In the examples the author cited, those activists and researchers were fired for reasons going beyond “asking Google to be a bit more ethical. And frankly it doesn’t seem ethical for activists, researchers, and the author to deliberately misconstrue facts whenever they believe they’re on the right side of an ethical (and sometimes just political) issue.
I've looked at some of the correspondence between Timnit and others and it's fairly unprofessional on her part if you ask me and it has this self righteousness tone to it too.
Another very funny thing people believe is that Google wanted to do "evil" things but their perfectly crafted plan fell apart at the last second when they realized that they have "do no evil" in their code of conduct. After much scrambling the order came from the top to quickly remove it to unblock the evil plans.
That said, there sure are jerks at Google like any other company but I've realized most these dramatic stories regurgitated by the media is BS
She was publishing studies critical of Google, Google wanted at least the right to have studies of the company reviewed and to include more updated information etc. which is extremely gracious on the part of Google.
She gave the company an ultimatum i.e. 'Change the Terms or I Quit' so they said 'We're not changing the terms, we accept your resignation'.
It's galling how many people (and their supporters) think that they have a right to be employed by a company and then publicly criticize them with misleading information, unmitigated or reviewed by the company.
In exchange for this tradeoff you get a lot better salary and don’t have to feel like all of your time is spent chasing grants.
So you are doing research within a slightly more defined scope. If you still call it research then the results are completely separate from your affiliation.
If not, it’s not research, it’s just propaganda.
Of course the CoC is not binding, but having that in there was a statement, which meant, roughly interpreted, "the impact of our work should not be net negative". The removal of the line itself did not change anything, of course, but it was a clear statement that this priority had been dropped. I think it's quite obvious why this is seen as not great.
Second, if you were wearing "I'm a good guy" badge on your shirt and later on decided to go rogue and work for the enemy, would you then remove that badge right away? Of course not unless you're truly incompetent at being bad.
I'd understand it if they got rid of the wording because of how much headache it creates for them.
Btw, that's basically why government and business officials often resort to saying the least informative statements. Because every word and sound bite will be used against them.
Well otherwise it would be considered securities fraud
Objectively, there was nothing wrong with her paper.
You may have a point about the other researchers. I'm not familiar enough with their situations. But I dug into Timnit's pretty thoroughly.
Their recent behavior isn't too encouraging either: https://archive.md/7jCQY
(Related Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/jackclarkSF/status/1451273190974660612)
Hopefully everyone will just chill out and focus on research.
The details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25313994
Discussion about whether the review process was normal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25308847
And hers case was especially easy, since she said she will leave the company if the policy isn't changed. Google didn't want to change the policy. What Google might have been wrong about here is if they reported this as her voluntarily leaving, even if you could argue it is Google firing her. But nobody really cares about that that detail, it isn't important and the story wouldn't blow up if that was the only thing they claimed Google did wrong.
The policy seemed to be made up specifically for her paper. Her paper already passed the standard internal review, and she alerted them months before the conference that her paper was going to be submitted.
If Google, for whatever reason, wanted to have the paper undergo a bit of extra scrutiny, it's entirely within their purview.
Regardless, being upset because you didn’t get your way doesn’t give you carte blanche to do unprofessional things that will get you fired. You can’t say “Give me X or I quit” and not assume there’s a chance your bluff will be called (especially when “X” is a demand for the company to violate its own policies).
But this is all another deflection. Whether the paper was rejected by a regular process or an irregular process, it doesn’t condone her actions that followed.
This is where we'll have to agree to disagree.
As you can see in this thread, she was treated unfairly. Someone confirmed to you that this is the case, and you're still arguing that her subsequent behavior was unjustifiable.
I think her subsequent behavior was a result of the unfair treatment. I'm not sure how I would've reacted in her place, and I have a lot of empathy for a scientist who is being scrutinized outside of normal policies.
Her paper was anodyne. No one would've blinked if it was published. And I think you keep saying that it's okay for a research department to stop publication of scientific work regardless of whether the paper was mistaken or not.
You've said that it needs revisions. I work in ML. It seemed not to need any revisions, as far as I could tell. Google's reaction seemed far out of proportion for what the paper claimed.
You can say "Well, that's life. Google didn't do anything wrong." The former is true, but I'm skeptical of the latter.
This is not true.
The fact that she may or may not have had extra scrutiny than others, within regular policy or not is completely besides the point.
If a company, for whatever reason, wants to have 'another review' of the paper, it's completely within their purview.
"Her paper was anodyne. No one would've blinked if it was published."
Our view of whether it was notable or not is irrelevant. If the company wanted to put the brakes on it, especially because it related to Google, then that's their choice.
It's hugely arrogant for her to make the claims she did - let alone publicly (!) - by all right she should have been fired for that, she was luckily the conditions enabled her to even try to establish the premise of her own resignation.
You can simultaneously believe that Google has the right to quash any paper, and believe that doing so arbitrarily is unfair. So yes, she was treated unfairly. And that's absolutely relevant to people's decision making. Like, what do you think it's irrelevant in relation to?
Its not clear what you mean by publicly, nothing was done outside of Google until after she was fired.
After the, (my words), harrasment of Lacun on Twitter, the sort of belittling of the internal award she was given (you'd have to really think they were evil to give her an award just to gaslight her), plus the short notice ultimatum to a very senior person (one level down from Jeff Dean right?)....no offense but from the outside she seems exhausting to manage.
The abstract came out, and honestly the paper was so so. Obviously it went against googles business model, but it'd be a wayyyy bigger scandal if they burried it.
Maybe Jeff Dean is a liar, but his comment was the paper missed incorporating significant recent research. As head of the group, and just out of respect towards the institution and to science, pondering it for more than 48 hours before bouncing on vacation or heaven forbid presenting at the next conference would have been reasonable.
Biased external view though. YRMV.
A social-justice themed charade is being made out of just being salty at getting fired.
It’s pretty likely the reviewer would have been harassed - a good thing perhaps if you have one view of thing - but a bad thing from another perspective.
Google refused and accepted that she writing be able to continue working there
I think it's worth reflecting on why we're so quick to believe the corporate version of events. Corporations have an astronomical amount of power and influence. Aren't you at least a little curious whether it's true?
And if there was nothing wrong with her paper, that raises the question of why an anonymous reviewer was grilling her about it.
I reflected on it and found that it mainly happens when the person affect have their entire work life on basis of their politics as opposed other victims of corporate malfeasance who get plenty of support/ empathy from general community.
Her paper got got flagged during internal review. There wasn’t time to revise it because she submitted it late. She then wrote an angry rant to her coworkers that claimed she was oppressed and told them to stop working. And then she demanded the name of the anonymous reviewer and threatened to quit if the company did not meet her demand.
Your defense is that most papers were submitted late without a problem. Perhaps most papers don’t need revisions, but this one did, and there’s no excuse for how she handled it.
I’ve had papers rejected from my company’s internal review process. It sucks, but it’s not the end of the world. You make some revisions and submit to the next conference. You don’t go ballistic and tell your coworkers their work is meaningless and threaten to quit unless you get your way.
And somehow you managed throughout to completely disregard Timnit’s own responsibility in the situation.
That sounds to me like what strikes do. Sometimes they do go down well, sometimes they don't.
She's a disgrace to the research community.
Not once in the paper does she mention that Google has been carbon neutral since 2008, because that would trash half her paper. The paper seemed of desperation to make non existent arguments.
Google buying green electricity makes green electricity cheaper, not more expensive. More producers are incentivized to produce green electricity as Google's demand increases continuously. Other companies like Microsoft and Facebook go green as well, and the economies of scale kick in. Prices start collapsing. This is actually happening right now.
If I go solar today with my home, it is not a negative action that displaces someone else. It actually expands the solar industry and enables cheaper solar in the future.
Without early customers, green energy would never have taken off.
But I suspect that will actually be worse from CO2 emissions perspective.
But its use has environmental costs and we are in big trouble with climate change. As long as there is fossil made electricity flowing in the grid, marginal changes in demand can be viewed as contributing to its production, because electricity is fungible (modulo transmission considerations).
Carbon neutrality works by subsidizing the costs of reducing carbon emissions at source. Trying to shit on that makes you regressive, not progressive.
I do understand and somewhat agree with the "perfect is the enemy of good" thinking, but it's still good to be aware and keep outselves honest about the difference between them.
The marginal CO2 perspective is in fact an establilished thing in the industry, see eg [1] [2].
Regarding "insurmountable demands", not sure what you're referring to here, the discussion was about whether there are significant indirect co2 & environmental costs to "carbon neutral" electricity as defined by Google, which I argued there are.
[1] https://www.nwcouncil.org/energy/marginal-carbon-dioxide-pro...
[2] https://www.tmrow.com/blog/marginal-carbon-intensity-of-elec...
The marginal cost of puchasing more energy might go down (or it might go up if you are pushing up the demand). But not the total expenditure on energy.
> Prices start collapsing. This is actually happening right now.
Thermal coal prices are at all time record highs right now. It's 4x the price it was a few years ago when we were all hearing about how solar has become cheaper than coal.
It's not that solar generation suddenly became far more expensive for some supernatural reason. It's that demand for electricity outweighs the installed capacity of renewables.
Are you sure that if the situation were inverted you wouldn't still be complaining? Damned if you, damned if you don't.
The negative externalities of CO2 are long term and not short term. So your complaints are counter productive.
https://www.dezeen.com/2021/07/30/carbon-neutrality-google-s...
The point is that electricity can have a green source, liquid carbon fuel can't. You absolutely cannot compare the two. FWIW, Google's data centers are primarily powered by green energy.
But not since they declared themselves carbon neutral (which they originally accomplished with certificates). Note the original claim was 'carbon neutral since 2008'. Google also uses a large amount of resources besides electrical energy, so claiming to be neutral is a scam unless they actually sequester co2 permanently.
> You can use the same argument to argue that EVs are a scam, because some electricity is generated by coal.
It's not the same argument. But I do argue that EVs are not carbon neutral.
I am going to have to ask for a citation for this. They claim to be carbon neutral, not that they don't use any resources at all.
>> > Google's data centers are primarily powered by green energy.
> But not since they declared themselves carbon neutral
Nobody has made this claim
> Note the original claim was 'carbon neutral since 2008'.
Which is true.
> But I do argue that EVs are not carbon neutral.
That is obvious
It sounds like you're saying that the calculations weren't mistaken, but that she didn't mention the carbon neutral status of Google as a whole.
Electricity from the grid can come from green sources, and in the particular case if Google, it actually does. Comparing electricity consumption for a one time training with jet fuel usage is absurd.
Moreover, the paper doesn't mention any possible benefit of building such nlp models. Increased accessibility of web content across languages and for disabled people.
Google, simply through its search, maps and navigation saves a lot of wasted carbon. Complaining about the power consumption of ML models is absolutely ridiculous.
Her paper reeked of desperation to find something, anything within the AI space that could be posted as an ethical dilemma.
Reading that paper convinced me that Timnit could bring absolutely no value to AI as a field, in terms of ethics or otherwise.
"We first consider environmental risks. Echoing a line of recent work outlining the environmental and financial costs of deep learn- ing systems [129], we encourage the research community to priori- tize these impacts. One way this can be done is by reporting costs and evaluating works based on the amount of resources they con- sume [57]. As we outline in §3, increasing the environmental and financial costs of these models doubly punishes marginalized com- munities that are least likely to benefit from the progress achieved by large LMs and most likely to be harmed by negative environ- mental consequences of its resource consumption. At the scale we are discussing (outlined in §2), the first consideration should be the environmental cost."
This whole paragraph is such a reach, and so absurd that it seems like a parody. Are we supposed to believe that marginalized communities are being harmed by Google training NLP models using green energy? Or will they benefit from better translation from English language content into marginalized languages?
Timnit has zero interest in what actually benefits marginalized communities. She uses them as a prop to build a career in high paying AI field where, apparently, the sub field of ai fairness has a low bar for publication.
Google handled Dr Gebru’s exit differently than that of Anthony Levandowski, Andy Rubin, David Drummond, etc etc because Jeff Dean made the call in timing and he was really that clueless about public optics, especially with Tensorflow’s huge following. Moreover, Dr Gebru didn’t have the bankroll to fund a legal team like any of the others listed.
A lot of the posts here suggest Google is struggling with scale. Dr Gebru’s case definitely would have been handled differently were Google a smaller company. Also if there wasn’t COVID—- keep in mind she was fired a couple days before Thanksgiving during COVID. The whole country was a mess then.
That is just very dishonest. She gave an ultimatum. Execs accepted the ultimatum. You are gaslighting other people on this topic. At the very least, you should've acknowledged that this is up to an interpretation.
Regardless whether she was fired or quit, she was toxic as hell. She dragged Jeff Dean into an unrelated matter in public and implied Jeff Dean supported personal attack.
https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1278569638532530177 -- this happened a few months before she left or was fired from google
If a direct report did this to me, I would've wanted them to leave. In this case, Gebru wanted to leave (according to her ultimatum). Jeff Dean wanted her to leave (I don't doubt this. nobody wanted to work with a colleage who attacked them on twitter). I see a happy ending for both.
Gebru and her supporters have been dishonest about the whole thing.
The reason Dr Gebru’s case is so divisive in tech (especially in this thread) is because so many are agnostic or ignorant of the role of ethics in tech; and almost every employee is ignorant of how Legal/HR execute retaliation. Anthony Levandowski is a literal criminal and yet is still enjoying tens of millions of dollars of Google’s money. Same with Andy Rubin. Even Michael Church is rich. If one percent of the energy spent fighting Dr Gebru was put into fighting the real scumbags in tech… you’d have something more like Google before it got greedy with scale.
Please note that this was months before she left.
The 3 names you mentioned have nothing to do with Jeff Dean.
Handling those 3 people has nothing to do with supporting Gebru or Jeff Dean.
This has nothing to do with Gebru being a toxic person.
Before or after she demanded that the company release the name of an anonymous reviewer?
Before or after she told them to schedule her last day if they didn’t meet her demands?