literally said that.
|
| I read some of her other work, and found little to no
| substance. She is mediocre at best.
|
| I would personally say that she is not a real AI
| researcher. (Her prominence, as lent by her CV, is a result
| of a gamed system).
| godelski wrote:
| > I saw an actual Tweet by Gebru that said some loss
| functions are more racist than others. (I am not making
| this up.)
|
| Do you have this source? I'm curious what she said. Is
| this L1 vs L2 but limiting to race?
| Manuel_D wrote:
| The "white Obama" pictures didn't even seem biased. They
| took a brightly lit photo of Obama and the output face has
| the same skin tone.
|
| Compare Obama's skin tone in this photo: https://video-
| images.vice.com/test-uploads/articles/5ef216e9...:*
|
| With other photos. E.g: https://www.obama.org/wp-
| content/uploads/ar_obama_sq.jpg
| godelski wrote:
| Bias is an overloaded word. To be clear, there is bias
| (there's always bias). Every model always has bias, we
| just want to understand that to understand the
| limitations of it. But yes, I agree that the
| reconstruction is decently faithful. I'm sure an L2 loss
| isn't that high when comparing the images.
|
| Part of what I was trying to say is that there is a clear
| human bias when evaluating the reconstruction. The
| problem here is our prior. We humans already know that
| the compressed image is Obama because he is a well known
| face. So we're judging based on that prior. So there is
| some irony when talking about model bias when you don't
| recognize the prior bias in evaluation. We should analyze
| the bias of the model (I mean there's problems with the
| reconstruction other than the race issue, like the
| teeth), but we have to also be careful when analyzing
| because we also have a bias (which we may or may not want
| to impart upon the model).
|
| The thing that gets me about these bias people in ML is
| that it is easy to recognize and identify bias. It is
| much harder to solve them. There seems to be two camps.
| Those that just want to identify and those that work on
| resolving them. The former typically say they work in
| bias and the latter typically says they work on long tail
| data (or sometimes few/low shot learning, or even
| metalearning). Yeah, we should recognize biases and
| discuss them, but just yelling at people doesn't help
| develop the necessary mathematical frameworks to resolve
| the issues.
| sangnoir wrote:
| You can't can't use a use a dropper and compare color
| hex/HSL values on different pictures with different
| lighting and say "Yup - that's the same", otherwise SFX
| wouldn't need color grading[1]. The second picture seems
| to be from a very brightly-lit environment - to the
| extent of washing out his blue shirt (collar), but the
| first picture gives no such cues, and appears less well-
| lit (virtually).
|
| AI models have no implicit knowledge of environmental
| lighting, and if the training data is exceedingly made of
| brightly lit images, may end up generating images that
| belong in well-lit environments (fairer-looking skin
| tones), but in low-light contexts. When looking at these
| generated images, the human eye does what it does best:
| determine relevant gamma-correction using all available
| cues.
|
| [1]. Assets rendered in the same color under all scene
| lighting conditions.
| registeredcorn wrote:
| > weaponizes political correctness
|
| I'm sorry to be nitpick-y. I understand what you are saying,
| but to be clear: Political correctness _is_ a weapon.
|
| The idea is that there is a correct answer (fact), and a
| separate, unrelated politically advantageous answer (group
| approval). Following the tactic of political correctness, to
| any degree, is using the concept for personal gain. There is
| no way to be political correct without doing so in a harmful
| manner. Approval of this kind can only be gained by attacking
| a target.
|
| "So-and-so is using explosives to destroy things." It is the
| design of the thing.
| robonerd wrote:
| Political correctness means adherence to a political
| ideology. Whether something is politically correct or
| politically incorrect is relative to the political ideology
| in question. Subjective value statements like _" X deserves
| more funding than Y"_, which don't have objective answers,
| may be considered politically correct or incorrect
| depending on the ideological context being considered.
| hintymad wrote:
| I'm not sure PC itself a weapon, but I get your point. PC
| is so ingrained in American culture that we implicitly
| accept that certain degree of PC is needed.
| octonion wrote:
| This is a terrible, zero-content personal attack on a person
| who isn't here to defend herself. You should be ashamed,
| although based on this attack I doubt you're capable of
| feeling shame.
| hintymad wrote:
| What do you mean by zero-content? I mentioned the paper,
| her attack on LeCun, and her attack on her co-worker as
| documented in the reddit megathread. Please feel to verify
| the facts.
| [deleted]
| 21723 wrote:
| It sounds like you're alleging that Timnit Gebru (whom I've
| never met, but who seems like a fine person from what I have
| read) is "toxic" and that working with her would be "a
| nightmare" to you. Am I correct in inferring this?
| fossuser wrote:
| Not OP, but here's an old thread from the last time this came
| up which is the bit I'm remembering:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25297823
| dekhn wrote:
| I'd have a hard time working with her because she says that
| the techbros of silicon valley are eugenicists. timnit's
| repsonse to https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/22/10503
| 94/artifici... was "this was a beautiful article to read
| after spending all weekend reading about the modern day
| eugenics movement underlying much of the whole AGI stuff."
|
| She sort of godwins her arguments.
| lupire wrote:
| dekhn wrote:
| I gave a single example, please see her entire twitter
| feed. She says this over and over in multiple ways and
| it's quite clear what she is saying and whom she
| includes.
|
| Beyond that, what I saw her write in internal groups at
| Google was simple not acceptable within reasonable
| bounds.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| I never expected to read ,,eugenics" and ,,html" in the
| same sentence.
| baybal2 wrote:
| throwawaygh wrote:
| The AGI safety stuff is weird and silly. AFAICT that
| community is mostly filled with philosophy types
| anthropomorphizing ML models that they don't understand.
| It's a waste of time and money. But then, I feel the same
| way about like 80% of what NSF CISE funds and there's
| plenty of toxic types in academia. At least the AGI safety
| stuff is all private money. My whole reaction to that
| community is mostly "weird and not worth my time".
|
| Timmit et al.'s reaction to the AGI/existential safety
| stuff is also weird. I don't even disagree, but I'm not
| sure why this topic in particular is such a lightening rod.
| petters wrote:
| "anthropomorphizing ML models" seems like the complete
| opposite of what AI safety people do.
|
| They often point out that just because you are
| intelligent, you don't have to seem human. I think they
| call it the "orthogonality thesis".
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Anthropomorphism isn't just about directly comparing
| things to people, it's also about assigning qualities
| that are related to people, like motivations, goals,
| opinions, concepts like good and bad, etc, even if the
| specific qualities would be alien to most people.
|
| In that sense, the AI safety crowd has been
| anthropomorphizing hypothetical AI for close to 20 years
| now.
| brian_cloutier wrote:
| Do you have an example of someone in the community making
| this mistake?
|
| My understanding is that if we knew that all future AGIs
| would have human-like motivations, goals, opinions, and
| concepts of good and bad then that crowd would be much
| less concerned. Smarter humans are not the concern.
| Intelligences which are _not_ human-like are the explicit
| concern.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Roko's basilisk comes to mind.
| brian_cloutier wrote:
| I wonder if you've had an in-person conversation with
| someone who would identify as being a part of the AGI
| safety community. I've talked with several people and
| their arguments are a lot more sophisticated than an
| intuition that ML models would have human motivations.
|
| This post isn't written by somebody inside the community
| but he presumably has access to them and has had
| conversations with them which shape his beliefs:
| https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/deceptively-
| aligned-me...
|
| I wonder if you also believe that post is just a wasteful
| collection of philosophy anthropomorphizing misunderstood
| ML models.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| The core thing I (and I suspect the original commenter)
| struggle to get past is the invetiable twist that in this
| post happens halfway through this post's part II.
|
| > If it's a very smart mesa-optimizer, it might think "If
| I throw the strawberry at the streetlight, I will be
| caught and trained to have different goals."
|
| It seems to me that this is a category error, like having
| the very smart mesa-optimizer start thinking about how it
| can find other models to marry. Why would gradient
| descent produce this very specific concept of goals-based
| identity? It's not even a human universal - many people
| don't have a particularly strong attachment to their
| current set of goals and hope for God or Buddha to help
| them get different ones.
| brian_cloutier wrote:
| I don't think I understand your objection because it
| doesn't seem like a category error to talk about
| optimizers having goals.
|
| I think you would agree that thermostats have goals? They
| try to minimize the error between the desired and the
| actual temperature. And you would also agree that
| gradient descent has a goal? It tweaks parameters in the
| search for models which minimize error in the training
| set. The system performing that gradient descent was
| designed by humans and exhibits goal-like behavior.
|
| But you think it's a step too far to believe that
| gradient descent could create a model which also exhibits
| goal-like behavior?
|
| What is the difference in category that you see between
| those two steps?
|
| I agree that humans are not goal-directed in the same way
| the community is worried that AGI might be. This makes it
| surprising that seeing AGI as potentially goal-directed
| is seen as anthropomorphism, humans often question their
| goals in exactly the way there is concern that AGI will
| not!
| karpierz wrote:
| Google is free to publish whatever information they'd like to
| vindicate themselves. The fact that they don't is information.
|
| Google is also free to sue for libel/defamation, but for some
| reason choose not to. This is also information.
|
| You can say "well, we don't have the full picture, so we can't
| draw conclusions", but this will lead to never draw conclusions
| about the behaviour of anything, as you'll never have a full
| picture.
| TheMagicHorsey wrote:
| Agree strongly with you on the Gebru firing. I followed it
| closely. The Press was pretty dishonest in the way they
| portrayed it.
| 21723 wrote:
| The really brazen thing here is that Google is claiming he was
| fired "with cause".
|
| People get let go all the time: layoffs, management changes,
| redundnacies. Usually, the company and manager try to avoid any
| legal or PR risk by saying nothing and letting the departing
| employee own the story. The fact that they're not doing this--
| that they're going out of their way to 9/11 someone's reputation
| after he's gone--suggests that someone in power is really, really
| pissed off.
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| What? No it doesn't suggest that at all. When employees make
| the choice to make their termination public it's very common
| for companies to offer reasoning. Any company. The takeaway
| that "someone in power is really, really pissed off" is
| nonsense.
| lupire wrote:
| Still, of someone is terminated _with cause_ , that legally
| means that the company was severely offended, to the point
| that they have decided to prevent unemployment insurance
| payout. It's serious.
|
| It's not just "we don't think it's profitable for you to work
| here".
| loveJesus wrote:
| smsm42 wrote:
| This article is remarkably light on substance. All we know by the
| end is what we knew from the headline - one of AI people at
| Google got fired because of some disagreement over some paper.
| Which paper, what it was about, what was the crux of the
| disagreement, anything useful to understand what is going on?
| Nothing.
|
| Also, some other people were at different time fired or left
| Google for reasons not related to anything in this story, but
| since they also worked with AI, we'd mention it just because we
| need at least four paragraphs of text.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Actually we don't even know that much. We know they disagreed
| with the paper, and they were fired. Maybe they were fired for
| not wearing pants on the bus.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _Google fired machine learning scientist Satrajit Chatterjee in
| March, soon after it refused to publish a paper Chatterjee and
| others wrote challenging earlier findings that computers could
| design some chip components more effectively than humans. The
| scientist was reportedly allowed to collaborate on a paper
| disputing those claims after he and fellow authors expressed
| reservations, but was dismissed after a resolution committee
| rejected the paper and the researchers hoped to bring the issue
| to CEO Sundar Pichai and Alphabet 's board of directors._"
|
| Google refused to allow a paper that was critical of a previous
| paper to be published? That would be scientific misconduct at the
| organization level, no? The kind of thing that got the Trump
| administration in trouble, right?
| sjg007 wrote:
| It is a strange hill to decide to die on. Even if you are the
| expert in the area, AI is weird and changing the world.
|
| Most Nature papers have something wrong with them. I don't see
| any reason that reinforcement learning cannot learn the best
| layouts or what not. I don't know the space though enough to
| say more than that.
|
| The NYTimes article alleges that he waged a misinformation
| campaign against two researchers. So there's that in the mix as
| well.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Were they fired because they challenged the findings, or were
| they fired for their behavior after being told their paper wasn't
| up to snuff for some reason?
|
| Same thing with Timnit...was she fired(or "resignation accepted")
| because of a paper she was writing, or was she fired because of
| her behavior after being told the paper needed more review(or
| whatever)?
|
| I really doubt that Google is so wrapped up in the "computer
| designs chips better than humans" paper that they are firing
| anyone who sows dissent. A much more parsimonious explanation is
| the dissenter was welcome to dissent, but behaved in a fireable
| way after being told other people don't agree with them.
| ghaff wrote:
| Publicly "fired for cause" would seem like a pretty spectacular
| overreaction to someone having an academic disagreement with ML
| vs. human performance in some domain of chip design.
| Sufficiently spectacular that I'm essentially certain there's
| more to the story.
|
| Timnit was at least in a more... fraught area.
| dekhn wrote:
| Timnit was fired for cause- the cause was being a jerk to
| coworkers repeatedly (she repeatedly attacked internal
| researchers on internally public mailing lists in an
| unprofessional way). I still don't understand why Megan and
| jeff tried to pitch it as a resignation or that it was about
| that specific paper not being withdrawn (Megan didn't even
| understand the difference between a submitted paper being
| withdrawn, and a published paper being retracted). Either
| way, the outcome of that situation is: Jeff doesn't really
| run Research any more and Megan is permanently sidelined, and
| now Timnit has an independently funded institute where she
| can say whatever she wants (her current position is that
| techbros are eugenicists).
| gwern wrote:
| > the cause was being a jerk to coworkers repeatedly (she
| repeatedly attacked internal researchers on internally
| public mailing lists in an unprofessional way).
|
| No, the cause was her ultimatum email demanding the names
| of the reviewers among several other things (which she
| refers to as "simple conditions") or she quit, and then
| also emailing Googlers telling them to stop working. The
| first was the email her manager replied to saying they
| weren't going to meet her demand and her resignation was
| accepted immediately given her other email, rather than
| after a leisurely vacation and few months of wrapup like
| she wanted. (This is how Gebru apologists justify defining
| it as 'firing' rather than 'quitting', to make her look
| like more of a victim.)
| dekhn wrote:
| Those were all proximal causes, not ultimate causes. I
| don't think she was a victim, I'm not an apologist, but
| the way google fired her was still rather unprofessional
| and had some severe consequences for the people who did
| it which are obviously still playing out today. What's
| amazing is that if they're put her on a pip for textually
| assaulting her coworkers, she would have been gone in
| 6-12 months without as much noise.
| themacguffinman wrote:
| Few are really fooled by a PIP response like this. I'd
| fire anyone who would make the decision to give such a
| high profile activist 6-12 more months of authorization
| to internal company materials and direct contact with
| colleagues to lash out against the company with the not-
| so-hidden knowledge that they're on their way out. We
| already know that another colleague who sympathized with
| her attempted to exfiltrate company material after Gebru
| was summarily fired. Many companies will still
| immediately escort you from the premises if you quit
| amicably.
| 21723 wrote:
| This. People get let go all the time and that's just how the
| game works, but if a company is publicly saying someone was
| "fired for cause", that means someone _who outranks the
| lawyers_ is out to rape this guy 's name, because that almost
| never happens otherwise.
| 21723 wrote:
| Scientists are pretty used to the idea of having their papers
| rejected. It happens all the time for all sorts of reasons.
| Never say never, but the likelihood that someone who's already
| gone through a PhD program would act out in some extreme way is
| low.
|
| Usually, these terminations have more to do with "He's getting
| close to something untouchable" than anything else. It happens
| to journalists, when they do their job a bit too well, also.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| I don't think you can quantify any of the claims that you
| made in your post.
|
| Is your argument that the "Computers can design chip
| components better than humans" paper is so fundamental to
| Google that they're silencing any critics? Conspiracy
| theories work better if there is even a kernel of truth to
| them. Maybe I could accept this if Chatterjee was rebutting
| advertising as a whole or something, but who exactly is so
| concerned about this specific paper?
| lupire wrote:
| If you write a paper, as happened here, claiming that your
| boss's greatest achievement is bogus, your employment might
| be in danger. Not because Sundar and the Board and large
| shareholders care, but because your boss cares.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Your boss can't just fire you at Google(unless you report
| directly to Sundar I suppose). Especially not "with
| cause". Whose greatest achievement was "Computers can
| design some chip components better than humans" that you
| are accusing of having fired Chatterjee?
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Scientists are pretty used to the idea of having their
| papers rejected.
|
| By journals, not by their employers. It's actually quite
| unusual for researchers in industry have their papers blocked
| by their employers, as many have testified after that affair.
| krona wrote:
| Exactly. This story doesn't add up to me - too much of a non-
| sequitur to fire someone for simply pointing out an
| inconvenient truth.
| timcavel wrote:
| t_mann wrote:
| wth? a "for cause" termination is a pretty big deal (in some
| larger organizations practically an automatic application
| killer), and to say it in a press statement is furthering its
| damaging impact. why do they think they need to do that?
|
| even if we take for granted that there's probably a lot more to
| this story than what's reported in the article, this leaves a
| bitter aftertaste. there are so many ways this could have been
| handled more gracefully. and the optics of doing that in the
| context of a critical study are poor, to say the least.
| citilife wrote:
| I'm not going to comment on the firing. What I can say, is that
| all research papers should be questioned heavily. Generally, the
| review process is very incestuous and creates perverse incentives
| to not threaten publications. It wouldn't surprise me if firings
| are related to questioning research.
| [deleted]
| chasd00 wrote:
| The article is really light on details. Fired with cause could
| mean anything.
| spoonjim wrote:
| Why does Google even fund this AI safety research internally?
| These conflicts are guaranteed to happen.
| sjg007 wrote:
| Checks a box that outside regulators can look at. Otherwise
| outside regulators would likely try to investigate and
| regulate. Also Google's own research can be used to counteract
| AI ethics claims that are existential to Google. These are
| likely going to be Big Data type claims. Big ominous future
| threats like the GDPR for example.
|
| We know the oil and gas industry produce copious amounts of CO2
| causes global warming -- they knew because they funded the
| research. But publicly their position was "uncertainty".
| dehrmann wrote:
| > ...and the researchers hoped to bring the issue to CEO Sundar
| Pichai and Alphabet's board of directors.
|
| Um, what? The board of directors has no interest in this.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| This is probably the most under-rated comment in the thread.
| Speaking as a scientist in industry, polluting executive
| attention with internal spats over publication clearance is
| cause enough for termination.
| whymauri wrote:
| I wonder how much of this comes down to the researcher's
| expectations going from SVP at a 1k person trading firm to
| Senior Manager at a Google with 100k+ employees. Maybe they
| expected to punch in a much higher political weight class
| than they actually could and got burned.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| Business is sometimes a difficult place to do pure research, just
| as a University is a very poor home for an operating business
| (outside of education). If you are a business who thinks there is
| some value in pure research then you could do worse than follow
| the model from the 50s and 60s. Separate research campus or unit.
| Separate management. Separate culture and working practices.
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