It disturbs me how much of a news story this is.
This should be handled internally and not aired in public across several media sites. Why should I care about the dirty laundry of FAANG and some random individual?
This should be handled internally and not aired in public across several media sites. Why should I care about the dirty laundry of FAANG and some random individual?
The media of course enables it, which I think is a sign of a growing, large scale, rational fragility across society (demand controls their publication, there is a large demand for this type of information)
I will have to search for them now but I saw people doxxing some of the current Googler's identities if they agreed with the resignation. This is extremely toxic.
Even the old media seems to love Twitter and it escapes FB level of scrutiny.
Facebook is now far less egregious & more of a soft environment to socialize with people you personally know. Bubbles/pockets of societal function and some large-influence which is lesser enabled than the prior.
Twitter is a platform that justifies large societal movement through "influential information".
(I don't have the best english to articulate here)
Now social media sites encourage people being public figures, which is an insanely bad advice for the vast majority of individuals.
No one forced her to do any of the following things:
1. Griping about the racist reviewers of her paper on Twitter.
2. Sending an email to a internal list criticizing Google's behavior and telling people to stop working on diversity.
3. Demanding the names of reviewers and threatening to resign if they weren't provided.
#2 or #3 would get you fired or cause your resignation to be accepted any place that I've worked.
#1 wouldn't get you fired but it's not going to help your career.
So, for us that care about google's use of AI and ethical use of it, it's important to understand what happened.
> She tweeted Wednesday that Google had abruptly fired her after a disagreement about a research paper that scrutinized possible bias in large-language AI models, which the company asked her to retract.
The article should be focusing on the disagreement here.
Instead the article focuses on employment which I don't care about.
I have not heard anyone express this fear, certainly not in the AI community.
I have not seen any part of the Timnit Gebru incident that paints Google in a bad light or corroborates any type of inconsistency or unfair judgment.
Google has done plenty of that stuff in other situations, just not in any part of the handling of Timnit Gebru’s very inappropriate behavior.
If Google fires a janitor, does that mean they don’t care about a clean work environment? If they fire a VP of engineering, does that mean they don’t care about engineering?
No, it means that person didn’t work out. And considering how she is handling it by going nuclear with the press and the twitter mobbing, I for one am not the least bit surprised.
That said, I don't believe that decisions about application of AI can be made internally at Google. These are basically PR jobs that come with the product.
When the triggering event involved a collaboration involving non-Google parties, that became pretty much impossible.
> Why should I care about the dirty laundry of FAANG and some random individual?
Maybe you shouldn't, but not everyone outside of Google is you. Other people in the field of AI ethics might want to know, because Google’s practices when it comes to employee research have a significant impact on how publications from Google authors are approached. And people who might consider working at Google, especially in the same field, have an interest in information about the working environment, positive or negative.
It's 1 employee out of 120k. There are probably other ethicists in AI at Google.
Also the story seems to have devolved more specifically to employment rather than talking about the specific ethical issues relating to Google's language models.
I mean google employees including most of her coworkers seem to think it's problematic.
None of that is useful here which from an external perspective looks like a employment dispute. She isn't exactly doing a Snowden here.
Even if the individuals internally view it as problematic, I am not gonna stop using Android, Google or Youtube. What are these individuals expecting to achieve from airing the dirty laundry in public?
Are they expecting people's opinions to have changed at all about Google?
The firing/resigning/petitions are irrelevant.
The wider community important information would be the specific ethical issue she is keen on raising.
FAANG employs a tremendous number of technology workers, are key drivers the industry-wide technical agenda formally (standards bodies) and informally (open source project management, areas of active research), are often the first line of serious education for new workers, and the fallback for workers when riskier undertakings fail.
If anything far more of their internal management (project and people) processes should be scrutinized.
I have no idea what or how this individual matters at all or the tech that she is relevant in. Not everyone at FAANG are industry leaders, and there are several cogs just like at IBM. I fail to see why I should care for every individual starling who can't stand out other than the company they work for.
This random individual along with James Damore and that random FB grad are not on the same level.
Your arguments tell me more that FAANG should be broken apart. Public attention and scrutiny would achieve nothing in affecting Google's decision making here.
> I have no idea
Why are you commenting then?
It's rather telling that your entire perspective is to demonize and diminish Gebru, who you don't even bother to name in your criticisms.
Why are you trying to establish some "level" distinction between Damore and Gebru. These aren't even remotely comparable situations.
Public attention and scrutiny is why we're talking about this, and have been, for a week now. It's pretty head in the sand to think this doesn't have impact.
Fine, there are AI stars too, but the article could lead about what they have done and why they are important no? A discussion involving Jim Keller would lead to his contributions to x86, Apple A10 series, Tesla chips and Zen.
I don't want a hand wavy discussion over ethics and AI, I want an explanation as to what they have contributed to the field that justifies why their opinion matters.
>Why are you trying to establish some "level" distinction between Damore and Gebru.
I am trying to establish that these random individuals don't matter to me. They are not known for their tech contributions but for the dirty laundry being exposed to the public.
These individuals from an external perspective seem to be known for being employed at Google and for some public controversy that cannot be influenced externally.
My point is why are these individuals in the news? Why should I care? They aren't industry leaders and from my perspective appear about as important as 'GE fires engine tester'.