Please read the article. I address some of the issues raised. My point is that Gebru's firing is symptomatic of some deep problems Google are experiencing. Thank you.
This is a very badly written and uniformed article, and sentences like these essentially illustrate the thinking here (It's imploding because I don't like it).
Here is an alternative reading: Google is cleaning house of toxic activists who are not interested in serious ethics research but use it as a vehicle for their ultra-progressive political agendas.
There is no real proof to this.
I'm following and reading research @ google (stuff like this https://ai.googleblog.com/ and other sources) for ages now and NOTHING indicates an 'implosion'.
It is strong research with real and constant results.
I have no idea why the autor would even consider using the word 'implode'.
Its not rocket science that data is biased and it just will continue be researched and a solution will be found. For the single reason that biased systems in certain areas will not deliver the results you need to use it properly.
well, they produce happy numbers for papers and depending on the brainwash-level of a population, they might also sufficiently often do the "right thing" towards minorities that noone cares too much about, independent of whether it would stand a chance against objective evaluation.
And the research they do is, even with this bias, ground breaking.
80% might be to get this thing running, 20% might be to finetune it for minorities.
When google started the ML stuff for translation, they did start with english, now they support much more languages than before.