AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google
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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 decided that the paper "didn’t meet our bar for publication" and demanded a retraction.
4. Timnit Gebru demanded access to all of the internal feedback, along with the author of the feedback. If Google wouldn't provide this access, she said that she intended to resign and would set a final day.
5. Google declined her demands and took her ultimatum as a resignation. Rather than setting a final date, they made the separation effective immediately.
The underlying reason for the paper failing internal review looks to be that it basically condemns Google's whole approach to AI (big models) while failing to take into account some relevant research that may favor google's approach. (I have no way of guessing if it would have passed review if it did take into account those, but still condemned the approach).
The massive amount of miscommunication makes her feel like she was being oppressed, due to race and or gender. Hence her aggressive tone in her emails and ultimatum.
Looks like a fairly classic case of a major blowup due to poor communication.
Unless Google deliberately changed the enforcement of the policy just to mess with her, she should have known the policy. It doesn't seem to be a complicated process, and 2 weeks is a reasonably short time to wait.
On the other side, Google has been in this game long enough, that they must know a paper can be updated in this case. So there wouldn't be a misunderstanding there, either.
What exactly happened is unclear so far. But I doubt it will come down to just a series of misunderstanding.
On a side note, I suspect that working research for a company with a conflicting interest in the same area is generally a bad idea. At some point, the dilemma of either leaving or stopping caring about it would present itself.
In reality, what every company/team/management wants is someone who will give them some constructive criticism on small mistakes here and there that are easy to fix, but ultimately act as a supportive shield for the company against /other/ criticisms. The more credible that someone is, the better, and the more sophisticated that act of supportive shielding is, the better.
In exchange, the company provides support, financial or otherwise, for that someone's personal career ambitions in becoming rich and famous themselves.
Anyone else see it this way? Or am I just too jaded these days?
There were clearly conflicts brewing below the lid. This was just taken as the final straw. On both sides, I'd reasonably expect. She was dissatisfied with a bunch of things that she couldn't makr public, so she boiled over on this one. That's why many people are surprised this is such a big deal.
And then she gave a ultimatum, which was great for both sides. For the employer since they could use it to get rid of her right away and make it look it's because of this (and "technically" they are right). And for her because she can use it for maximum outrage. It was a calculated provocation. Come on, if you really want to be part of a process of change, that's not how to achieve that. She is smart enough to understand this.
This feels like a classic privileged tantrum which has blown up in the face because Google refused to bend this time.
Asking for the review notes is one thing, it seems like the main demand Jeff refused was giving the names of every reviewer. Why would the names of the reviewers be relevant to the academic, unless they specifically wanted to use the reviewers identity in order to undermine the notes?
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.
This is pure speculation, but it looks like there may have been some additional backchannel from the conference reviewers to their buddies at Google that caused a follow-on sensitivity or objection later from other functions at Google, namely PR & Policy (based on her tweets), which may have been why Timnit was super curious about the identity of the feedback authors.
That seams a big jump. Isn't it more likely that the treatment is due to pushing for ethics in an organization whose business model is antithetical to ethics?
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".
Why would they need those names anyway? I'm also unable to think of any reason they might need the identities of the reviewers.
> Imagine this: You’ve sent a paper for feedback to 30+ researchers, you’re awaiting feedback from PR & Policy who you gave a heads up before you even wrote the work saying “we’re thinking of doing this”, working on a revision plan figuring out how to address different feedback from people, haven’t heard from PR & Policy besides them asking you for updates (in 2 months).
The NY Times reported that four of the researchers working on the paper also worked at Google.[1]
> In an interview with The Times, Dr. Gebru said her exasperation stemmed from the company’s treatment of a research paper she had written with six other researchers, four of them at Google.
It seems to me Google management should have been aware of this paper prior to the day before publication.
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[0]: https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-a...
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/03/technology/google-researc...
Out of curiosity do people think that a company either should or would publish self-funded research that's detrimental to their PR? I'm not sure that this is a realistic expectation with our current methods of company governance (which should probably be changed). I'm assuming the research isn't overly safety oriented and is more like "overuse of google leads to decreased overall well-being" rather that "use of the cigarettes that we sell leads to significantly reduced life expectancy". Of course that statement begs the question of where the line between the two lies.
Is the part that makes me cynical about Google’s motive. What sort of process calls for XFN feedback on your work but withholds that feedback and its sources from you? This is very odd.
https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-a...
One can judge the content for themselves, but it was clearly intended to ratchet up pressure on management.
>I’m always amazed at how people can continue to do thing after thing like this and then turn around and ask me for some sort of extra DEI work or input. This happened to me last year. I was in the middle of a potential lawsuit for which Kat Herller and I hired feminist lawyers who threatened to sue Google (which is when they backed off--before that Google lawyers were prepared to throw us under the bus and our leaders were following as instructed) and the next day I get some random “impact award.” Pure gaslighting.
I think if you threaten to sue your employer, the employer isn't too much at fault and just covering their own neck when you later threaten to resign and they take you up on that offer.
Yann: “ML systems are biased when data is biased"
Timnit: “I’m sick of this framing. Tired of it. Many people have tried to explain, many scholars. Listen to us. You can’t just reduce harms caused by ML to dataset bias. 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 [Ruha Benjamin, Associate Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University]"
I don't like engaging this kind of discussion but have to call out the "I'm so tired" bit every time I see it.
In this case, the issue is that "it's the dataset" is attacking a straw man: nobody is accusing ML practitioners to be explicit racists actively conspiring for their models to be racially biased. Everyone understands that it is (often) a result of the underlying dataset.
But, the argument goes, understanding the genesis of such bias isn't enough to excuse it. At least not when those models are put to actual use in, say, law-enforcement contexts. Or credit agencies, or hiring decisions, or really anything.
If your dog happened to bite any red-haired kid it came across, it doesn't matter that you think red-haired kids are just as good as others, or that the dog was once mistreated by a red-haired kid. You're not going to allow the dog to get near any red-haired kids. And if you do, you'll face charges of at least negligence when some red-haired kid gets mauled.
To tie this back to AI, it would mean that as long as your models produce racially biased results, they simply aren't ready for deployment or publication. Go find better data until your work is no longer liable to inflict harm on anybody.
That's the standard for all other industries: if your car is shown to reliably kill pedestrians below a certain height in crash tests, you go back to the drawing board. Adding a sticker "don't operate car in the vicinity of children" isn't enough.
You can disagree with that reasoning (although you'd be wrong). What you can't do, as a leader in AI, is to pretend to have never heard of it, or that it is so obviously wrong that it warrants no reply whatsoever.
> have to call out the "I'm so tired" bit every time I see it.
so... I guess you're tired of it?
Yeah, it sort of implies that, yes, you're angry about something, but actually have no constructive advice or solutions, other than to accuse someone of being a bad person or even a racist.
The "I'm so tired" bit is similar to the "I'm not here to teach you" bit. Maybe someone can't teach you because they actually have nothing to teach.
She says 'let us lead and you follow' -- sure...where? What are we concretely doing about the "in-built bias" problem?
“Let’s generate fake data with GANs to prevent our AI from discovering politically uncomfortable regularities!”
It’s ugly work but someone has to do it, right?
I wish this were true.
>Timnit responded with an email requiring that a number of conditions be met in order for her to continue working at Google, including revealing the identities of every person who Megan and I had spoken to and consulted as part of the review of the paper and the exact feedback. Timnit wrote that if we didn’t meet these demands, she would leave Google and work on an end date. We accept and respect her decision to resign from Google.
Self entitlement or she forgot she was just an employee, and not some sort of independent tribal leader fighting google from the inside.
It's not clear to me here what you're advocating for -- a lawsuit wouldn't be raised by such an intelligent and virtuous individual unless there was some clear wrongdoing. Are you saying that you think workers shouldn't sue their employers if their employers are breaking the law?
In any case, Timnit Gebru (this particular AI researcher) has been recognized as having done some pretty important work in AI ethics. Sounds like this whole thing is messy, but thought I'd mention that for more context.
I'm sure LeCun knows this too. It's a fact that has been known for almost 40 years now, that for a given generalization system multiple bias modes are are possible, and of course the process of optimizing architectures against a biased benchmark will change the learning bias of the model. It's not just datasets that are biased, generalization systems are necessarily biased too.
As for the last line, I don't know that it should be expected for employers to fire employees pursuing recourse against sexual harassment.
I'm sure we can agree that the tone wasn't good, but she does have a point in saying that it's not possible to reduce the bias to datasets used to train the final model.
The paper : http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom/pubs/NeedForBias_1980.pdf
The Twitter replies read a lot like her Google message thing. She’s got a lot of good things to say but needs to work on the delivery.
I think she’s playing the victim and race card a lot more than she should. She’s got all the ammo she needs to make her arguments without the angry victim tone.
The most relevant parts (in terms of back story) should be this:
> A week before you go out on vacation, you see a meeting pop up at 4:30pm PST on your calendar (this popped up at around 2pm). No one would tell you what the meeting was about in advance. Then in that meeting your manager’s manager tells you “it has been decided” that you need to retract this paper by next week, Nov. 27, the week when almost everyone would be out (and a date which has nothing to do with the conference process). You are not worth having any conversations about this, since you are not someone whose humanity (let alone expertise recognized by journalists, governments, scientists, civic organizations such as the electronic frontiers foundation etc) is acknowledged or valued in this company.
> Then, you ask for more information. What specific feedback exists? Who is it coming from? Why now? Why not before? Can you go back and forth with anyone? Can you understand what exactly is problematic and what can be changed?
> And you are told after a while, that your manager can read you a privileged and confidential document and you’re not supposed to even know who contributed to this document, who wrote this feedback, what process was followed or anything. You write a detailed document discussing whatever pieces of feedback you can find, asking for questions and clarifications, and it is completely ignored. And you’re met with, once again, an order to retract the paper with no engagement whatsoever.
Maybe my remark is down to earth but, she literally told her group to stop working. I do not know of any company where this is an acceptable behavior for a manager. Besides the disagreements, it sounds to me that was the action that caused Google to pull the trigger.
Also from Dean's email it is pretty clear there are a number of new products down the pipe based on AI. At one point top management decided the company should stop denigrating its own products.
Where did you read that?
in the email shown,she told a listserv called "Women and Allies" to stop writing docs that are an attempt to better the situation in terms of diversity, equity, inclusion as writing those docs are like pissing in the wind in her opinion
We don't know the full list of demands, but Jeff Dean shared one demand that people may find unreasonable. Other demands may have been much more reasonable, but those weren't shared.
Maybe someone could post it here when it's published?
And she was under the impression that her company would value her so much that, not only they wouldn't take the first "clean" opportunity to let her go, but that they'd want her to stay so much that she could leverage it?
That's just you not realizing how your company sees you as a litigious/PR disaster timebomb and are tiptoeing around you. The worst part is that there was a path for you to be professional and achieve your goals, but then I guess you don't get to bask in Twitter's righteous indignation that way.
In a realpolitik sense you are probably right. But right now I'm going through standard onboarding training and they are VERY explicit that it's not supposed to work this way, and that you are not supposed to retaliate or exclude someone because they make complaints or take actions based on the defense of a protected group (including themselves).
It will be difficult for her lawyers to prove that she was let go as a retaliation, which it is not. The only thing which is apparent is that her employer did not value her work as much as she thought, so that her demands and her threat to resign (and the tarnishment of the Google brand because of the Twitter threads which she would write about it) would actually turn into a "clean" opportunity to let her go.
That is what happens when you are supposed to negotiate, and go the confrontational way. You have to estimate your leverage accurately before the full-blown war, otherwise it is a blitzkrieg.
IMHO we don’t really know if that part (achieving your goals) is true, or not true.
> 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.
Institutions are being pushed by the Twitter mob, and by the Twitter mob mentality, even when the person is formally within the institution. 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?"
Colleges are inculcating an environment and culture that may not be good for working in large groups. One recent example of these challenges: https://quillette.com/2020/12/01/race-and-social-panic-at-ha....
> However, we believe the end of your employment should happen faster than your email reflects 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.
> As a result, we are accepting your resignation immediately, effective today. We will send your final paycheck to your address in Workday. When you return from your vacation, PeopleOps will reach out to you to coordinate the return of Google devices and assets.
This third part they make "the resignation" the same as firing the person in practice. No way to plan a coordinated rampdown, transition and handover of projects and responsibilities. Just an unconditional goodbye, don't come to work again.
> However, we believe the end of your employment should happen faster than your email reflects 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.
> As a result, we are accepting your resignation immediately, effective today. We will send your final paycheck to your address in Workday. When you return from your vacation, PeopleOps will reach out to you to coordinate the return of Google devices and assets.
Her resignation certainly gave Google an easy out of all that hassle, but would I call this a firing? Perhaps not.
If you're the employer you have to figure that if somebody's pissed off enough to (i) sue you whilst employed by you, (ii) write that kind of message to others working in their function or group, and (iii) now they've delivered an ultimatum you're unable or unwilling to meet, they're only going to cause more trouble if you make them work their notice period.
If it were me in her boss's position I'd have got her out the door as fast as possible.
No. No COBRA benefits and usually no severance. Also the employee is not eligible for unemployment benefits.
Unless she formally offer to resign it seems like her management jumped the gun.
Husband returns with 12 loaves of bread.
Most software engineers can read the above joke, and laugh at themselves, then go ahead and upvote your comment not realizing that it is EXACTLY THE SAME THING.
Employee: "This is extremely important to me. If you can't address what is important to me, then I can't work here anymore"
Google: "OK, thanks for your resignation".
This is not okay. Google is "technically correct" - but it is appalling behavior that should make every Googler shake with discomfort.
Employees are people. People can get dissatisfied. Frustrated. Angry. Sure, you can say companies don't owe anything to anyone because there is at-will employment.
But the reality is unless we want to live in a dystopia, people should be allowed to voice concerns and anger and frustrations, and not be fired for making things uncomfortable or inconvenient.
The original article has been updated with Jeff Dean's response, while a member of Gebru's team (who still works at Google Brain) states that Dean's email is misleading and inaccurate: https://twitter.com/alexhanna/status/1334579764573691904
As I understand it: The paper had already been submitted to a conference, and the "cross functional team" Dean speaks of basically reviewed it like peer reviewers and said you have to retract it. It sounds like Gebru and her co-authors were not given an opportunity to respond to the criticisms to stave off retraction. If you've experienced peer review, you know that such reviews are by no means a definitive analysis of a paper, and one usually gets the opportunity to respond. Here, it sounds like anonymous internal peer review was used as a hammer to retract it. Dean's descriptions of the criticisms sounds rather pedestrian to me, as a researcher, and I'm sure Gebru and her co-authors would push back on these characterizations.
Honestly, it sounds like the paper was attacking some sacred cows internally. And Gebru's work probably threatened other researchers on other teams. Not unlike traditional peer review mind you, but at least one can usually post in on arXiv without worrying about this.
> Timnit co-authored a paper with four fellow Googlers as well as some external collaborators that needed to go through our review process (as is the case with all externally submitted papers). We’ve approved dozens of papers that Timnit and/or the other Googlers have authored and then published, but as you know, papers often require changes during the internal review process (or are even deemed unsuitable for submission). 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.
> A cross functional team then reviewed the paper as part of our regular process and the authors were informed that it didn’t meet our bar for publication and were given feedback about why. It ignored too much relevant research — for example, it talked about the environmental impact of large models, but disregarded subsequent research showing much greater efficiencies. Similarly, it raised concerns about bias in language models, but didn’t take into account recent research to mitigate these issues. We acknowledge that the authors were extremely disappointed with the decision that Megan and I ultimately made, especially as they’d already submitted the paper.
> Timnit responded with an email requiring that a number of conditions be met in order for her to continue working at Google, including revealing the identities of every person who Megan and I had spoken to and consulted as part of the review of the paper and the exact feedback. Timnit wrote that if we didn’t meet these demands, she would leave Google and work on an end date. We accept and respect her decision to resign from Google.
If the paper was bad it should have been rejected by the conference to which it was submitted. If the paper was critical of things Google does and it didn't like that, that's pure suppression. And, as you say, academic norms provide a period of rebuttal, it's unclear how much was allowed here.
Secondly there is value of having anonymous review in an academic setting, however it sounds like they tried to enforce that anonymous review for the company, which again doesn't serve the same purpose. People should be told exactly why decisions are being made so they can correct their mistakes in the future. If you aren't willing to invite someone into a decision making process, when a large portion of their research is in biases in institutional decision making, then you have got to know you're in for a bad time.
Why did they not fight to keep her, if she was so singularly brilliant? IMO, it's because she wasn't an employee they wanted to keep around.
People don't get fired for asking for opportunities to respond to criticisms. My guess is there were previous incidences regarding her behavior and, in this situation, she threatened to quit and they accepted.
I have a hard time taking someone who looks like that seriously. Says a lot about her and her team.
> 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 pressure on your own management via the U.S. Congress seems pretty obviously like a good way to get yourself fired.
If you're going to try to exert political pressure from the outside, you're going to wind up on the outside. I'm no big fan of Google's management, but I find it hard to fault them for this one.
A threat to resign isn't the same thing as resigning. And it seems you don't think so, either, since you characterize her threat as a bluff. It can't be both a bluff and a resignation.
She lives her life attacking people who she disagrees with, and brings in race/gender into any conflict where she's involved.
I am surprised Google had hired her, because it was only a matter of time they'd become collateral damage in this roving tornado of hate and aggression.
From what I have seen today, she gave them an ultimatum: do this, this and that or else I will leave. They decided to not do those things she demanded, and then proceeded to fire her before she could do any more internal damage.
If internally she has a history of bringing race or sex into every discussion I could see why they'd rather be anonymous. Even being accused of being racist can ruin someone's career in this current climate.
If you're anyone else in the company and think a problem could possibly work out, try to amicably work it out. If you believe it to be impossible to work out, it is much better to just resign than to threaten to resign, which will almost always result in firing.
If you resign, you have the upper hand, can still get 2 more weeks of pay, possibly a couple of good recommendations for your next job, and then go write your blog posts after that.
Her response to that tweet is a bit harsh, but not completely unreasonable. I'm not a Twitter expert, so I can't really stitch together their conversation on Twitter to see where/when it goes off the rails.
Curious: How did she 'force him to give up on twitter'?
There's a lotta companies who've hired ticking time bombs like this. They don't get why they were truly hired.
A good number of social activists are rude and abrasive and then blame how people react as racism/sexism. No one wants to be around or work with anyone who is a jerk. The quote above sorta reminds me of how this person is going about their life.
https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1275162528511860737
Whatever your position, Yann engages on substance, and Timnit is obnoxious:
https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1275191341455048704?s...
https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1275191515380215808?s...
Basically the worst of online discourse, but in this case one-sided. Yann is discussing in good faith and Timnit is not.
If this is the normal way she interacts with people she disagrees with it's no surprise they didn't want her to stay. The public tweeting about it doesn't inspire much confidence either.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-c...
The picture insiders paint is that of organizations infested with technically mediocre people who form cliques that provide air cover for each others mediocrity ... with sex and race providing a disincentive for management to take action.
I wonder how accurate that is ... one explanation for the stories could just be that a lot of disgruntled males are unhappy with competition.
On the other hand, if it was true and I was a high performance underrepresented minority, there's no way I'd go to Google. Wouldn't people just assume I'm there because of quota filling, instead of my actual performance?
I know I flip out at people on the internet sometimes but I hope I never become someone like that.
What happened to diversity of thought, academic freedom, free speech as a civic virtue and not simply a restriction on government action, and all those other things this community normally stands for? Just yesterday we saw the NLRB rule that Google had illegally fired workers, and we were talking about how the big tech companies use their power to suppress internal dissent and it's bad. How did we forget that so quickly?
Can you provide a source for this. What did she say?
There are legitimate criticisms of Yann's tweet. Just because he is technically correct about how ML works doesn't mean that what he is saying isn't ALSO a classical dismissal of the concerns people have with AI.
The issue isn't that ML is evil or racist. The issue is that if it is used too objectively detached from the reality of the world it operates in, the outcomes could be used for evil or with racist intents.
AI scientists like LeCun handwaves away concerns about diversity in data sources, just as his employer handwaves away concerns about engagement algorithms surfacing misinformation on the platform.
But the societal consequences remain for others to deal with.
>Do you know what happened since? Silencing in the most fundamental way possible.
"Silencing in the most fundamental way" to me means physically clapping your hand over someone's mouth or murdering them, neither of which I believe she actually meant. This email would have greatly benefited from peer review.
Interesting. Having been on the receiving end of a (later proven to be bogus) HR complaint, this is exactly how it was handled. I was forced to respond to allegations where neither the allegations nor source were ever shared with me.
Fortunately, said person accidentally admitted to doing it, after changing their story a few times, and was summarily fired.
I wonder what People Ops is, something more about logistics maybe. Still paid by the company, so it can't be on the side of employees.
What strikes me is how out of touch she seems to be. We're in the middle of pandemic and millions of people are out of work. The worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. However, due to luck, her credentials and research, she has been able to continue working for one of the top companies in the world and is even able to take a vacation. Good for her.
And yet, while on vacation, she makes demands of her employer that perhaps she was aware they wouldn't/couldn't meet.
I'm stunned by the if you don't accept my conditions, I'll deal with you, when I'm good and ready, when I get back from vacation. Like, how out of touch and tone deaf is this?
Anyway, the first thing she does, after rage quitting, is to run to Twitter to complain. She even said on Twitter that she didn't have a lawyer and wanted to find one ASAP. Honestly, everything Google did seems perfectly reasonable. Is her behavior unbecoming of a manager? Based on what I saw on Twitter, I'd say 'Yes'.
I had been following her on Twitter and saw this pop-up last night. It was kind of confusing and seemed like it was going to become very annoying, so I unfollowed. Then today, it kept showing up in other people's feeds, so I blocked her and muted people who retweeted her.
There is such a thing as a "brilliant jerk" and usually companies keep such people around too long. Seems like Google decided this headache wasn't worth it, and cut her loose. But now we see a "brilliant jerk" who is female and a minority/POC.
This conclusion seems so non sequitur to the argument. There is literally nothing in the previous argument to suggest that any of this was motivated by anything other than a disagreement with the report. The argument presented by the researcher is conjecture. Coupled with the fact that she threatened to sue her employer and they kept her for a year? Any reasonable employer would see that her employment is a liability and dismiss her prior to a year.
In the world of business, there is no jewel too precious to discard.
Plain English translation: she didn't present the results of her research in a light that favours the company's goals.
Once in a while someone posts an article on HN about academia and how doing a PhD is badly paid with few opportunities for stable employment. Then the comments will wonder why people still bother with academia.
Well, this is why. Because, as a rule, if you are a researcher in academia you won't be asked to retract your research because it makes someone look bad.
Not entirely accurate (worked in academia). If your research makes someone look bad or have a chance to jeopardize financing, usually you won't get a chance even to send the paper, because it will be shut down in your research center by either your mentor or other peers.
Sound mentors are well connected with publishers, and even if you somehow send it under the radar (which will be the end of your research career), someone will call either your mentor or management for confirmation.
> she didn't present the results of her research in a light that favours the company's goals.
The same is happening in academia, but let's not open Pandora's box :)
If your results go against current dogma, or if they reveal an uncomfortable truth, your paper will be rejected for spurious reasons every time you submit it. A recent example from Glenn Geher[1]:
> I have published more than 100 academic pieces in my career to date. I've pretty much been through it all.
> From this context, I will say that the most difficult paper that my team (the New Paltz Evolutionary Psychology Lab) and I have ever tried to publish was a paper on the topic of political motivations that underlie academic values of academics.
That's the pushback you get for researching political motivations in academia. It's much worse if your ideas directly connect to social policies. If your ideas are particularly heretical (or you engage in good faith with heretics), you'll have your life threatened by violent mobs. This has happened to Allison Stanger, Bret Weinstein, Jordan Peterson, and many others.
1. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/darwins-subterranean...
It would be great if this were true. But it isn't.
https://medium.com/@leej12255/the-threat-to-academic-freedom...
I have experienced exactly that, in academia.
The squeaky wheel gets the grease, but it still bothers me that people like this get highly paid positions to point out problems seemingly without any technical knowledge. And then she's delusional enough to think that she can misbehave and make ultimatums?
The article links to a "landmark study" that shows that black women are underrepresented in training datasets and therefore misclassified more. Sure, that's important to fix, but it sounds like an undergraduate project, and it's not something I would call AI.
You are making a lot of (wrong) assumptions here. Not too many Stanford PhDs are graduating without technical knowledge
>But now there’s an additional layer saying any privileged person can decide that they don’t want your paper out with zero conversation.
Decisions in megacorporations are made in one direction, from the top on down. If this is her main point of contention, I sympathize but that's what you get for joining one of the largest corporations in the world. It seems both parties will be better off without each other. I hope her research won't suffer for it.
of course it will. The big tech companies have created networks of users and user data that is beyond anything that can be replicated in an academic or laboratory setting. By saying that it's fine for corporations to have draconian oversight over research about the systems they build, what you are saying is that these systems cannot be researched for any purposes other than to make them more profitable. That is an abdication of responsibility.
Unfortunately enacting change "from within" isn't always easy. It's easy to forget that Google AI still sits underneath the megacorp.
Her role is specifically created to hold her employer to account when they are using bad practices. Her opposition to particular policies enacted in the company is literally part of her job description.
"after all the micro and macro aggressions and harassments I received" "does it just happen to people like me who are constantly dehumanized?" "Silencing marginalized voices like this is the opposite of the NAUWU principles which we discussed" "the next day I get some random “impact award.” Pure gaslighting" "Writing more documents and saying things over and over again will tire you out but no one will listen."
I’ve been at companies where I’m faced with an approval process before publishing research to the outside world. It can be quite stressful, especially in the face of holidays and impending deadlines.
However I guarantee that if anyone had a problem with the work, they would take the time to tell me why.
And it would happen without untitled meetings or unrelated email drama.
They might even work with me to fix the problem because they’re my coworkers and that’s what it means to work together in a normal workplace where people respect each other as colleagues.
Sadly every piece of publicity related to Google and its workers makes me want to work there less and less...
"withering email" == "anger-fueled message sent by a manager to a large group that asks readers to ignore company policy and start arguments with other leaders"
I don't see where "ethical AI researcher" comes into play here. Instead, I see a leader at a company unprofessionally sending messages to a large listserv and is later fired.
What am I missing?
"Google silences minorities/women/AI researchers" is way more interesting/important than "Google/AI researcher did/didn't misbehave."
She wasn't fired. She said she'd resign if they didn't meet her conditions, so the accepted her resignation. She's being disingenuous.
We should hire by skill alone whether the person is a Lesbian Black Female, or a White Male
Another argument is that it's necessary to be discriminatory in favour of minorities to level the playing field.
I share your opinion, but not everyone does.
1. I think few companies are out there "hiring by race or gender". At most companies I know, affirmative action means hiring by skill, but making sure at least XX% of the hiring pool are women, black, etc. This really just means your resume is more likely to get seen and maybe you're more likely to get a first round, but not that "you're being hired by race or gender".
2. You could argue this is still unfair (although as previously stated, you're still hiring people who earned it based on skill). Unfortunately not doing anything would me more unfair, specifically by stagnating things in the problematic state they are now [1].
In the macro-historical context, white Americans brought African slaves to their country, and actively deprived of wealth and knowledge, right? That was a societal, conscious commitment to push these people down.
Now that they're free but seriously lacking wealth and behind on knowledge too, they're expected just create that wealth and knowledge themselves. Thanks to "unfair" institutions like public education, this is going to happen regardless, but very slowly unless there's a societal, conscious commitment to push these people up.
[1]: Having a huge chunk of your society be alienated not only socially but also economically leads to conflict, could worsen the gap instead of improving it, weakens social and cultural ties, etc.
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 most of my adult life. Be it for employment, education, or housing.
Where conversations can get annoying is when I feel demonized because inequity exists independent of my individual actions. But I can live with someone bitching on Twitter because I'm not afraid of the police or telling potential employers I have a kid on the way.
What I don't like living with is the inability of others like myself in my own caste who would dismiss reality on reductionist notions "hiring by race or gender is inherently racist" without critical thought. Ignoring lack of diversity tacitly supports inequity and is itself racist or bigoted, by virtue of doing less than nothing to correct it.
But tech companies want to talk to the humans they're hiring, so race and gender are (almost) always available as information inputs during the hiring process. There's no equivalent to the curtain to remove the possibility of bias, so you need to look at alternate methods. Setting hiring targets is one way to do it. If you're going to complain that the targets are unfair, you can't just say "Well shucks, guess we have to stick with the system that produces massively unequal outcomes." You've gotta propose a system that's less unfair than the status quo.
In this case, I'm not going to respond in much detail, other than to note that there are 30+ years of writings about affirmative action which get deeply into this issue. Your summary of it is misleading and incomplete.
Since you can't actually calculate someone's skill, all you can do is hire on an attempted measurement of skill. And if you find reasons to think that your measurement of skill has inaccuracies, you'd probably be better off taking that into account when evaluating a candidate.
It's a hell of a lot easier for a white male to pick up those skills because of culture and society than it is for most other groups of people.
I think there's a lot that can be done to help minority groups succeed and I'm a little less concerned about what's "fair" to white males like me.
Do you think it's possible that you can "hire by skill alone" and given two equally skilled people - one man, one woman - always hire the man, and that you could hire some equally skilled women if you randomised or removed whatever male-bias exists in your hiring?
Do you think it's possible that there are equally skilled men and women available to employers to hire, but that employers have built frat-boy workplaces where only men are interested in working, and cultures that drive away skilled women?
Do you think "hire by skill alone" means always hiring the most expensive people - like buying jewellery by value alone? What if a company can't afford to staff with all the maximally skilled people, but can get 80% of the skills for 50% of the money?
What about hiring people who can be trained or skilled up, and training them?
What about teams, where the collective skills can be greater than the sum of their parts, but maybe not if all the parts are identical?
I am not sure how this may have influenced Google's decision in this particular case, but I imagine it was part of the evaluation. Other comments here delve further into her current and previous actions.
[0] https://www.lynchlf.com/blog/personal-liability-for-managers...
Maybe she's more mature than me, but they're probably not going to end up being super relevant.
I switched from IC to EM because I really love helping grow careers, but if I ever was put in Jeff Dean's position I'd probably quit immediately. No job is worth it.
I routinely run into the issue that if I try to understand why people did something that went badly/harmed people without looking to blame them per se, I get accused of being "an apologist." But in practice trying to understand why things happen is essential to finding a real solution. Merely asserting that X person's/group's needs matter and they are being harmed isn't really enough to find a viable path forward.
Like I have seen people say that suburbia is "White supremacist design" because in practice it ended up being mostly Whites who got suburban housing when suburbia was born in the US. I have tried to make the distinction that suburbia was born in part because large swaths of greenfield development was quicker, easier and cheaper to create and that this choice wasn't, per se, racist.
I am aware there was real racism happening and there were a lot of bylaws that intentionally excluded People of Color, but I'm sure those bylaws would have existed even if they had been building towers of condos in downtown areas instead. It wasn't specific to the architectural form that was built.
I recently had an exchange with someone that reminded me how important trust and mutual respect is and how the lack of such tends to cause problems to escalate.
I asked this person about a thing they did. I had been having paranoid fears that they did that thing in reaction to me and stuff I was working on and when they replied to my inquiry they had a wholly unrelated reason.
I didn't tell them that I was having paranoid fantasies that maybe this was some kind of negative reaction to me. I framed it neutrally.
Their reply was very reassuring to me. It was reassuring in part because I trust and respect this person. If you don't have that piece, having a long list of negative experiences makes it difficult to believe they aren't intentionally harming you and then lying about their real motives to cover it up and enable additional abuse.
It is, perhaps, a mistake to leave this remark. Like Timnit Gebru, I'm pretty tired and frustrated with a lot of things and feeling rubbed raw and exhausted.
But it seems to me it doesn't get better by throwing in the towel and giving up on saying anything just because the entire world is touchy after a nearly year-long global pandemic.
What feels like a breakdown of trust in society has been on my mind a lot recently. Without trust, it seems communication and collaboration becomes impossible. How can society solve any of its problems when people can't discuss anything about those problems or potential solutions without it turning into a fight?
I read her email. You know what's crazy about it? she is talking about Google silencing marginalized voices. She keeps referring to herself as a marginalized voice in the research community! She has a PhD from Stanford, working at one the best places in the world for AI researchers, and she gets more attention than almost any other researcher I know of (she earned it of course). Wake up woman. You're a privileged researcher! If I were making the comments she made to Lecun, no one would even bother to listen, yet alone Lecun actually respond and eventually leave twitter because of that. Give me a break. There's not even one sentence in her email about what is actually the content of her paper that is so controversial. It's just a rant about nothing. Welcome to the real world, companies have policies and once you join them you lose your freedom to do whatever the heck you want. You can go back to academia but no one would pay you what you've been making at Google Research.
Yea there is something uniquely activist academic about all these complaints you see surfacing nowadays.
As though millenials are landing in industry now and they're surprised their employers are companies selling products and not activist organizations.
And you're right it's even funnier when the people complaining are urbane academics from elite institutions outraged that they don't unquestionable authority to enact policy.
However, you really should read https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/2004-ipo-letter/
Anyone who recalls this letter should be able to muster sympathy for those who have joined Google with an activist mindset. Google is supposed to be different. Google is supposed to be for people who want to make the world better. Sure, maybe it's all just so much branding, but this is how Google (and by extension many Googlers) styles itself. This news is more evidence that Google is really bad at living up to that image - as idealistic/lofty/unrealistic as it may be - where it counts.
And any way, Timnit isn't toxic. She is upset with the status quo of equity among genders and ethnic groups in her field, and she is fighting to improve it. This is naturally unwelcome - and perhaps comes off as combative - to anyone who is satisfied with the status quo, but I would not call it toxic.
In the email Jeff writes that the paper she wanted to submit conference review system did not meet Google's internal review standards.
To me this looks really fishy! I did not read her work, but Google has conflict of interest in publishing this paper? If the paper is so out of date as Jeff writes, it will get rejected in conference review system. Reviewers are known for being brutal..
Perhaps she's right to call out BS here, probably not the way she did.
From the Jeff Dean email it seems like the "cross-functional team" (read: includes people who are focused on company's bottom line, not the subject matter of the paper) wanted some sort of "fair balance" when discussing AI. He cites some examples.
Does this mean if we review papers on AI from Google employees that Google has approved for publication in the past, we will consistently find this balanced view.
Is this now posted somewhere publicly?
I feel like most of this conversation is pretty speculative until the commentariat (self included) can read it!
EDIT: duh
Granted, because the process she described is anonymous and opaque by design, it could have happened to other people at the company and only they, HR, and the people requesting/ordering the retraction would know about it. At the same time, if that's the case, then Google needs to stop that, because it looks really bad, especially when it involves a minority researcher who published a paper on how certain models Google uses may have some degree of discriminatory bias built into them.
Imagine this: You’ve sent a paper for feedback to 30+ researchers, you’re awaiting feedback from PR & Policy who you gave a heads up before you even wrote the work saying “we’re thinking of doing this”, working on a revision plan figuring out how to address different feedback from people, haven’t heard from PR & Policy besides them asking you for updates (in 2 months). A week before you go out on vacation, you see a meeting pop up at 4:30pm PST on your calendar (this popped up at around 2pm). No one would tell you what the meeting was about in advance. Then in that meeting your manager’s manager tells you “it has been decided” that you need to retract this paper by next week, Nov. 27, the week when almost everyone would be out (and a date which has nothing to do with the conference process). You are not worth having any conversations about this, since you are not someone whose humanity (let alone expertise recognized by journalists, governments, scientists, civic organizations such as the electronic frontiers foundation etc) is acknowledged or valued in this company.
Then, you ask for more information. What specific feedback exists? Who is it coming from? Why now? Why not before? Can you go back and forth with anyone? Can you understand what exactly is problematic and what can be changed?
And you are told after a while, that your manager can read you a privileged and confidential document and you’re not supposed to even know who contributed to this document, who wrote this feedback, what process was followed or anything. You write a detailed document discussing whatever pieces of feedback you can find, asking for questions and clarifications, and it is completely ignored. And you’re met with, once again, an order to retract the paper with no engagement whatsoever.
Jeff Dean's response about mitigations being made to minimize the issues she highlighted could be justified too, but again, because the process she described is opaque, no one external to the process has any idea about the merits of the arguments raised.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/tech...
“ Google could have fired Mr. Rubin and paid him little to nothing on the way out. Instead, the company handed him a $90 million exit package, paid in installments of about $2 million a month for four years, said two people with knowledge of the terms.”
Let’s assume that’s true. What is worse behavior? Obviously his. Yet he gets paid.
It’s not an apples to apples comparison but if google was to say to anyone, “goodbye and don’t let the door hit you on the way out”, shouldn’t it be this guy and the other dudes mentioned in the article?
And IMHO the fact that they didn’t is a great example of systemic sexism in action. So it’s not unreasonable to wonder if similar forces played a role in this situation.
It’s not surprising that companies function like this but that doesn’t make it right, and, it doesn’t mean that (even though change is slow) it isn’t possible to change norms.
We don’t know the full details; Googles firing of her may be valid.
But to be as dismissive of her being a representative of marginalized groups, and facing prejudice (conscious or unconscious) herself, is wrong. IMHO.
It seems likely that both sides are mis-characterizing events in pursuit of their own goals -- which to me suggests a general environment where parties are tending not to communicate with the goal of arriving at agreement -- but rather as adversaries.
Hackernews will of course assume that the only reason for an adversarial relationship in this scenario is "cancel culture SJW memes" and other "deemed toxic" trends for which the minority voice is almost always the only guilty party.
I think that level of dismissal is unwarranted as it seems pretty likely to me that there is a definite gotcha-oriented communication style coming from the google leadership here -- which very well might reflect an intentionally or unconsciously adopted strategy to create obstacles for voices of disagreement like this.
Said hires have thus far, as far as I can tell, not produced anything of substantial value to any of these companies. They nevertheless become increasingly emboldened and misinterpret their situation. After all, no-one dares criticise them, they are showered with feel-good publicity. The only thing they need to do is keep their end of the deal.
Until they overstep, get fired, and cause drama by claiming everything that happened to them was due to discrimination, and not because they are toxic and disruptive.
I think this is all a good thing because it may alert some executives to the price for hiring activists into research roles.
Edit: Should add that I am purely talking about the power dynamics here, not research impact or the question of whether AI policy is an interesting subject. It is, I am just observing that it has not driven particular value to companies when compared to the negative publicity these dramas cause.
Edit: And to be clear, her most cited paper (> 1000 citations) had an impact on what some companies did: https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/8/21284683/ibm-no-longer-gen...
What is disturbing here, from a researcher's point of view (even within a company!), is the lack of transparency on why a paper is being blocked from publication. The implicit understanding of being a researcher in a company like Google is that, while papers are subject to review prior to submission/publication, that the company will not wholesale reject it and instead will work with you to make modifications and changes. Clearly something different happened here that should be of concern to people considering working at Google Brain.
Companies hire activists because they want to look good without actually changing things. Activists go to work for companies because they want to change things. So, naturally, the company has to lie to the activist about their function to do this, and the activist has to be naive about it. If the activist starts doing what they want to do, and not what the company wants them to do, then the company will fire them, and the activist will reach for an explanation.
"As far as I can tell" is doing a lot of work here.
I can confirm this is untrue. I worked with someone like Gebru (definitely an activist researcher) at a non-FAANG and AI ethics drove 3 multimillion dollar deals. Was a better business case than most I built over that time.
Besides, saying they don't drive revenue is a critique of research roles, not Gebru...
It has become an archetype at this point.
The idea that companies only need to do maximize shareholder value isn't that old and was only popularized in the 80s. If you restrict creating value to that, then maybe she didn't create any at Google. But maybe Google wants to create a software that works equally well for everyone and raising the issue of IA biases would have helped achieve that goal.
Maybe if you’re going to hire ethics researchers, you should listen to them?
IMO it’s the _companies_ that strike me as toxic drama queens with their shady tactics and obfuscations, hiring ethics and policy folks to look good without any intent on following through with support or respect.
Just to be clear, their end of the deal is to justify Google's actions as ethical, not to ensure that Google's actions are ethical.
> I think this is all a good thing because it may alert some executives to the price for hiring activists into research roles.
Ah, yes. They're going to do their jobs and point out poor ethics and policy in _your_ company. I mean, they were hired for that, but if they could just look down and _pretend_ to care about the space they were hired for, instead of actually caring, that'd be great.
> You are not worth having any conversations about this, since you are not someone whose humanity (let alone expertise recognized by journalists, governments, scientists, civic organizations such as the electronic frontiers foundation etc) is acknowledged or valued in this company.
It feels more generally accurate to say that no ones humanity is respected at companies like Google. That isn't to discount or lessen the difficulties minorities and women have in tech companies; those are substantial and significant. But if someone in a diversity role is slighted, the natural place to jump is a diversity motive; its far more likely that the company just doesn't give a shit about anyone.
And that's true of nearly every company. It was immature for us, as a community, to believe big tech would be any different than any other megacorp. They say they care about diversity, inclusion, and people; they don't. They don't care about any individual. Companies, as a collective intelligence, care about two things: Money and Self-Preservation (in that order).
That being said, I totally support the fight that people like Timnit are fighting; they're fighting for the recognition of humanity, through the lens of diversity and inclusion, a critical component of a much larger fight intrinsic to a capitalistic society. That's the value of a hire like this; its just the unimaginably unfortunate case that this value hasn't been realized at Google, and probably never will.
>Said hires have thus far, as far as I can tell, not produced anything of substantial value to any of these companies.
These two statements are at odds with each other.
I mean, yes. It's an unfortunate reality that ethics are often at direct odds with the unrelenting pursuit of business value. For a big tech like Google, by caring about people and the impact of your technologies, you will almost surely sacrifice profits in the short term.
So then the question is: people or profits?
- 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.
She is fired because she works against the interests of the company who hired her.
The outcome won't be different if you are a man.
What is the story?
Sadly, she will undoubtedly come up with some trumped up reason to sue for discrimination and probably be bought off with a settlement.
In that thread Timnit established that she was an "authority" and then instead of engaging on the merits in the conversation, simply said basically, "You have to submit to me because I'm the authority" and refused to offer any information of any substance ... as though she was some kind of wizard and what she knew was just way too complicated for us mortals to understand.
Meanwhile, LeCun just very calmly engaged on the specific technical details about bias in Deeplearning systems.
After that, Twitter just piled on LeCun and claimed he was being a "mansplainer" ... as though saying anything technical to a black woman is "mansplaining".
As an engineer what would you seek to research if you wanted to reduce the bias in specific AI systems? You'd figure out how to minimize bias in the algorithms and in the data, and identify any other sources that could introduce bias, and figure out how to put controls on developers and data collectors to prevent bias ... right?
Ok, now go look at what is actually discussed in AI bias papers.
Sometimes I feel the emperor has no clothes and everyone just pretends like vacuous bullshit is something profound because if you criticize the papers you'll be fired or blacklisted in Silicon Valley.
These dismissal decisions are not made lightly and I would wager there was a long history of events leading up to this. You usually only see the straw that broke the camel's back.
"This is the exact email I received from Megan who reports to Jeff. Who I can't imagine would do this without consulting and clearing with him of course."
I am sure Jeff Dean was made aware of the situation given the PR impact. But it is a stretch to say that Jeff Dean personally decided to fire her against her manager's wishes.
Allegations like that need evidence.
> This is the exact email I received from Megan who reports to Jeff > Who I can't imagine would do this without consulting and clearing with him of course
Then you try to engage in a conversation about how this is not acceptable and people start doing the opposite of any sort of self reflection—trying to find scapegoats to blame.
The current HN story is titled "AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google". That current title is either inaccurate or is pure editorial from the submitter.
By the way, that part about unions and strikes also applies to the joined at the hip government as well.
None of these comments offer any substance on the main issue in focus: the fact that Google may be actively suppressing the publication of valuable research for reasons other than its academic merit.
Of course there are all kinds of ethical questions that can arise in that situation, but is that not the normal case in corporate research?
> Jeff Dean, Google’s head of AI, defended the decision in an internal email to staff on Thursday, saying the paper “didn’t meet our bar for publication”. He also described Ms Gebru’s departure as a resignation, after Google had refused to agree to unspecified conditions she had set to stay at the company.
> The dispute has threatened to shine a light on Google’s handling of internal AI research that could hurt its business, as well as the company’s long-running difficulties in trying to bring more diversity to its workforce. ...
> The paper looked at the potential bias in large-scale language models, one of the hottest new fields of natural language research. Systems like OpenAI’s GPT-3 and Google’s own system, Bert, attempt to predict the next word in any phrase or sentence — a method that has been used to produce surprisingly effective automated writing, and which Google uses to better understand complex search queries.
> The language models are trained on vast amounts of text, usually drawn from the internet, leading to warnings that they could regurgitate racial and other biases that are contained in the underlying training material.
> “From the outside, it looks like someone at Google decided this was harmful to their interests,” said Emily Bender, a professor of computational linguistics at the University of Washington, who co-authored the paper.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/995c62ab-26b1-4eed-b1fb-cb4846023...
So I don't work in AI, but in every field I have worked in, and in the academic journals I used to work for, all of these are issues that would be addressed during the standard peer review process.
You ignored recent publications? Reviewers will complain. A good journal will have peer reviewers who know which citations are missing.
You left out citations that weaken your conclusion? Reviewers will complain. Et cetera.
I realize people object to Gebru's history on Twitter, but Google exec's defense of her dismissal sounds pretty weak to me.
Some of the worst people in history who committed the worst atrocities were very passionate about making the world a better place, at least as they defined “better”.
Much more interesting questions that might get revealed a bit:
Does Google treat minorities appropriately? Is Google covering up ai ethics research? Does Google care about AI ethics/bias?
Google cares about AI ethnics because talking about it gives those people, especially higher ups, an imagined sense of significance and adrenaline rush of being a savior.
But in reality, AI ethnics is just a gloried showroom of diversity/inclusiveness.
It is not a product, it doesn't generate revenue, in corporate world, nobody cares.
The only reason that department exists is because it was regulated into existence.
So, no, Google does not particularly care about AI ethics. They care about not getting harangued by the US government.
From what I've seen, I agree with Gebru about AI research, but this letter has too many problems itself.
A plague on both your houses!
And Hello, Streisand effect!
I think this title could be a little more descriptive. The conversation is about DEI, the fact she pointed out more accountability is necessary, the abruptness of it all, etc. I didn't know who Timnit Gebru was and almost didn't click on it because this sounded like some random researcher and I'm sure Google fires people all the time.
Once I was reading it I realized this is quite interesting after all.
I don't care if the corporations building a dystopian panopticon are intersectional.
Similarly, it raised concerns about bias in language models, but didn’t take into account recent research to mitigate these issues.
When Jeff Dean wrote me feedback for a small thing that I made, I was extremely happy to even get an answer from him. I think Timnit doesn't have any idea of the things Jeff and Sanjay wrote together, their code base was always clean, beautiful and well documented and tested, with lots of benchmark tests. She should have gone with the comments and work much more on the paper.
Timnit definitely did not intend to resign "immediately" and from everything what is known was fired on the spot (that she mentioned a possible resignation in an Email is not important for that distinction). A correct headline would be "AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired by Google after threatening to resign".
Neither "fired" nor "resigns" seems correct. I feel that she was "forced out" or "let go" (ironically this euphemism is more accurate here). She threatened to leave and they kicked her out.
That's all I need to know about why she was fired. I'm glad Google despite all the stuff they've done before knows when someone has gone off the SJW deep end.
This is a silly communion that puts both sides to shame.
Late stage capitalism is such a circus.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/donglegate-adria-richa...
This also sounds like an opportunity for an awesome person to spread their wings now they're out from under what sounds like a pretty oppressive system
Her biggest accomplishment seems to be driving Yann LeCunn off Twitter with angry accusations. She tried to continue her power trip at a workplace but her boss called her bluff.
This is a great firing for Google. She won’t be missed.
Yikes.
Obviously, this is a person which is very passionate about her research. She’s also a Black woman; given US history, there’s a probability that she was discriminated against during her life — maybe, multiple times. If not her, maybe some of her relatives were. Sure, this is hypothetical and does not excuse her attitude — but try to put yourself in her shoes.
It’s easy for us to reason about it, and think about how we would have dealt with it differently. Maybe she was in a bad place, or felt that she was being discriminated against.
She’s also a human being like me and you so — yes — maybe it’s not about racism and discrimination. Maybe she’s just entitled.
Either way, Google’s HR should’ve done better. It’s easy to let anger or exasperation get the hang of you. They should’ve scheduled a call to discuss everything calmly.