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Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google
- twentytwo11 6y agoApart for calling people racist for having a different argumented opinion, like she did with LeCun, what else is she known for?
- contemporary343 6y agohttps://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=timnit+gebru https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=timnit+gebru
- twentytwo11 6y agoVery typical for a scientist to have a list of publications. Do you point to some specific piece of work?
- peanoman 6y agoThe link sorts papers by number of citations so the most famous piece of work is literally the first one you see when the page loads.
- black_puppydog 6y agoWhat else do you want? Be weary of "rockstar" scientists. Science is for the most part about incremental insights, and shouldn't make you famous.
- MaximumYComb 6y agoNot much really. She had a really good PhD research paper but besides that she seems to just be playing racial politics.
- fhrow4484 6y agoAny details on what happened? Trying to get context, I see big names professors from Stanford, Caltech, Berkeley, Cornell all commenting/retweeting on how bad this is, so it's a big deal for sure
- IvyMike 6y agoOne of her tweets says: > I was fired by @JeffDean for my email to Brain women and Allies. In a later tweet, says she would repost the email publicly but she no longer has access to it. I'm guessing it will leak soon.
- germanjoey 6y agoWhat's "Brain Women and Allies"?
- trynewideas 6y agoGoogle Brain is a deep learning artificial intelligence research team at Google. Google Brain Women and Allies is a mailing list within the team.
- PeterStuer 6y agoAre mailing lists in Google gender segregated?
- whoknew1122 6y agoIt's pretty common in large corporations to have 'affinity groups', which discuss topics that affect the group. I don't work at Google; I work at Amazon. I can only speak about my experience, but it's likely the same at Google. You don't have to be a part of an affinity group to be a member of the mailing list (that's where the ..and Allies portion comes into play). The 'Google Brain Women and Allies' mailing list is probably full of women from the Google Brain team, non-binary and men from in from the Google Brain team, and others who aren't on the Google Brain team but are interested in its work. Again, I don't know. But this is educated conjecture based on my experience at another FAANG.
- throwaway-kmc 6y agoAll this says is, she sent a mail to Brain Women and Allies that resulted in her immediate termination. Does anyone else remember when she picked a fight with Yann LeCunn by deliberately misinterpreting his remarks to cast him as a racist? Seems reasonable to assume she picked another fight. Reading the Twitter threat, it reads like she made demands in a way visible to a large number of employees (something about authorship on a paper, to skim the Twitter thread) and perhaps attacked Google while being a manager there (the emphasis on talking to non-management employees sounds like this). I assume the email will leak, this being Google we are talking about.
- esyir 6y agoSounds like a win to me then.
- thundergolfer 6y agoSays she deliberately attempts to cast LeCunn as a racist is a very uncharitable framing, but putting that aside, it doesn’t actually seem reasonable to assume she picked a fight. We have no idea what was in the email.
- throwaway-kmc 6y agoHow would you describe what happened? LeCunn calmly and rationally explained that a particular model produced biased results, and that that this was due to the bias in its training data. He was then excoriated as a racist by this woman and the Twitter mobs she incited, to the point where this Turing Award winner is no longer willing to engage with the public via that medium. LeCunn made repeated attempts to explain his position, only to be virtually shouted over about he wasn’t listening to people of color because he pointed out that a model trained on White people learned to produce images of White people, and that if it had been trained on Black people it would produce images of Black people. It was a research paper, not a production system, and Gebru and her acolytes were much more interested in scoring cheap points than in having a serious conversation about either ML fairness or the merits of this particular paper. Seriously, the primary sources can be read by anyone.
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- totorovirus 6y agoWave of political correctness hit the AI industry. I wonder to what extent this PC thing is going to reach.
- timnit-drama 6y agoThe email she posted [1] makes it pretty clear that she sent an email with some demands/conditions (separate from the one "to Brain women and allies") and said that she would resign if they weren't met. Google said they wouldn't agree to them, accepted her threatened resignation, and told her it was effective immediately. Without knowing more context, it sounds like she tried to do some hardball negotiating by threatening to leave, and got her bluff called. Quoting the tweets for posterity, link at the bottom: > I need to be very careful what I say so let me be clear. They can come after me. No one told me that I was fired. You know legal speak, given that we're seeing who we're dealing with. This is the exact email I received from Megan who reports to Jeff > Who I can't imagine would do this without consulting and clearing with him of course. So this is what is written in the email: > Thanks for making your conditions clear. We cannot agree to #1 and #2 as you are requesting. We respect your decision to leave Google as a result, and we are accepting your resignation. > However, we believe the end of your employment should happen faster than your email reflects because certain aspects of the email you sent last night to non-management employees in the brain group reflect behavior that is inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager. > As a result, we are accepting your resignation immediately, effective today. We will send your final paycheck to your address in Workday. When you return from your vacation, PeopleOps will reach out to you to coordinate the return of Google devices and assets. [1]: https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1334364732480958467 https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1334364732480958467
- techbusters 6y agoThere is still a civil way to accept a resignation, with proper timelines and transfer of responsibilities. She offered to resign in some time due to some demands, and the immediate termination seems to be related to an email unrelated to those demands. This sounds a lot like a sleazy move by Google to couch an immediate firing as a resignation.
- unishark 6y agoI'd call it petty more than sleazy. Drama queens on both sides.
- zestyping 6y agoAccording to Gebru, this is the text of the email she received from Megan. https://imgur.com/a/1P7HQFW https://imgur.com/a/1P7HQFW
- cyrus20 6y agoRacism exists. Pay discrimination exists. Yet, you can't go about breaking every norm and rule if you are famous and from an under-represented group. I also saw the tweets at Yann LeCun. I'm not his biggest fan, but that wasn't right. She's hurting minorities for her own agenda. Edit: removed info about myself.
- whymauri 6y ago>Yet, you can't go about breaking every norm and rule if you are famous and from an under-represented group. Unless you still work at Google, how do you know she actually broke any rules? As far as I know, her e-mail to the Brain list is not public?
- unishark 6y agoThe question is whether that Twitter exchange was an isolated outburst (of the kind that reminds us all to stay away from social media, at least using our real name) or an example of typical behavior that led to this firing.
- ramraj07 6y agoI've never heard of a 300% pay gap between people doing the same job, how does that even happen? Were you paid significantly under par or did that other person somehow hit jackpot? And at what level are we talking about?
- hypervisorxxx 6y agoLol
- cyrus20 6y agoSorry, I'm gonna not answer just because I don't want to make it about myself and also don't want to reveal my identity.
- 93po 6y agoI have personally worked somewhere where the person who did the same work as me was paid 3x as me. I was new to the workforce and he was best friends with the CFO for 15 years. Despite my newness and her experience it was the same work.
- contemporary343 6y agoReading through some of her earlier tweets there seemed to have been conflict around her/ her team pursuing a particular research direction or projects, directions that higher ups were not happy about because of how it might make Google look. This is ultimately the limitation of being a researcher in a company - some topics will be off limits and you’re not allowed to poke around things that will make the company look bad. By virtue of their research area, her and her team no doubt push against this limit very often. Based on this, I’m not sure it’s possible to really pursue many lines of research inquiry into AI ethics and fairness within a place like Google.
- techbusters 6y agoyeah really makes you wonder why these tech companies pretend to be the good guys and hire ethics teams, when they don't intend to follow through when conflicts of interests arise.
- jl2718 6y agoAre there any publications or results that show what she accomplished as a research scientist at google? What is considered the leading edge of the field of in AI ethics research? Had she accomplished something of great distinction in this field prior to google? Was her google street view result related to ethics? I would assume that ethics research would involve how an AI can learn to act ethically. Perhaps something about how an AI treats a sentient versus non-sentient impediment, like how it would decide whether to stop for ducklings or just run them over, whether it has the ability to learn a function for long-term social implications of its actions, specifically longer than the training stimulus, which is the remarkable function of the human prefrontal lobe, or only considers short-term task reward.
- manux 6y ago> Are there any publications or results that show what she accomplished as a research scientist at google? Yes. [1] > Had she accomplished something of great distinction in this field prior to google? Yes. [1] [1] https://scholar.google.ca/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=timnit+gebru&btnG=&oq=timnit+ https://scholar.google.ca/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=timni...
- dogecoinbase 6y agoIt's incredibly disappointing to see the first batch of top-level comments here. Timnit is an absolute leader and inspiration in the field, and has been outspoken in dragging the old school of machine-learning-is-money-laundering-for-bias crowd into modernity. This move makes it clear that Google has no commitment to Ethical AI as a field; they want rhetorical cover for their ongoing bad actions.
- twentytwo11 6y agoAccording to her, Yann LeCun is a racist just because he said that a specific ML model was biased due to a bias in the data and not because ML learning as a research field was racist. Such an inspiration!
- dogecoinbase 6y agoLack of insight into structural and systemic bias is indeed the plague of modern ML research, and at this point is so well-understood that carelessness is no longer excusable, and passes into true negligence (or worse).
- compycom 6y agoShe didn't call him a racist. She pointed out that there's more to addressing bias than just acknowledging that it's there. If you are going to say "Well, garbage-in, garbage-out!", why do you keep putting the racist garbage in? Why do you, knowing of the problem, keep using biased sources of data, knowing of the potential harms? That's the deeper question ML research/industry has to grapple with. When these models are deployed increasingly quickly and at scale in ways that can potentially cause massive harm, why is it okay to keep doing the same exact harmful things? LeCun mentioned that there would have been opposite problem if it were trained on a dataset from Senegal. But why wasn't it trained on a dataset from Senegal? Why do we always see these errors where white-centric datasets produce white-centric results? It's obvious that while it would be a symmetric situation a vacuum, we do not live in a vacuum. We live in a world with deep sociocultural biases in favor and against various racial groups. And it is unjust to let AI perpetuate and entrench these biases by acting at with this bias at scale. Acknowledging dataset bias by itself doesn't address the bias meaningfully. In practice, we often treat the bias as an exogenous factor when it is not, moving it outside the scope of our responsibility. But it is very much the product of our work, a reflection of our choices, values, and beliefs about what to prioritize. We can't abdicate our responsibility for it (even if we choose not to prioritize it.)
- schneepart 6y agoyou live by the sword, you die by the sword. she wants to work for an elite American corporation but thinks she doesn’t have to abide by the rules. well this is not how corporations work and as anyone NOT privileged enough to have only had cushy research jobs can tell you you get fired for insubordination. she can try to re-imagine the system from the outside but who are we kidding? these sanctimonious woke capitalists are no revolutionaries, they just want a piece of the pie without having to incur the concomitant moral costs. ironic that she can expect to marshal support just by ranting on twitter - if that’s not privilege, then what is?
- jmeister 6y agoI hope with this episode and Coinbase, SV will lead the fight against toxic SJWs. I’ve always thought only SV has the freedom and power to start this fight. Then academia and other institutions can follow and ride the momentum.
- evgen 6y agoInteresting opinion, since the most recent info to come out of coinbase is that the SJWs were right and upper management are unconscionable assholes. (Oh yeah, let me see now.... they are 'on the spectrum', which is I guess what we white males need to say to excuse our anti-social or racist behavior.)
- throwaway_33455 6y agoShe is being very selective with the information she is choosing to release. She made demands to Google which they did not accept, but she does not specify what those demands were. She also says that she doesn't have a copy of the post she made to the "Brain women and allies", but she doesn't summarize it either, and given her position, I imagine she could get a copy from someone else in the group if she cared to. I'd suggest given Timnit is choosing to only tell a very small part of the story here, and Google is obviously not going to publicly comment on an HR matter, especially one this sensitive, that it's best to withhold judgment.
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- dshpala 6y agoHeh, considering how popular Jeff Dean is at Google, she doesn't have a chance here, even before LeCunn incident. Better suck it up and go somewhere.
- jiuahweruihawi 6y agoI'm sure she'll make a good asset to any company that wants a totally dysfunctional office culture where everyone is terrified at every moment of doing the slightest thing to upset the wokes.
- black_puppydog 6y agoRead: her concerns about entrenched privilege are actually valid and you fully condone them? Great stance to take bruh.
- dshpala 6y agoOr: she won't be able to play black/minority card against Jeff, and will have to civilly discuss the matters. But judging from her tweets this is not happening, bruh.
- black_puppydog 6y agoAfter reading the mailing list mail in question (pending confirmation that it is authentic) I think Jeff Dean should have been well aware of the situation. I quoted the relevant parts here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25292266 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25292266 Assuming Dean was aware, this civil discussion should have happened either in the meeting described, or shortly thereafter. So far we only know her story on this meeting, but that story sure makes it sound like there was no discussion to be had.
- bryan_w 6y agoThe comments here are weird right now. They seem overly focused on the spat she and Yann LeCun had a while back when it doesn't seem like this incident is about that? Hopefully some clarification comes out about what her demands were and the internet drops their pitchfork about something that happened long ago
- apsec112 6y agoIt was only five months ago, not really that long in the scheme of things.
- bosswipe 6y agoThe LeCun affair is pretty good evidence that she's a hot head who's more than willing to provoke public drama.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoIt's a pattern of behavior. She had a thread just last week calling her employers "a bunch of privileged White men" and complaining that they were disrespecting her by not letting her work on some unspecified research project. https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1331757629996109824 https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1331757629996109824
- MaximumYComb 6y agoHow does she think that's acceptable? You don't slander your boss in public unless you think you're untouchable or you want out.
- spoopyskelly 6y agoEvery time one of these Twitter warriors with pronouns in bio gets put in their place the world gets a little bit better.
- lowercase1 6y agoI mean if you are a bias/ethics researcher and your bosses ignore/limit your work then there are reasons to complain/whistleblow.
- notsureaboutpg 6y agoEthical AI is, like many things "ethical" which originated in elite universities, not really all that ethical at all. It's leaders often have a warped ethical framework as well. That's my take on this.
- villgax 6y agoShe's hurting the minorities with her own damn agenda & not abiding by rules from her workplace, well deserved.
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- throwaway432334 6y agoI think this is a great argument for why unionization in tech is going to be important. Right now the only way to disagree with unethical actions by your employer is leaving; easily replaced.
- angry_octet 6y agoBut is this truly the situation where a union makes a difference? She hasn't been fired unfairly for someone who is a senior manager. She has ready employment possibilities and won't experience any hardship. I'd rather they kept their powder dry to protect employees fired for things like union organisation, and protecting the workforce during large layoffs/reorgs, individuals discriminated against for their race/religion/sexuality, being compelled to take actions that are immoral/illegal etc. None of which seem to apply here.
- worker767424 6y ago> So I've been immediately fired :-) Who ends that sentence with a smiley?
- MaximumYComb 6y agoSomoene who's career relies up, and grows by, finding ways to stay relevant.
- MagnumOpus 6y agoSomeone who creates and relishes drama.
- whoknew1122 6y agoIt could be someone who uses humor as a coping mechanism in stressful situations. I respond to stressful and/or tragic situations with sardonic/dark/derisive humor. It's a coping mechanism for me. Some people cry. I crack jokes. Just yesterday I said in a meeting with my boss 'No one wants to touch that project, because the customer gives out negative feedback like cheap halloween candy.' If I were fired from my job in a way I felt was unfair, I'd probably do something similar.
- busrf 6y agoHere's a tweet with more details about her conditions and how that ties in to her resignation: https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1334341991795142667 https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1334341991795142667 > Apparently my manager’s manager sent an email my direct reports saying she accepted my resignation. I hadn’t resigned—I had asked for simple conditions first and said I would respond when I’m back from vacation. But I guess she decided for me :) that’s the lawyer speak. > I said here are the conditions. If you can meet them great I’ll take my name off this paper, if not then I can work on a last date. Then she sent an email to my direct reports saying she has accepted my resignation. So that is google for you folks. You saw it happen right here. In the email she posted, it seems that they "accelerated the timeline" for her termination because "certain aspects of the email you sent last night to non-management employees in the brain group reflect behavior that is inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager", i.e. a separate email from her conditions email. It seems like she was ready to leave if they didn't meet her conditions, and that this would have been a reasonable outcome for her. However, it bothers me that they wouldn't even come to the table about the non-condition email. Like OK, "inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager". That's some weak shit. It had better be something pretty fucking severe for them to fire her immediately and not, I don't know, do some planning around transitioning her projects? Work out what to do with the team she herself managed? Be given the grace of leaving on a good note that an engineer of her caliber deserves? She's a leader of their ethical AI group. What happens to that group and all of their research and direction now? Who do they hire to replace her? This isn't the same level of impact as firing a cog in the wheel IC who gets too uppity with organizing. This stinks like a convenient excuse to shoo an AI ethics researcher asking some inconvenient questions out the door.
- MaximumYComb 6y agoTo me, it stinks like a convenient excuse to remove someone who was difficult to work with. Only last week she slandered her bosses on Twitter, which is a public forum.
- busrf 6y agoMatthew Garrett, a senior security researcher at Google, is very critical about Google on his Twitter all the time. As he has pointed out, he's still very employed. https://twitter.com/mjg59/status/1334382463498391557 https://twitter.com/mjg59/status/1334382463498391557 Neither of us are on her team at Google. (I'm certainly not and I doubt you are.) We have no idea how easy it is to work with her. Certainly if I were working with an AI ethics researcher I would expect them to ask difficult and uncomfortable questions. I think that's part of the job description.
- ramblerman 6y agoShe just retweeted: "They (tech companies) stay coming after black women." https://twitter.com/chenaichair/status/1334384579596197889 https://twitter.com/chenaichair/status/1334384579596197889 The casualness to make this now about race/gender as well when that wasn't even her inital argument. I can't imagine working in this kind of environment. It must be exhausting, always having to tread on eggshells or end up on a twitter firing squad. Not being able to argue points, without it ending up being about race/gender. Do we really have to pretend that someone blessed to be working on AI at google with the greatest minds on something so exciting is disadvantaged compared to the rest of us?
- visarga 6y agoI remember reading on her twitter around the Yann LeCun scandal time, she acknowledged her privilege while calling Yann on his. I didn't like how a man's output was seen as the result of privilege instead of hard work.
- whimsicalism 6y agoWhy is it an either/or? I don't see how people can deny that people take you more seriously on tech stuff if you're a man. It's pretty obvious to me, honestly. Equally obvious, you're not going to become a top AI researcher without being immensely talented.
- berdario 6y ago[Redacted, since I don't want to fuel speculation] It always was (also) about race/gender! That said, I don't know Timnit, and I don't know her specific circumstances... I believe that Google is full of people who wants to solve these problems, but somehow leadership fails to capitalize on that. It might only be a few bad apples in the leadership, but each one wields a huge amount of power (hiring and firing people)...
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoI mean, I don't know what "dared" has to do with it. It's unfortunate that we're working off incomplete information here, but that's not our fault - unless there's a recent leak I haven't seen, nobody's made the email available to read.
- FreekNortier 6y agoOff topic but I thought Timnit was a male name.
- jiuahweruihawi 6y agoI was curious so I looked it up. According to Timnit Gebru's Wikipedia page she was born in Ethiopia but her parents are from Eritrea. I can't find it again but I saw something somewhere about "Timnit" meaning "wish" in Tigrinya, a language spoken in Eritrea and northern Ethiopia. Here's a tweet from Timnit Gebru mentioning that she speaks Tigrinya, presumably natively: https://twitter.com/timnitgebru/status/1078042727936376833?lang=en-gb https://twitter.com/timnitgebru/status/1078042727936376833?l... So it appears to be a Tigrinya name. TIL.
- draw_down 6y agoCome on
- renewiltord 6y agoUnfamiliar with a culture, it is easy to make these mistakes. I thought Taylor, Blake, Charlie, and Hayden were male names. Apparently they're practically unisex in their use.
- jiuahweruihawi 6y agoThere's so much context missing here. What did she post on Google Brain? What were the demands she made to Google? Are these in the public domain? (If they're not public then I imagine they'll be leaked eventually if this gets enough media attention. Are we witnessing the opening act of Google's next enormous Damore-style PR clusterfuck? Grab your popcorn.)
- sumtechguy 6y agoYeah there is a lot missing here. I personally have ever seen the 'do x or I quit' move work exactly once. The second time they tried it they took them up on the offer. They were even very nice to work with and were part of the 'do not fire this person or it is chaos' team. When he did it the first time he said 'I can only do this once if I try again they will fire me on the spot'. He did it a second time just to see if they would match his external offer (they let him ride the 2 weeks at least). You usually only get one shot at that sort of move. If you do it all the time, managers start looking for ways to offload you. You will be seen as a threat to org stability as you come off as unreliable. No matter how key you are.
- alew1 6y agoThe comments here are disheartening, essentially a combination of “It was Google’s right to fire her” and “She seemed ‘difficult.’” For an industry-operated “Ethics in AI” group to have any teeth, it can’t fire people when they do research that makes them look bad, or when members of the group are ‘difficult.’ (Multiple members of the team she managed have said that she was a great manager and this came as a total surprise [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]; so it’s also worth asking who she was causing difficulties for... and whether it was her, or just her research.) Google can’t have it both ways: it can’t credibly claim to be home to meaningful research about AI ethics, but not provide the tenure-like academic freedom protections that enable researchers in universities to discover and publicize results without regard for whether they paint a company’s products or direction in a bad light. [1] https://twitter.com/negar_rz/status/1334369747241218050 https://twitter.com/negar_rz/status/1334369747241218050 [2] https://twitter.com/dylnbkr/status/1334395186705702913 https://twitter.com/dylnbkr/status/1334395186705702913 [3] https://twitter.com/L_badikho/status/1334393782310227970 https://twitter.com/L_badikho/status/1334393782310227970 [4] https://twitter.com/alexhanna/status/1334348137616568321 https://twitter.com/alexhanna/status/1334348137616568321 [5] https://twitter.com/dylnbkr/status/1334372430437994500 https://twitter.com/dylnbkr/status/1334372430437994500
- derivada 6y agopeople here have been passing premature judgement, as have you. You are projecting criticism of the commenters onto google; it hasn't been stablished that google fired her because she was difficult or made them look bad. There is indeed a scenario where that is the case, but there are others where Google is right to fire her without undermining their ethical position; to say otherwise is to say that she is infallible, an attribute usually reserved to religious groups. If she wants some non faith based support, she should be transparent about the terms of the email where she put forward conditions to the company.
- cvhashim 6y agoSeems to be a large number of people defending Google on here when every other other day, Google is the target (and rightly so) for criticism on HN. Would this be a bigger issue with the HN crowd had it not been a black woman? Edit: and here come the downvotes :/
- iron0013 6y agoYou gonna change this one to say she “resigned” too?
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- pmarreck 6y ago1) We don't know what her demands were. Perhaps they were unreasonable. 2) She sent them right after an email blast that apparently rubbed execs the wrong way. 3) Then she threatened to leave and they called her bluff. If I was a manager and an otherwise well-respected BUT irate employee who made unreasonable demands threatened to leave right after sending out a controversial email blast, I think I'd let them leave, as well. Negativity doesn't produce positive solutions.
- breatheoften 6y agoIs there a difference when collecting unemployment when fired vs resigning?
- munchbunny 6y agoUsually resigning doesn't get you severance but being fired without cause does, but I think this is typically a convention, not a law. I'm unsure about the laws around unemployment in these situations. I doubt the wording used here will matter when it comes to legal brass tacks. Whatever contracts Google and Gebru actually sign will be authoritative there, not the public wording.
- GhostofDamore 6y agoWhat will those rooting for Google to fire James Damore have to say now? I bet there is a significant overlap of those supporting her now with those rooting for Damore's firing. And Damore didn't make any demand, just a memo. I see many support her (from a justified? knee jerk reaction?) that being fired from a corporation for questioning it's bottom line is due to the power dynamics. The support to Timnit Gebru (provided her demands are provably good, but only hurts google's bottom line) would be more powerful/rational if the same people will vocally support Damore. Even if supporting a worker being fired without complete information is a justified position to take based on corporate dynamics, some have started making this into ugly race issue. Some are `supporting` her in the lines of "She was black and hence was fired". If people are judging others as racist just based on tweets now, Jeff Dean seems the opposite of such smear. Even if Dean was a corporate zombie pulling the trigger to save the company bottomline, calling him racist for that without evidence for the latter is insane. There seems to be a sick trend in progressive politics in US to move away from supporting workers and start making everything into a race issue with no justification.
- drewrv 6y agoDamore was an engineer whose continued employment would open the company up to a risk of lawsuit. Gebru was an ethicist who was willing to resign over some deep concerns. Presumably ethical concerns. We don't know much more about Gebru's situation, but they're different enough that it's not a useful comparison.
- GhostofDamore 6y agoBoth are Google Employees who got fired for rubbing their superiors in the wrong way. > whose continued employment would open the company up to a risk of lawsuit If protecting google from a lawsuit is your main concern, aren't you for firing her? The memo of James isn't as much a threat to bottom line or a lawsuit as unveiling some unethical practices (which she allegedly is up to due to her ethical concerns). My point is precisely you can't have it both ways and be consistent.
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- wyldfire 6y agoAdditional discussion over at /r/MachineLearning [1]. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k5ryva/d_ethical_ai_researcher_timnit_gebru_claims_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k5ryva/d_e...
- describe24 6y agoArgh, it's been archived already :(
- black_puppydog 6y agoThis seems to be the email she sent to the internal "Women and Allies" mailing list: https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-an-ethical https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-a... The most relevant parts (in terms of back story) should be this: > A week before you go out on vacation, you see a meeting pop up at 4:30pm PST on your calendar (this popped up at around 2pm). No one would tell you what the meeting was about in advance. Then in that meeting your manager’s manager tells you “it has been decided” that you need to retract this paper by next week, Nov. 27, the week when almost everyone would be out (and a date which has nothing to do with the conference process). You are not worth having any conversations about this, since you are not someone whose humanity (let alone expertise recognized by journalists, governments, scientists, civic organizations such as the electronic frontiers foundation etc) is acknowledged or valued in this company. > Then, you ask for more information. What specific feedback exists? Who is it coming from? Why now? Why not before? Can you go back and forth with anyone? Can you understand what exactly is problematic and what can be changed? > And you are told after a while, that your manager can read you a privileged and confidential document and you’re not supposed to even know who contributed to this document, who wrote this feedback, what process was followed or anything. You write a detailed document discussing whatever pieces of feedback you can find, asking for questions and clarifications, and it is completely ignored. And you’re met with, once again, an order to retract the paper with no engagement whatsoever.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoThanks for sharing this. I'm just very confused now. What kind of "privileged and confidential document to HR" would be relevant to retracting a research paper? She has some very legitimate frustrations with the process here, but she doesn't seem to be disputing that the document was relevant. In a more normal context, my default assumption is that "privileged and confidential document to HR" means "someone's raised a serious issue and we'll be sued if we don't fix this", but I don't see how that fits here.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- m4x 6y ago
- thisismyswamp 6y agoTimnit conveniently lost access to the email that supposedly led to the firing. She previously sent her twitter mob out on LeCun for his stance on bias in machine learning models. I do not respect that kind of person and will not take a stance on this. I am disappointed that the twitter crowd doesn't care about the email, but not surprised. Just trying to keep in mind that the smart reasonable people tend to be silent.
- dang 6y ago(We moved this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25291559 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25291559, where it was off topic, to here, where it is on topic.)
- lowercase1 6y agoToo many people expecting too perfect of behavior from someone apparently put it a shitty situation by much more powerful forces.
- describe24 6y agoNobody has set the bar that high. Many people are just expecting basic civility. We all have to deal with issues yet not everyone turns to being hostile at every beat. It's not a once off Tweet for her, I think more would be forgiving if that were the case
- lowercase1 6y agoHalf of the comments here are focused on the appropriateness of an email after things had already become beyond repair. It's way, way less important than Google potentially preventing publication of damaging research. It's a bad sign from Google that this is their argument. If they were good on diversity/ethical ai they'd fight on that not on tone. If the facts are bad fight on tone, etc
- describe24 6y agoI think a number of people have mentioned it but I don't think Google let her go because of either her email or paper. Her email alludes to there being tensions already present between her and her superiors for at least a year. It sounds like they may have already tried to have let her go. However, legally, they could not. This latest event gave them an opportunity, since, she essentially gave them an ultimatum. Perhaps after last year's legal success she felt she would have the upper-hand and didn't expect them to actually decline her conditions. Honestly, the focus on the paper is coming more from her and her supporters trying to spin it (although I'm sure many truly believe it) to make it sound like she was fired for trying to uncover ethical flaws at Google. When in reality, it sounds like she was difficult to work with and burnt a lot of bridges
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- nbzso 6y agoThe Verge published article:) I wonder why there is no comment section in it. https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/3/22150355/google-fires-timnit-gebru-facial-recognition-ai-ethicist https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/3/22150355/google-fires-tim... Seriously I am not American and don't work for American companies. Politicisation of companies for me is dangerous path, in my humble view meritocracy is in core of successful enterprise. This "woke" thing creates more inequality from this perspective. But I am just another cog in the system, so please give me a direction of thoughts on this subject. I am with open mind, where I am wrong in this?
- kenjackson 6y agoI think that as an ethicist in the field of race and AI there's really no way to escape politicization. If you identify bias in a company centered around race (note, not using the term racism, as I think often the bias isn't intentional), its hard to take action w/o politics coming into play almost immediately.
- describe24 6y agoA lot of ethicists on twitter today saying they thought Google was ethical because of one person. Which is just wild
- nbzso 6y agoThanks for your comment.
- ad404b8a372f2b9 6y agoTimnit Gebru is a bully, it reflects badly on Google that she was hired on their ethics team in the first place. Either way (and I'm usually the last person to defend google and their professional practices) if you threaten to leave you're already gone, there is no healthy professional relationship built on ultimatums.
- derekpankaew 6y agoThe demand she made was for her manager to share the names and comments of everyone who reviewed her paper. > Timnit responded with an email requiring that a number of conditions be met in order for her to continue working at Google, including revealing the identities of every person who Megan and I had spoken to and consulted as part of the review of the paper and the exact feedback. Timnit wrote that if we didn’t meet these demands, she would leave Google and work on an end date. We accept and respect her decision to resign from Google. Source: https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-an-ethical https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-a...
- bigbubba 6y agoNot surprising they were wary of conceding to that demand, since it doubtlessly would have caused at least some of them to be harassed on twitter.
- jonnycomputer 6y agoWired has an informative article about this. https://www.wired.com/story/prominent-ai-ethics-researcher-says-google-fired-her/ https://www.wired.com/story/prominent-ai-ethics-researcher-s... Have to say that being asked to retract a paper because her manager didn't like what she had to say sounds pretty objectionable to me. Academic researchers thinking about joining Google beware.
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- randomcarbloke 6y agoShe seems absolutely awful.
- eyevpoison 6y agoI saw her ted talk to understand more about her viewpoint. Looks like she is only interested in increasing the demands for black people and that too women. Because she says, "products should be tested on all types of customers". The natural follow up to this is how do we define types? Race is only the first level, very soon within race also, we will see people forming groups.
- mlcrypto 6y agoGoogle seems like a shit show these days. Being liberal and playing politics is more important than coding ability