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Comment by contemporary343 | Hacker News Reader

They also seem to have sidelined Samy Bengio (Yoshua's brother) who was the skip-level manager of the team and, as far as I can tell, backed both of them and continued to: https://twitter.com/L_badikho/status/1362892301979312128

As can be seen above, current team members state that Google is running a smear campaign against both of them. We should emphatically not take Google's words at face value here either.

All of this increases my respect for Microsoft Research immensely. They've been more hands off and had researchers publish work critical of MS technologies. It's quite telling that supposedly more open Google is incapable of creating as open a research org as MSR, which remains in my view an excellent example of what an industrial research org can be.

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As can be seen above, current team members state that Google is running a smear campaign against both of them. We should emphatically not take Google's words at face value here either.

I don’t get this. Google’s words are that she exfiltrated company documents. She either did or didn’t do this. And is google going to risk making this into a much bigger story by committing libel against a former employee?

Or should AI ethics researchers be empowered to steal corporate documents?

I try to maintain an open mind, but things seem almost straightforward in this case.

Google didn't say where she sent the documents. Forwarding emails to her own employment lawyers would be exfiltrating company documents technically.

I don't know, but I think it is much more likely that she is being fired for sharing internal info with journalists, outside activists, or former employees, than for sharing it with her own counsel.

Your employer might not like you sharing their internal info with your own attorney (under attorney-client privilege), but if they fire you for it, they potentially expose themselves to significant legal risk. Maybe you are planning to file a complaint or lawsuit about discrimination or harassment, or considering reporting your employer to some regulatory agency, and firing you for sharing evidence with your own attorney could legally be retaliation and viewed poorly by the legal system.

Now, if you share internal info with someone else's lawyer, or if you ask your own lawyer to share that info with third parties (other than regulatory agencies), different story – I think your employer is on much firmer legal grounds in those cases.

> but I think it is much more likely...

...but you really have no idea.

You’re just speculating, in a way that conforms with how you’d like to interpret these events.

Which, to be fair, is what we’re all doing, with basically no information on what actually happened.

At this point, it’s all just the he-said-she-said from the Google PR machine.

I think in this case, there’s little reason for someone without bias to accept Google’s versions of events.

Maybe you’re right; if you’re not, maybe she’ll sue. Maybe not.

What is clear though is that what you think is likely, is probably not particularly indicative of what actually happened because, flat out, you have no idea.

None of us really do at this point.

Has she given a contradictory version of events?

> Has she given a contradictory version of events?

To be fair, if she were preparing a wrongful termination suit, publicly commenting would be an unforced error.

It wouldn't be the first time Google miscalculated legal risk.

And they didn't say they fired her for exfiltrating documents. That's how most people will interpret what they said. But they left room to say it wasn't material.

Isn’t that “actually” exfiltrating company documents? Not Google, but I don’t remember any of my NDAs mentioning that I couldn’t share confidential/privileged/company information unless I really wanted to with my lawyer...

Laws override NDAs. Legal counsel is a common exception. Different jurisdictions have different specific rules.

Your NDAs probably don't say you can cooperate with law enforcement investigations either. But it's very unlikely a court would say you can't.

You still might need a legal order to obtain the documents.

Or you might not. Different jurisdictions have different rules.

Everyone is assuming it’s email, but you don’t need “a script” to search your own email, and you don’t need to risk getting fired sending emails to your lawyer, you just print them out. Or wait to get fired and get them during discovery. Google isn’t going to go into conspiracy mode and risk hundreds of millions over a line manager getting fired, that’s absurd.

It wouldn’t surprise me if this “script” was trying to pull documents from manager or HR only sources and that they were related to Gebru’s employment—hence the need for a script to do a search. Which would imply she was looking for ‘dirt’ outside of her normal access and responsibilities.

That scenario would explain a lot of what’s going on here.

Saying documents could mean emails doesn't assume it's email. Axios said the unnamed source said Mitchell looked through "her messages" though. And what other relevant files would there be thousands of?

Google Apps Script can do things Gmail search can't. Like regex.

Lawyers I know say don't rely on discovery if you can help it.

You think Google doesn't monitor printing?

I mean, generally speaking you can’t get fired for printing your own emails.

The political activist collective is slowly falling apart. If you get blamed for racism when firing an employee for telling colleagues not to pursue KPIs, there is not much you can do to continue placating these professional victims. They are now resorting to calling Google gaslighting for replacing Gebru with a Black person. It is low-brow ugly neo-racism, but then again, I don't really want Google AI in charge of AI ethics, with or without Gebru, so may the mess and reputation damage linger for a long time.

> The political activist collective is slowly falling apart.

In my heart and heart and dream of dreams, yes I wish that to be true. However my intuition tells me another generation with the same persona will pick up the banner again in a few years.

Dearest ones,

we have only just begun. See you next summer.

Thankfully not. For several reasons. Mainly...

"Reality has a way of asserting itself" - Obama

IMHO Philosophy is great and all for motivations and decoration, but for structural items like farming, biology, and architecture it's blind and mute. And the movement in question is a philosophical one, namely a bastard child of post-structuralism and select bone and gristle from Marxism. Sure, it'll rise again, like a bad penny zombie. But for now its lost half its population that just wanted Trump out the door.

Who was Gebru replaced with? I couldn't find anything when I looked it up (ironically on Google).

She wasn't, really.

For context, you had a reporting chain of Jeff Dean -> Megan Kacholia -> Samy Bengio -> Timnit Gebru/Meg Mitchell.

Timnit and Meg have been fired. Samy appears to have been sidelined, despite everyone involved in the ethical work liking Samy and finding him willing to protect them.

My best Guess is that Marian Croak (a Black woman who is currently an Engineering VP in an unrelated area) will approximately replace Megan Kacholia with Megan focusing on other areas, except that "ethical AI" was only a part of Samy's purview, much less Megan's, and its unclear if Marian is stepping down from her former position, or if she's going to split her time between ethical AI and completely unrelated work.

So there are no direct leads of the ethics team currently. There's a VP in charge who has other significant responsibilities and relatively junior researchers (some of whom are very recent hires with limited experience), and no one in the middle. So any chance of mentorship is gone, and the system is quite clearly adversarial. Those researchers have lost their direct and skip level manager, with no clear replacement. Lovely.

Doubt she was needed there first place, just good PR to hire someone related with ethics who is also POC and woman.

> They are now resorting to calling Google gaslighting for replacing Gebru with a Black person.

The complaint isn't what they did, it's what they didn't do. There were no substantive policy changes that could address the underlying issues. Tokenism without change isn't improvement.

What are the underlying issues?

Broadly there were two complaints:

1. Concerns about censorship of research critical of Google.

2. Concerns about diversity efforts within the Research organization.

Replacing someone with a proven track record of being above-average on diversity work, even to his own detriment, and who was willing to fight for his reports when they were censored by higher ups (Samy) with someone who is at best an unknown quantity (Marian) does not instill confidence.

Further, the claimed changes don't really do much. Supposedly, failures of DEI will be more impactful on perf for executives. Does that mean that the executives involved in this sequence of events will be dinged for mishandling this? My impression is no, or if anyone is, it'll be Samy.

As a sidebar, there's also the more nefarious thought that if you're being judged on the diversity of your org, firing a black woman and then bringing in a black woman executive means you won't get dinged for DE&I failures. Hence: tokenism without addressing the underlying issues, which might be summed up as many of the employees have no confidence in management.

Timnit and her supporters are toxic.

Can you imagine calling out your manager of manager on Twitter like this?

https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1278569638532530177

Like wtf. This happened 6 months before Timnit was fired.

I would absolutely not work with this person if they behaved like Timnit.

She and her supporters are absolutely fired for being toxic. They are playing martyr.

> I would absolutely not work with this person

What would that look like, would you quit? Give your boss an ultimatum? Something else?

To be real, I'd slowly move away and look for other projects that don't involve her.

If I was her boss, then, yeah, I'd probably want her to transfer away.

She called out her boss to take a stand in public against racism. It somewhat implies that Jeff Dean may not be against racism.

It's a really toxic tweet.

This tweet, what's wrong about it?

Timnit Gebru Jul 2, 2020 Yep generally you did, thanks. But not about me, Deb and others being attacked by White supremacists, anonymous accounts etc. Clear support means taking a clear stand. And this doesn’t seem to be ending.

Why would you call out your colleague to take a public stand?

You really don't see anything wrong with it? Wut?

And if he didn't, the implication would be that he was racist, basically.

Timnit doesn't take a stand on blacks attacking Asians on twitter either. Is she racist against Asians?

Now let's go through 1000 other issues in the world!

So, yeah, this whole charade of calling out your colleague to tweet about your cause on twitter is highly toxic.

They are both engaging on Twitter, and I don't see any calling out. Unless you find a good quote, that is just discussing, as adults should.

It may be bad choice on them both professionally, but you're singling out one..

Because she mentioned Jeff Dean first. Then, Jeff needed to ask what this was about.

Then, Jeff ended with "personal attack is not okay". Like huh?

At this point, we might as well ask Jeff to tweet that the earth is round. Otherwise, we would call him a flat earther.

This isn't called "engaging" when one side would assume you were racist if you didn't tweet to support their cause. The word you are looking for is strongarming.

The whole convo is just cringe.

Somehow the feed didn't scroll up as far as it did now. I see some other posts before those I saw first.

But that just confirms it, it's better to totally ignore any drama on Twitter, which also news organisations need to learn.

Who said what, in an online forum, is just not newsworthy.

I mean it would be hard to ignore when that person was your colleague...

I'm sure, if it was a random person ,Jeff would have ignored

If Google releases a statement defending themselves, it's a "smear campaign". If Google remains silent, it would be evidence that they were wrong.

I haven’t seen any of the “smear campaign”, just what these two employees have written publicly and, honestly, they both seem like entitled self-absorbed pains in the ass who crap on everything around them just because they didn’t get their way, who view anyone who disagrees with them as an idiot (or worse, evil), and as completely unprofessional and poorly prepared to be dealing with something of such significance at a $50B company.

These are people who should have never made it past individual contributer.

There is a difference between pushing your company towards a better place and dropping bombs every time someone disagrees with you, a distinction neither of these two seem to realize.

Microsoft did fire Caspar Bowden though.

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