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I guess Yann is making a statement about Twitter being a toxic cesspool or whatever. The thing is, in other public forums where he will make himself available f

I guess Yann is making a statement about Twitter being a toxic cesspool or whatever. The thing is, in other public forums where he will make himself available for open conversation, he will experience the same thing. When you are Chief AI Scientist at Facebook, you are the face of Facebook, whether you like it or not.

mc32 6y ago
On twitter people are trying to impress other people through one upping or being the wokest more so than in person. So, in person, people may stand up and shout, but moderates in the crowd will give them a minute to say their peace and then drown them out, if they drone on...
- randomsearch 6y ago
  Interest point. So whilst COVID-19 leaves us all stuck on twitter... we can expect the quality of debate to get worse until in-person discussions resume and act as a corrective.
pm90 6y ago
Sure, but he won’t be able to comment on shit and ignite another controversy, like what seems to happen on Twitter. People like him usually communicate to the world through conferences, papers and statements where the messaging is reviewed. Twitter let’s people speak their minds, and you know what? Most people who have not dealt with issues of racism and bias just don’t understand how to have a conversation about these things and screw up.
- KKKKkkkk1 6y ago
  I've been following Jeff Dean's twitter for about a year. Even if we put aside the technical contributions that he and his teams have made, that man is a paragon of leadership. Compassionate and yet so level-headed and reasonable.
  - pm90 6y ago
    Yes I agree with you but what’s the point? Everyone should be like Jeff Dean? Many people don’t have those qualities and don’t desire to have them. I have no idea who this person is, but it sounds like he’s not very good at engaging with the public on Twitter, so the best strategy for him is to leave the platform.
TAForObvReasons 6y ago
The criticisms leveled at LeCun has nothing to do with Facebook or his employment, but rather with his commentary. To summarize (in case you didn't read the article): > LeCun responded, “ML systems are biased when data is biased. This face upsampling system makes everyone look white because the network was pretrained on FlickFaceHQ, which mainly contains white people pics. > “The consequences of bias are considerably more dire in a deployed product than in an academic paper,” continued LeCun in a lengthy thread of tweets suggesting it’s not ML researchers that need to be more careful selecting data but engineers. Other AI scientists, most notably Google's Timnit Gebru, disagreed with the framing of the situation strictly in terms of dataset bias: > Research scientist, co-founder of the “Black in AI” group, and technical co-lead of the Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team at Google Timnit Gebru tweeted in response, “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.” It's an especially sensitive time now when AI is being used to power many judgments with real-life consequences.
- cottonseed 6y ago
  Not sure why you're being downvoted. I haven't been following this and I appreciated the summary.
lmm 6y ago
The level of discourse on Twitter is noticeably worse than every other major social platform (except YouTube comments if you count those). I'm sure people will have tough questions for him elsewhere, but the sheer nastiness is a distinctly Twitter phenomenon.

mc32 6y ago

On twitter people are trying to impress other people through one upping or being the wokest more so than in person. So, in person, people may stand up and shout, but moderates in the crowd will give them a minute to say their peace and then drown them out, if they drone on...

randomsearch 6y ago
Interest point. So whilst COVID-19 leaves us all stuck on twitter... we can expect the quality of debate to get worse until in-person discussions resume and act as a corrective.

pm90 6y ago

Sure, but he won’t be able to comment on shit and ignite another controversy, like what seems to happen on Twitter. People like him usually communicate to the world through conferences, papers and statements where the messaging is reviewed. Twitter let’s people speak their minds, and you know what? Most people who have not dealt with issues of racism and bias just don’t understand how to have a conversation about these things and screw up.

KKKKkkkk1 6y ago
I've been following Jeff Dean's twitter for about a year. Even if we put aside the technical contributions that he and his teams have made, that man is a paragon of leadership. Compassionate and yet so level-headed and reasonable.
- pm90 6y ago
  Yes I agree with you but what’s the point? Everyone should be like Jeff Dean? Many people don’t have those qualities and don’t desire to have them. I have no idea who this person is, but it sounds like he’s not very good at engaging with the public on Twitter, so the best strategy for him is to leave the platform.

TAForObvReasons 6y ago

The criticisms leveled at LeCun has nothing to do with Facebook or his employment, but rather with his commentary. To summarize (in case you didn't read the article): > LeCun responded, “ML systems are biased when data is biased. This face upsampling system makes everyone look white because the network was pretrained on FlickFaceHQ, which mainly contains white people pics. > “The consequences of bias are considerably more dire in a deployed product than in an academic paper,” continued LeCun in a lengthy thread of tweets suggesting it’s not ML researchers that need to be more careful selecting data but engineers. Other AI scientists, most notably Google's Timnit Gebru, disagreed with the framing of the situation strictly in terms of dataset bias: > Research scientist, co-founder of the “Black in AI” group, and technical co-lead of the Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team at Google Timnit Gebru tweeted in response, “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.” It's an especially sensitive time now when AI is being used to power many judgments with real-life consequences.

cottonseed 6y ago
Not sure why you're being downvoted. I haven't been following this and I appreciated the summary.

lmm 6y ago

The level of discourse on Twitter is noticeably worse than every other major social platform (except YouTube comments if you count those). I'm sure people will have tough questions for him elsewhere, but the sheer nastiness is a distinctly Twitter phenomenon.