26 ms·

About Google's approach to research publication – Jeff Dean

• gcr 6y ago
  Maybe different teams are different, but on my previous team within Google AI, we thought the goal of google's pubapproval process was to ensure that internal company IP (eg. details about datasets, details about google compute infra) does not leak to the public, and maybe to shield Google from liability. Nothing more. In all of my time at Google AI, I never heard of pubapproval being used for peer review or to critique the scientific rigor of the work. It was never used as a journal, it was an afterthought that folks on my team would usually clear only hours before important deadlines. We like to leave peer review to the conferences/journals' existing process to weed out bad papers; why duplicate that work internally? I'm disappointed that Jeff has chosen to imply that pubapproval is used to enforce rigour. That is a new use case and not how it has been traditionally used. Pubapproval hasn't been used to silence uncomfortable minority viewpoints until now. If this has changed, it's a very, very new change.
  • logicslave 6y ago
    Do you want to know whats interesting? I read alot of computer science research, particularly what comes out of Google. Its clear to me that details are left out of specific papers, especially how things are done in sub systems. But, like a jig saw puzzle, I discovered that many papers are actually descriptions of computing systems and algorithms that interact. If you read between the lines and squint your eyes, you can get a much bigger picture of internal google AI systems than you guys think you can.
    • SirYandi 6y ago
      Would love to read a blog post of your observations about that
    • cbsmith 6y ago
      Oh yeah, absolutely. It's not at all hard to see the systems view of this.
  • vikramkr 6y ago
    They might have enough of a PR budget to make the Google version of the story stick. But, its concerning that, if what you say is true, they are hoping to make that work by leveraging the public's ignorance of how the Google specific process works. Its also not the smartest move, since Google is important enough and public goodwill towards tech is low enough that journalists will have a field day looking for evidence of double standards/a cover up. And they're not making it too difficult for the journalists if that evidence is found in the top comment on a hacker news post.
    • hackcasual 6y ago
      This really seems like whistling past the graveyard on google's part here. There's too much meat to the story for them to really do much more than obfuscate. The intersection of race and gender, ethical implications of big tech, the capitalistic pursuit of innovation at the expense of individual freedom. All of these look bad for google
  • theobeers 6y ago
    And the examples of issues flagged in review that Jeff keeps highlighting—like Timnit’s alleged failure to mention recent work to reduce the environmental impact of large models—are themselves a bit worrisome. Jeff gives the impression that they demanded retraction (!) because they wanted Timnit and her coauthors to soften their critique. The more I read about this, the worse it looks.
    • omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
      That was my impression as well. Having said that, if Jeff were to make public the paper, criticisms of the paper, and improvements made to address the problems described in the paper, that could go a long way towards clearing the air.
      • gcr 6y ago
        oh yes absolutely, i would love for timmit or jeff to release this paper as-is so we can see what happened. could be a good read.
        • UncleMeat 6y ago
          The draft is rolling around the web already.
          • treis 6y ago
            link?
            • ninjin 6y ago
              A second hand account from a VentureBeat journalist is the best I could find [1]. As a researcher with more than a decade of experience in Natural Language Processing, what is described by the journalist in regards to the paper content seems to be non-controversial and nothing out of the ordinary from this kind of work. If anyone could find an actual leak I would be more than excited to have a look at it using my own eyes rather than filtered through someone else’s. [1]: https://venturebeat.com/2020/12/03/ai-ethics-pioneers-exit-from-google-involved-research-into-risks-and-inequality-in-large-language-models https://venturebeat.com/2020/12/03/ai-ethics-pioneers-exit-f...
  • kwillets 6y ago
    That confused me as well -- where I work we have a legal dept. approval for IP issues, and that's it. Academic review doesn't make sense in that context or time frame.
  • petulla 6y ago
    This response really seems like gaslighting. He doesn't address her concerns and glosses over whether she was held to a different standard than others at GR.
    • bmitc 6y ago
      He was also extremely vague, perhaps intentionally, about what the issue actually was. His sentence about when the paper was submitted and approved and all that is impossible to parse and make sense of who did what and when.
      • sbarre 6y ago
        Of course he was vague. This just happened, tensions are high, and no doubt Timnit is talking to an employment lawyer to find out what both parties' right and obligations are, and I'm sure Google's lawyers are also getting all their ducks in a row. This is spin at best, gaslighting at worst. We'll never get the full story (and should we? it is an internal company matter made public, after all)..
        • Barrin92 6y ago
          >We'll never get the full story (and should we? it is an internal company matter made public, after all)) Not really sure what the point of an 'ethical AI' department is when there's no transparency or accountability facing the public because if it can be cancelled internally at any point if it threatens the company you've basically recreated some kind of Soviet ministry for truth
          • SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
            The point is to do foundational research, and to help Google ensure that its AI development complies with its own ethics. Google did try to set up an AI ethics board for accountability to the public, but it fell apart, because many segments of the public have ethical views which were seen as unacceptable. (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/04/google-cancels-controversial-ai-ethics-panel.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/04/google-cancels-controversial...)
  • pengstrom 6y ago
    Increased scrutiny on minorites speaking up is a common historical occurance.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • eachro 6y ago
    But in this scenario, shielding Google from liability is actually a primary concern given that Timnit is discussing ethics/bias. A paper on say novel transformer architecture, the lottery ticket hypothesis in a new setting, a new RL benchmark suite, etc is not going to expose Google to legal risk the way ethical AI research often can.
    • aabhay 6y ago
      This. I have been arguing the unpopular opinion that most AI ethics work in corporate settings is not designed to empower real research. It was a matter of time before an actual researcher with an ethical compass was removed unceremoniously. Anyone in an AI ethics team at a large company — you need to know exactly what your job means to the company, because it isn’t safe.
    • oh_sigh 6y ago
      How would publishing a paper open a 3rd party up to legal risk? Research papers aren't laws, and it is chronologically impossible for a research paper to influence already on the book laws.
      • eachro 6y ago
        I can imagine a scenario where a politician who wants to pick a fight with Google uses some of the unflattering findings in the published work as supporting material for why Google needs to be regulated/fined/etc: "Google does {bad thing}. Look at this research report from Google researchers! They admit to doing {bad thing}!"
        • oh_sigh 6y ago
          That would be a future act, not making previous acts illegal ex post facto.
      • btilly 6y ago
        A paper from Google saying that Google knows that its systems discriminate against minority groups can open Google up to liability for a class action lawsuit from said minority groups against Google. And the fact that Google knows increases the damages that they can look for. The same paper from outside of Google also creates liability, but now the argument for increased damages becomes about whether Google knew.
  • lokar 6y ago
    In technical infra I saw papers rejected that were deemed to be not interesting enough (not a big enough novel contribution).
  • cavisne 6y ago
    We know large language models are super important to google, and there are lots of competitors. If they approved the paper the message would be "google thinks language models are a waste of resources and racist". There would be no academic debate on this topic as its been framed as woke and published by a militant activist, so any disagreement would be racist (see prior interactions between this researcher and other researchers [1]). Thats why the standard process of publishing, peer reviewing, academic critique etc would not work. Why would their researchers working on language models stay? when they can go to Facebook, OpenAI etc. Why would new researchers join? [1] https://syncedreview.com/2020/06/30/yann-lecun-quits-twitter-amid-acrimonious-exchanges-on-ai-bias/ https://syncedreview.com/2020/06/30/yann-lecun-quits-twitter...
    • freeone3000 6y ago
      Academic debate is, in fact, done through conferences and journals. You saying there can be no debate is a strawman position with no basis in reality. The idea that standard rigor cannot be applied to ethics research is absurd, and seems to insinuate that the entire field is absent discipline. The proper response to her position would be to publish a response or critique. Attacking her entire field does nothing to further the conversation.
      • diffserv 6y ago
        The statement that "Academic debate is, in fact, done through conferences and journals" is not strictly true. Specially given that a lot of reviews in more popular conference are very hit and miss. You can submit the same paper to the same conference multiple times and get wildly different opinions on the same paper. The variation in reviewers' response is often due their lack of knowledge and unfamiliarity with the problem. Take a look at the recent reviews on some of the more popular conferences on OpenReview.net. Most of the reviews don't have any substance and are often vague/generic. I'd take the reviews from peers that I trust and are aware of my work more seriously than reviewers of conferences.
    • yodelshady 6y ago
      She's got solid STEM credentials. If google managed to hire a "woke militant activist" instead of what they wanted... is that really much better? Demand the best from your multi-billion dollar corporations.
  • lallysingh 6y ago
    Also, when has feedback on a paper in this process been relayed via HR? You only bring in HR protections to protect the company from a legal standpoint.
  • calf 6y ago
    The key sentence is the bullshit about a paper not offering mitigation as not helping. Since when is a scientific paper required to do that.
    • BeetleB 6y ago
      When I was in academia, it was not unusual for the referees to reject a paper for this reason. Of course, you are informed of that and always have the option to rewrite the paper to include that information. In some cases, though, it's not simply a matter of listing it as other work in the Intro - you may need to incorporate it into your models, etc.
      • calf 6y ago
        That's no justification for the rationale that critique or negative results in general are not paper worth or do not advance science in less short-sighted ways.
        • BeetleB 6y ago
          I wasn't discussing the appropriateness - I was pointing out that this behavior is normal in science. Your original comment was: > Since when is a scientific paper required to do that. Unfortunately, for a long time (since well before my time, at least).
    • justicezyx 6y ago
      If you are actually an academic researchers in an academia institution, and are exposed to a large scope of the dealings of the community, then you might find that professional academia is as political as corporations, if not more so...
    • dekhn 6y ago
      beyond reviewers or editors asking you to make changes like this (for example, "so-and-so just published <blah> which means that your sentence about <blah> is obsolete"), we're talking about research coming from a corporation. If one part of the company is trashing another part of the company, and it's based on stale results, asking to have the paper updated to include the latest results is reasonable.
  • contemporary343 6y ago
    Ditto in my past experience at Microsoft Research. Never an actual review of paper's merits, just IP and maintaining trade secrets if applicable.
  • dzdt 6y ago
    Yes it is disingenuous for Dean to pretend that this was a normal process applied to a normal situation. Clearly whatever happened on that team, this latest round was not the beginning or even most important part. Gebru's letter mentions her threatening to sue Google previously, for instance. [1] The discussion about rigour in a conference paper or internal review is obviously a pretense. [1] https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-an-ethical https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-a...
  • jariel 6y ago
    "Pubapproval hasn't been used to silence uncomfortable minority viewpoints until now." This is sad gaslighting of a reasonable concern the team had. Having to endure some external review for what could otherwise be sensitive material. The inability for the SJW crowd to work reasonably within very reasonable terms, to then resort to aggressive tactics such as 'demand the names and opinions of everyone on the board' and then publicly misrepresenting the situation is going to lose you a lot of favour. Every time I read one of these stories I immediately feel sympathetic to the individual, but then upon learning more, I feel duped and maligned for having been effectively lied to. The doors are wide open for progress, those who take it to micro-totalitarian lengths are not doing anyone any favours.
    • mostafab 6y ago
      Black female scientist Timnit Gebru fired - the end of Google as a top AI research institution? https://melwy.com/blog/black-female-scientist-timnit-gebru-fired-the-end-of-google-as-a-top-ai-research-institution https://melwy.com/blog/black-female-scientist-timnit-gebru-f...
  • kazamaloo 6y ago
    Every paper we submitted went through a technical review as well as legal and IP reviews. They were along the lines of cite this, cite that, run these experiments etc. What's different in her case is that you don't see the names of the people reviewing. Being the devil's advocate, she MIGHT have a pattern of aggressively attacking people who reviewed their work before. So they might have made the reviewers anonymous this time.
  • contemporary343 6y ago
    Similar experience to another current Google Brain researcher: https://twitter.com/le_roux_nicolas/status/1334601960972906496 https://twitter.com/le_roux_nicolas/status/13346019609729064... Submitting conference papers last minute is... normal.
    • sjg007 6y ago
      This tweet is on point.
  • cyrus20 6y ago
    At least when I was there, my papers were getting thoroughly reviewed and often had to make some adjustments before getting approval. Never occurred to me to make any demands from the reviewers or threaten to resign if my paper doesn't get immediately and unconditionally approved. Seems like she's asking for preferential treatment.
    • contemporary343 6y ago
      She's the one asking for an option to revise and discuss it. Management is the one demanding an unconditional retraction, with no recourse.
  • stjohnswarts 6y ago
    Why wouldn't you want to weed out bad papers as close to the source as possible to save company embarrassment and external people's time? If you see something wrong during a review why not push it back to the author before it does rounds outside the company? That would seem like a very bad practice to me.
  • creato 6y ago
    I don't think the approval process is being used to enforce rigor in general, the (claimed) problem is the paper lacks rigor specifically in regards to claims about google's behavior. Publishing a paper with a lack of rigor about some obscure mathematical technique isn't a problem for google (beyond some possible but unlikely mild reputation damage). Publishing a paper with a lack of rigor that says google is doing unethical things, when those things are questionably accurate, that is something google would (and should) have a problem with. Whether the paper actually lacks rigor in a relevant way is not something I can comment on.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• kaymanb 6y ago
  > Our aim is to rival peer-reviewed journals in terms of the rigor and thoughtfulness in how we review research before publication. I can see how this might be frustrating for academics working within Google. The field already has systems in place for peer-review. While I admire the idea of Google holding their research to a certain standard, it also provides a mechanism for dismissing research that paints Google (the corporation) in a bad light. If a paper is good enough to pass an (external) review process, why should it not be published?
  • iab 6y ago
    I think this is the crux, in that google is not academia; so naturally a band-gap would arise if your expectations were that it should behave like an academic institution. From their perspective, what requirement is there to publish work that is not well aligned with their goals (optics, financial, etc)?
    • htrp 6y ago
      The problem is also that Google's AI labs are treated more or less as academia, that's one of the big selling points for recruiting. I'm in industry and am not allowed to even talk about the projects I work on, much less publish papers, it kills recruiting conversations with maybe 10% of the people at conferences.
  • danpalmer 6y ago
    > If a paper is good enough to pass an (external) review process, why should it not be published? There are many journals that have a poor track record on peer review, and in fact even those that have a generally good track record often have times that it famously failed. Whether we agree or not, Google want to protect their reputation. Because not every journal will be up to their standards, ensuring that papers do meet a standard is going to be important for them. They could do this by only allowing submission to certain journals, but this would require an understanding of each journal, its processes reputation, etc. Perhaps easier is just to review papers before they are submitted. This does also allow them to protect potentially NDA'd info from being accidentally included in a paper given to external reviewers, which is (whether you agree or not) something they will clearly want to do.
• bnj 6y ago
  While I’m a spectator to this unfolding story and am reacting to a pretty cursory overview of what happened, this has the distinct feeling that Google thought they were moving in for a checkmate by, in their words, “accepting a resignation”, only to have it — very predictably? - blow up in their faces completely. Even if Google is acting presenting the chain of events faithfully, their final move to jump on an opportunity to remove the researcher and call it resignation seems so aggressive and incongruous that from the outside it makes it seem like this conflict is rooted in a larger and more difficult relationship that they calculated was no longer in their interest. I’m wondering if the cost benefit analysis is still looking that way on the inside, because this move and the attention it’s causing is so contrary to their stated goals that I have to wonder if Google is committed to those goals at all. Others must be wondering exactly the same thing.
  • pm90 6y ago
    This sums it up almost perfectly. The only thing I would add is that things like these tend to have a pattern. If a single person speaks up and you have multiple others claiming similar treatment, it significantly increases the likelihood of the workplace being hostile to such persons. Also: Googles bar for hiring is extremely high. For multiple senior engineers/managers to corroborate this description is rather damning.
  • noitpmeder 6y ago
    I don't see what else they should have done? This researcher made some ultimatum. As part of it, she said if Google refused, she would set a date to leave the company. Google obviously did not concede to her demand, and obviously didn't think it beneficial to let her be a thorn any longer, so took her up on her offer.
    • pseudalopex 6y ago
      She didn't offer to resign immediately. Fewer people would be criticizing Google if they just accepted her actual offer.
      • 6y ago
• drfuchs 6y ago
  My researcher acquaintances at industry labs at IBM, Microsoft, HP, Xerox, ATT, Bell, DEC, Compaq, etc. never have had to have their papers reviewed internally before submitting them to conferences or journals. What's up with Google?
  • gcr 6y ago
    Until now, nobody on my previous team at Google had to have their papers reviewed internally for scientific rigour either. (We have a publication approval process, but its purpose is to prevent IP leaks and maybe shield liability, not uphold scientific rigour standards)
    • lokar 6y ago
      I've seen Urs reject papers out of Tech Infra that he thought were not interesting enough
    • lallysingh 6y ago
      This is the AI Ethics team in a company betting their future on AI. They know they have a bubbling ethics problem and they've screwed over their best chance to do anything other than completely fuck it up. In history, this will be a wtf double facepalm moment.
    • kazamaloo 6y ago
      Technically you can submit it without pubapprove unless somebody rats you out and you might face some repercussions. Otherwise every paper is supposed to go through AI Ethics committee review along with other types of reviews.
  • bnj 6y ago
    I wonder how consistently these standards are applied, even zeroing in on Google. If it turns out that most people within the company don’t face a barrier from this process in the same way then that sounds like a really problematic symptom.
    • 6y ago
• dang 6y ago
  Previous threads on this ongoing story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25292386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25292386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25285502 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25285502 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25289445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25289445
  • thisgoodlife 6y ago
    one link says she resigned. The other one says she was fired. Which one is it then?
    • dang 6y ago
      It's fuzzy, and people are disagreeing about which aspect to emphasize.
    • exolymph 6y ago
      People have argued both cases. The tl;dr is that she said "I will resign if XYZ" and Google was like "we accept your resignation effective immediately." Whether or not that counts as firing is a matter of opinion.
      • swyx 6y ago
        well; also whether google has to pay severance.
        • minhazm 6y ago
          There’s no legal requirement to pay severance. That’s just a courtesy most companies do in exchange for a non-disparagement agreement or during layoffs to save face a little.
    • sp332 6y ago
      The headline on the platformer.news article was updated to reflect the fact that she was fired.
    • 6y ago
• hartator 6y ago
  It sadden me that they make Jeff Dean work on these kind of issues. His map/reduce invention brought to the world a lot more than managing his coworker egos.
  • geodel 6y ago
    How do you know they are making him to this. It seems to me Jeff chose to accept leadership position at Google. So managing egos would be first class task to deal with for him.
    • tempest_ 6y ago
      Exactly. If managing people were the same skill set as computer science perhaps we would not be seeing this play out as it has. This is seriously a massive failure on the part of Google to handle their own shit. I often wonder if these people are too old or out of touch to appreciate how this kind of thing may or may not blow up on social media. To not consider how this might cause public relations issues especially when dealing with someone who has an established social media presence seems like a misstep. On the flip side maybe they thought it was worth it. Weather the storm for a few days and twitter will move one. It's hard to say.
  • typon 6y ago
    Jeff Dean did not invent map/reduce
    • foobarian 6y ago
      OK then tensor flow
    • hartator 6y ago
      He did: http://cacs.usc.edu/education/cs653/Dean-MapReduce-CACM08.pdf http://cacs.usc.edu/education/cs653/Dean-MapReduce-CACM08.pd...
      • mpihaditfirst 6y ago
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• wyldfire 6y ago
  It appears that this was released intentionally by Dean. But in case it wasn't, or in case it gets altered/updated - it's been archived [1]. [1] https://archive.is/VpAN8 https://archive.is/VpAN8
• nova22033 6y ago
  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. This sheds some new light...
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • wilde 6y ago
    Not really. People bluff in negotiations all the time. A normal response would have been, “I can’t do that. Are you still committed to leaving?” Instead Google went all scorched earth and it’s still unclear why. It also indicates that they don’t particularly value her in progress work in the lab since normally you want the 2 weeks or whatever to squeeze some wrap up work out of folks.
    • ghaff 6y ago
      People bluff but you generally have to be prepared to walk if your bluff is called. If I walk into a manager's office and demand 2x salary or I walk and the response is "we believe you are fairly compensated," you're now in a rather uncomfortable situation. Which is of course not to say you can't have a more measured negotiation. But it can be hard to walk back from give me X or I do Y, especially if there isn't a lot of middle ground between giving you X or not giving you X.
      • nebulous1 6y ago
        > People bluff but you generally have to be prepared to walk if your bluff is called. Then you aren't bluffing.
        • ghaff 6y ago
• Imnimo 6y ago
  This reads to me like Google felt that the paper painted some of their other technologies in a poor light, and wanted to insert language that made them look better. The way he describes their objections, they strike me as the sort of thing that is routinely addressed in the camera-ready version of papers by adding a few lines to the related work section. Not the sort of thing that a conference reviewer or an internal reviewer would reject a paper over. Previously, we only had one side of this story. But if this is Dean's best spin on Google's side of the story, I'm very tempted to conclude they're in the wrong here. Obviously I don't have all the information, but the information I do have feels consistent with the idea that someone important at Google didn't like Gebru's paper for corporate-political (meaning making Google look good, as opposed to political-political) reasons, they tried to get Gebru to play ball, she refused, and now they have to back-project a justification in the name of "scientific integrity". Unfortunately, I think this is a story where most people's opinions about who's in the right will be more informed by their previous opinions about Gebru and Dean than the narrower question of what happened with this particular paper. I'm probably even guilty of that to some extent myself, given that I'm a fan of some of Gebru's previous work.
  • asciident 6y ago
    I've seen these review comments before and I don't know if we can say from our position whether it's corrections that can be made for camera ready or not. If a paper does not analyze the improvements from recent work, and just older work that has been surpassed (deemed inefficient by Dean), the new reanalysis might not be as favorable to the results as the paper proposes which means the paper is moot. Or the second point is about bias in language models, but it sounds like these issues are mitigated in recent research, which means people are already aware and have solved a bulk of the issue being described in the paper. But certainly it's possible that the paper's contributions stands strong even after accounting for the recent work that Dean mentions. In that case, it could be corrected for camera ready. But my point is that we can't tell right now without seeing the paper, and the relevant research that was omitted.
    • whimsicalism 6y ago
      But this review process had never been used for introducing comments of this sort to a paper ever before. Plus, there was no suggestion of change, just retraction.
• throawaydmg 6y ago
  > 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 It always amazes how blatantly authoritarian these "woke" types are. I would not be surprised if the sole reason she wanted the identities of every consultant was to engage in some sort of witch-hunting and bigoteering[0] [0] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Bigoteering https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Bigoteering
  • foota 6y ago
    I can imagine she felt helpless when her work was being blocked. Imagine you were going to start a project and was told someone in your org was against it and that you couldn't do it as a result.
    • kevinskii 6y ago
      That pretty much sums up every employee/employer relationship, and it isn't a bad thing.
    • throawaydmg 6y ago
      Maybe take a step back, consider the possibility that you may be wrong, and if you still think you are right, then attack their ideas and arguments, instead of acting entitled and demanding to know who said this or that. Like PG wrote, the worst thing you can say about an idea is that it is wrong, you don't need to resort to personal attacks or x-isms.
      • foota 6y ago
        Are you replying to the right person?
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  • Orthw2020 6y ago
• qppo 6y ago
  Yesterday the conversation was all over the tone of the email exchange, and my gut was regardless of the research it discussed that Google was probably alright to choose to accept that researcher's resignation. Now I think I was wrong, Google looks like they're full of crap. If the research doesn't pass muster I'd like to read it and pass my own judgement. I'm guessing the tone was justified.
  • javajosh 6y ago
    What's even worse is that Google ignored Timnit's attempts to figure out what went wrong, handing down a decision by fiat. I am surprised that this doesn't violate Google's standards! It would certainly violate mine. OTOH Timnit sounds like a down-the-middle SJW type, which means that every conflict is about identity, privilege, and so on, which honestly hurts her message. To me, its enough that Google shut her paper down and wouldn't tell her why or give her even a chance for a different outcome -- perhaps it is, ironically, her SJW nature that makes it risky for Google to engage her in the way she wants to be engaged, because a deeper conflict cannot look good for Google in the current cultural climate. (E.g. sounds like she's got strong intellectual integrity points, and weak SJW points to make about Google, but they couldn't engage the former without also dealing with the latter.)
    • visarga 6y ago
      > ignored Timnit's attempts to figure out what went wrong, handing down a decision by fiat Funny, because she mobbed Yann LeCun and after she obtained a forced apology from him and an invitation to a civilised and serious discussion she said "this is not worth my time". Maybe it wasn't worth their time.
  • google234123 6y ago
    If oyu are paid by Google, Google has a right to vet your external work related to your position.
    • zemo 6y ago
      ok google234123
• choppaface 6y ago
  It's frankly unprofessional for Jeff Dean to post only his email in this document without providing more context. The news media has in cases provided balanced coverage that included the email from Timnit that prompted Google's action: https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-an-ethical https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-a... This post from Jeff Dean simply underscores that he has failed to balance the need for diplomacy with the research thesis of his own research group. I'm not saying he's being malicious, but incredibly tone deaf. While I appreciate he gets "attacked" at nearly every talk (at one retinopathy talk I saw him grilled for 10 minutes on race), he's going to continue to get this sort of attention until he can stop being the Googler who wants to tell you why their view is right.
  • saagarjha 6y ago
    I mean, this is obviously a place where Jeff Dean is providing the voice of Google on the topic. Why would they provide balanced context?
    • hackcasual 6y ago
      A large part of the criticism directed towards google is that they weren't particularly transparent in their handling of this situation. This is making that look worse.
  • gundmc 6y ago
    It seems reasonable to choose to publish something you wrote yourself (and presumably cleared with legal/PR) and not publish something written by someone else with an intended internal audience. It would be WAY worse if they unilaterally published Timnit's private emails publicly.
    • bagacrap 6y ago
      Indeed, it's usually considered poor form to forward emails to broader mailing lists.
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• Footkerchief 6y ago
  The followup does not answer the major questions raised by this part of Dean's original email: > Unfortunately, this particular paper was only shared with a day’s notice before its deadline — we require two weeks for this sort of review — and then instead of awaiting reviewer feedback, it was approved for submission and submitted. A cross functional team then reviewed the paper as part of our regular process and the authors were informed that it didn’t meet our bar for publication and were given feedback about why. [...] We acknowledge that the authors were extremely disappointed with the decision that Megan and I ultimately made, especially as they’d already submitted the paper. When it was "approved for submission," was that approval final and actionable, or some kind of conditional approval? Is demanding a retraction after an approval the normal way it works at Google, or was this an unusual occurrence that Gebru was right to question?
• chrisdinn 6y ago
  Why doesn’t Jeff just suck up his pride, apologize and hire her back rather than write increasingly thin rationalizations for his reaction? High level research (and engineering) will involve egos and you should expect this kind of push back when you stop someone from publishing. Nothing here justifies how he handled it Of course, I think many of us have seen this reaction before, maybe even done it ourselves. It’s bad for everyone, don’t do it Jeff!
  • schoolornot 6y ago
    Ok, put another way. What interest does Google have in re-hiring her? She left on a bad note and brought tremendous negative PR. The company isn't losing business over this as the treatment didn't rise to abuse or harassment. Her team will operate just fine - everyone is replaceable. Apparently Google has varying degrees of transparency when it comes to decision making. To be expected at a large company. There are some things my company & boss do that seem abnormal and out of character. You have to go with the flow sometimes and shut up. It seems like this person had some kind of utopian mindset where she felt management was obligated to explain everything around the blocking of her paper. I doubt a guy like Jeff who wants to do tech all day has a vendetta against black women that want to publish papers. What a way to go.
• rajangdavis 6y ago
  Had Gebru not raised an ultimatum, what would have been the consequence of the paper not passing internal review be? It sounds like she submitted the paper anyway, would there have been consequences to those actions?
  • visarga 6y ago
    Copyright infringement? She doesn't own the paper, even though she signed it.
• asfadfdsa 6y ago
  There are a lot of people commenting that she didn't actually resign. I agree, but it sounds like the conversation went like this: employee: I'm not happy about x, y and z. If you don't do those, I'm going to quit. manager: well we are not going to do those, so thank you for your time. We accept your resignation and would like it to start immediately (i.e. you're fired). If you are gonna tell your manager that you plan to resign if a condition isn't met, then what do you expect them to say if they don't plan to fulfill that condition? It sounds like she was expecting them to say "Hey, well we don't want to meet your demands, but sure, we're happy to have a disgruntled employee around here, so feel free to stick around, or you could just quit on your own timeline, no sweat". I suspect that many people would be fired on the spot for threatening to resign, so don't threaten it if you aren't okay with that consequence.
  • reikonomusha 6y ago
    What if the language weren’t so direct? For example, > If I can’t know who is providing reviews to my work, it’s difficult for me to imagine continuing to work as a part of this group. Many people would still describe this (erroneously) as an ultimatum even though it could be bleakly summarized in the same vein as a true ultimatum.
    • SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      We don't know the exact language, but by Timnit's account she made a numbered list of demands, which is pretty inherently direct.
      • ryanobjc 6y ago
        And she said her email contained language like “and if my demands aren’t met, then I will find an exit date.” It sounded from her account a straightforward threat to leave.
        • ergocoder 6y ago
          "We can't meet your demands for sure. But please hang around the company and choose your exit date at your liking" -- no reasonable person would respond like this. In any case, making this an issue sounds way overkill. Both want to part way. Either side can choose an earlier date of the termination. She doesn't need Google's permission to leave earlier. Google also doesn't need her permission to make her leave earlier.
• coffeemug 6y ago
  TL;DR: Jeff and Co got sick of Timnit's woke bullshit, pushed back, she threw around some ultimatums, they called her bluff and pushed her out. Personally I'm glad that Google is finally cleaning house. More of this plz.
  • deanCommie 6y ago
    Don't you have some more subordinates to sexually harass?
  • courtf 6y ago
    Wait, I thought the tech industry was literally North Korea, and as long as you sing the woke anthem every morning, you could never get fired?
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• courtf 6y ago
  Google's got five more HR reps working on the case. They got them working in shifts!
• geodel 6y ago
  I think Google can't be force to admit that when postmodernist racial theory ideologues are in the research / leadership ranks this kind of review is necessary. So Google is just going to say this is how we do it (or did it always).
• oivey 6y ago
  I would be absolutely furious if a manager blocked my work from being published. Even a manager who has worked as a researcher, in my experience, significantly lacks the expertise to be making such judgments. A research manager’s job is to be familiar with work across an entire portfolio, so they will be necessarily less knowledgeable than individual senior researchers. Presumably Google generally also feels this way seeing as this appears to be the first case where prepublication approval was denied for content. I would never work somewhere where management had such a lack of respect for my own judgment as a researcher.
  • visarga 6y ago
    Then you probably have to get hired at a corporation that never puts its own well being above the rest.
    • oivey 6y ago
      No, in my experience, you are wrong. Becoming an industrial researcher trades some independence for money, steady project funding, and the opportunity to more directly impact the world. In return your employer gets first or sole access to your research in order to make their products better and more profitable. Clueless suits forcing you to degrade the integrity of your work by demanding you soften your message or by puffing it up with PR need not be part of the equation. This case is over a research paper, not a press release. Smart companies know that employing researchers that are honest people rather than sycophants is good for their bottom line. Probably, even Google knows this, and this is just a mistake. If I was in the position of this researcher, I’d threaten to quit, too. Google’s actions suggest it wants to appear to care about ethics in AI rather than actually caring. That’s not a environment conducive to her to have any impact, so why stay? Clearly she’s not going to have a problem finding a job elsewhere.
• supergirl 6y ago
  sounds to me that google hired this ethics researcher but now they don’t like what she found
• jl2718 6y ago
  If she submitted, does that mean we are going to be able to read it? Is it on preprint?
• spinningslate 6y ago
  I don't know Jeff Dean. I have read some of his work, watched some of his presentations. He seems a credible bloke. This, though, looks and feels like thinly-veiled retroactive and pretty unconvincing PR. It's short on detail and appears somewhat at odds with several points from Timnit Gebru's resignation note [0]: - Dean says the paper was reviewed by a "cross-functional team". Gebru says she received the feedback through a "privileged and confidential document to HR" - Dean says the paper was submitted for review on the day it was due to be published; Gebru says they had notified "PR & Policy 2 months before". - Dean suggests the feedback was due to the paper not highlighting mitigating work for some of the limitations the paper was exposing. That seems like a very normal part of the research process. Why, then, does Gebru claim that she was told that a "manager can read you a privileged and confidential document" and that no other recourse or exploration of the feedback was permissible? The only thing we know from the outside is that reality will be far more nuanced and complicated than the tidbits that leak out. Even allowing for that though - and reading some of the related comments here - Google isn't coming out of this well at the moment. [0]: https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-an-ethical https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-a... EDIT: Fixed spelling of Timnit Gebru's name.
  • sillysaurusx 6y ago
    Dean says the paper was submitted for review on the day it was due to be published; Gebru says they had notified "PR & Policy 2 months before". Wait, really? That’s an important detail if true. The one-day timeline was a central part of the narrative surrounding this story. Notifying them two months ahead of time makes this a completely different situation. I’m a bit skeptical. Could this claim be verified somehow? Since it’s very public news at this point, we may as well try to be rigorous.
    • usmannk 6y ago
      From what I read it sounds like Timnit cleared the general idea of the paper 2 months before. The paper itself seems to have been submitted for approval 1 day prior to the deadline. Another HN commenter says that submitting papers for approval "hours" before the deadline is common at Google.
• aphyr 6y ago
  Dean writes: Our aim is to rival peer-reviewed journals in terms of the rigor and thoughtfulness in how we review research before publication. But Gebru writes that HR and her management chain delivered her feedback in a surprise meeting where she was not allowed to read the actual feedback, understand the process which generated it, or engage in a dialogue about it: Have you ever heard of someone getting “feedback” on a paper through a privileged and confidential document to HR? 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... 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. (from https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-an-ethical https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-a...) I've been through the peer review process at Physical Review Letters, SIGMOD, and VLDB. You get a document containing all the reviewer's comments, plus a metareviewer's take on the overall decision and what has to change. You can engage in dialogue with the metareviewer, including a detailed response letter justifying your choices, highlighting things the reviewers may have missed, and explaining where you plan to make changes. You get additional rounds of comments from the reviewers in light of that letter on later drafts. I'm not a Googler, and I have no idea what the standard review process looks like there, but what Gebru describes does not sound at all like peer review. I also note that Dean does not contradict Gebru's account of the meeting or feedback process. If I had a paper rejected in this fashion, I would also demand to know what the hell was going on and who was responsible. This feels off.
  • xiphias2 6y ago
    I think the person who submitted feedback in privileged and confidential way made a great choice. I expect more people taking this route in the future actually, people are scared in the current political athmosphere. Look at what Jeff Dean is getting, even though he didn’t do anything bad. A manager in ethics shouldn’t ask Google to break the law by not providing confidientality that was requested.
• deeviant 6y ago
  I feel that Jeff Dean is a much better engineer than he is a leader.
  • spoopyskelly 6y ago
    You're probably right, a good leader wouldn't have hired such an useless person in the first place.
• temp8964 6y ago
  This whole sh*t show only proves certain kind of people are extremely toxic.
• johncena33 6y ago
  I've read her email. In my first job, right after college, I have also sent an inflammatory email (nothing compared to the email she has sent) to my manager (not a whole group of coworkers). And I got seriously reprimanded for it by my then manager. Even after a decade I cringe when I remember the email I wrote. I have no idea why people think it's okay to send emails like this and expect not to get fired.
  • apta 6y ago
    It's because of a culture that praises playing victim, no matter how successful you are, and regardless of whether or not they're telling the truth.
• greatwhitenorth 6y ago
  Every "woke" company in SV is going to go through this. I really want to know how "diversity' will help someone build a software company say a CRM app. How does a skin color/race help with that? If ideas of a different race matter, why should they be employees and not found through user testing/customer feedback? Coinbase, Google, keep it rolling.. No fully remote company has to go through this bullshit.
• paijiut 6y ago
  I don't know why Google is bothering to say anything. It's pretty obvious that those who support the person who left have anchored their opinions and won't change under any circumstances, and those defending Google are anchored as well.
  • themacguffinman 6y ago
    While that is likely true, there's value to staking out your position clearly. It reduces speculation and can help you at least claim a side in a fraught conflict that could quickly turn both sides against you.
• deleted 6y ago
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• claydavisss 6y ago
  very long winded way of saying: "she was a pain in the ass and I was looking for an excuse to get her out the door"
• tinyhouse 6y ago
  In her email she claims that she is constantly being dehumanized. This is unacceptable to someone in her amazing position and to be honest sounds like she is a narcissist. I think Google couldn't wait to get rid of her (cannot blame them, she wanted to sue the company a year prior, also "represented" the company really bad on social media) and her email with demands was their opportunity. I don't think she would survive in any company. She is better off starting her own company or going to academia. I don't feel bad for her, I'm sure she already got multiple offers. Not from FB that's for sure though :)
  • apta 6y ago
    This is the problem with hiring SJWs. They will claim being victimized, racism, etc. the moment they don't have their way. I'm sure many people would have loved to be in her position and have her salary and benefits. Some people can't have enough it seems. "Wokeness" is a disease, the goal is to keep getting more and more power behind the guise of "equality". Hopefully more employers will reject hiring "woke" people after seeing the trouble they're causing.
    • rebelos 6y ago
      I suspect you're being downvoted because this post sounds like a denial of very real issues of sexism and racism. However, the suggestion that employers will work to identify and preemptively reject employees with an SJW bent is not only sound but almost certainly already underway.
      • apta 6y ago
        That's good to hear. The SJW crowd has caused enough chaos already.
• freediver 6y ago
  Funny that Jeff Dean would write and share this in a google doc. After 20 years of being a driving force for the web, there was no other easier, more appropriate tool avaialable to a senior google employee to share his opinion online.
• angry_octet 6y ago
  After reading Jeff Dean's response, I can only come to the conclusion that Timnit Gebru acted like a primadonna. It is completely normal to have to obtain prepublication signoff on material before it is submitted to a conference (and manager signoff even before abstract submission). Given the breadth of experience at Google, it seems strange not to avail yourself of this. Demanding to know the identity of reviewers is absurd (no journal would tolerate that) and deeply unprofessional. Making it an explicit ultimatum was her decision. Denigrating the entire area of research at Google on a large mailing list is the action of someone who wants to be terminated. People claiming that the deficiencies in the paper are minor and wouldn't be blockers obviously have little experience submitting to academic journals. Other parts of Google doing deeply technical work probably don't have the same level of review as the Ethical AI group -- for obvious reasons. There is usually a long back and forth -- there are even memes about the infuriating comments from "Reviewer 2" [1][2]. Omitting to mention argument-obsoleting developments in the field (from your own lab!) is more than enough to send you back to extensive redrafting. To be clear on terminology -- a retraction is an academic black mark, and occurs to a paper after publication, usually for reasons of research misconduct. This is not an instance of that. [1] https://twitter.com/redpenblackpen/status/1133440569907195904/photo/1 https://twitter.com/redpenblackpen/status/113344056990719590... [2] http://jasonya.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/PowerResponsibility.jpg http://jasonya.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/PowerRespon...
  • joshuamorton 6y ago
    > It is completely normal to have to obtain prepublication signoff on material before it is submitted to a conference (and manager signoff even before abstract submission) To be clear, both of these had been received for the paper in question.
    • angry_octet 6y ago
      That isn't the impression I had from reading the principal's statements, to wit: > Unfortunately, this particular paper was only shared with a day’s notice before its deadline — we require two weeks for this sort of review — and then instead of awaiting reviewer feedback, it was approved for submission and submitted. It seems like someone short-circuited the review process and submitted without review to meet a deadline, with a post-submission review. When this occurred, it was not all green lights. The expectation is that you then pull the submission and, post review, submit elsewhere. After all, conferences are all virtual now, it is not a hardship to submit elsewhere. If you have other information as to the facts or the internal process do tell.
• jkbhzsdfkhjnzs 6y ago
  > "So if you would like to change things, I suggest focusing on leadership accountability and thinking through what types of pressures can also be applied from the outside. For instance, I believe that the Congressional Black Caucus is the entity that started forcing tech companies to report their diversity numbers. Writing more documents and saying things over and over again will tire you out but no one will listen." People are forgetting about the part where she basically encourages her colleagues to talk to congress, at a time when tech CEOs are regularly being hauled in front of congressional committees. At the point when that is written, this clearly is an adversarial relationship between her and Google. And it wasn't Google that made it adversarial I couldn't imagine writing something like that and keeping my job
  • rirarobo 6y ago
    I believe this excerpt is actually what led to her firing on such short notice. Actually, I find it surprising that this is going largely unnoticed. Jeff's emails, which were surely also crafted with sign off from PR and legal, attempt to frame this "resignation" as an issue of the paper's content, as well as the inability to meet Timnit's demands. However, this framing does not seem to align with the experiences of other Google researchers, and does not explain why she was terminated in this particular manner. If that were really the case, why didn't they just wait for Timnit to return from vacation, try to resolve the issue, and if unsuccessful, accept her resignation? Why not try to deescalate and handle the situation more tactfully? Timnit's account of the email she received also seems to confirm this: "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 ..." [1] So, what aspects of that email triggered such a prompt termination? Well, Jeff's first email says that Timnit was telling employees to "stop work on critical DEI programs", and I've similarly seen some comments focus on the part of her email that reads, "What I want to say is stop writing your documents because it doesn't make a difference," but Timnit is clearly not saying to stop DEI work, she's saying to "focus on leadership accountability" and to apply external pressure. That seems to me to be the real issue, and the sort of thing that would trigger pressure from legal. The fact that the tone of the email is frustrated, and it airs some dirty laundry, would not necessarily result in firing, if leadership really wanted to keep her on, they could work something out. According to Timnit, her own manager was not informed, she's well liked by her academic community and her Google reports (who are expressing their dismay on Twitter), and Jeff has regularly praised Timnit in the past. So, the mention of congressional pressure in her email really seems to me to be the real catalyst here. [1] https://www.twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1334364735446331392 https://www.twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/13343647354463313...
• deeeeplearning 6y ago
  A lot of people mistakenly think Google is part of their family and has incentives other than making profit and avoiding bad PR. It's not really a surprise they took the first opportunity they could to fire someone who has in the past threatened them with Lawsuits... Don't be evil Google died a long time ago, there's nothing to see here, just business as usual.
• rlt 6y ago
  I think we’re starting to see companies discover the limits of how far they’re willing to let employees push their “woke” agenda using the company’s name. It seems disparaging your own company while ignoring research that counters yours is Google’s limit, but we’ll have to wait to see the research paper if it leaks.
  • htrp 6y ago
    Reading the abstract, it seems to be a pretty vanilla-esque survey paper.... which implies there's some more info that will only come out if this goes to court (doubtful).
• samizdis 6y ago
  This topic, over the past couple of days, seems to me to have become fraught, polarised and argued to distraction and faction. It's not a stretch to say that the world has a problem with discrimination, or that big personalities can rock the boat when they go against the grain. Or that corporates have interests to defend. I'd like in this case, though - not to say that all the other factors aren't worthy of examination as subjects in their own right - to see this paper. The authors/collaborators are leaders in the field. There are legitimate concerns about AI/ML; the validity/reliability of data from which, nowadays, consequential outcomes are derived. Please, let's ignore - at least for now - the corporate politics, the heat of the race/gender politics, the PR machines weighing in (look at all the news outlets grabbing this atm), and take a look at what the paper says. The right people (those in the field and qualified/able to do so) should be listened to. As for the politics of this, and the posturing and politicising and agenda-building on all sides: that doesn't help. AI and ML affect us all now. This is a trend. Let's at least expose the findings of acknowledged leaders in the field - let's see this study - before we descend into the sideshows of politics and factionalism. Please. Edit to clarify: tl;dr - I've not seen/read this contested paper. Whatever its contents, I want to see them, and imo that is more important than the current controversy blizzard etc.
  • agentdrtran 6y ago
    it's absurd to want to wave away stuff like "race/gender politics" when the impact of that "politics" is overwhelmingly obvious in the field.
    • samizdis 6y ago
      Sorry for not being clear. My only point is that I would like to see the research paper. I respect acknowledged and qualified domain expertise. It's an education for people like me, non-academics and not domain experts (but working with some ML/AI stuff). I want to see the thoughts and discoveries and recommendations and cautions and all that - from people who know their stuff. The rest, to me, is a distraction. This specialist/academic, has a really good rep. I care not about character or friendliness or whatever. As a brain, this person is documented as having the chops. I want to see the report.
• deleted 6y ago
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• danbrooks 6y ago
  It's standard practice to check in with stakeholders before submitting a paper. The important issue in the paper seems to be that the paper villainized large language models, which Google has a vested interest in. The paper was likely publishable with a bit more context in the introduction. I've been in similar situations and they were handled offline. The explosiveness of this situation seems to have been prepared the history of Timnit's relationship with Google. This incident was just the spark.
• yodelshady 6y ago
  Well, the lesson I'm taking from this is to have a good HR department, and listen to them. One of their most valuable functions is to stop you "letting go of" people for stupid and petty reasons that blow up in your face, spectacularly.
  • apta 6y ago
    I don't think letting go of a person for causing a tantrum is a bad thing. She threatened to quit, let her own up to it.
  • throwaway19937 6y ago
    It's quite common for managers to fire or accept resignations from employees who give ultimatums. There's also the angry email that she sent to other people ranting about Google's behavior and telling them to stop work. Either of these scenarios would get you fired any place that I have worked.
• goutsuffer 6y ago
  I am more concerned whether she is really a good researcher or not. If she is, just continue her great work and contribute real good stuff in the field. BTW, what exactly is Ethical AI?
  • frongpik 6y ago
    With her credentials, no less than "a famous scientist that's authored landmark papers in AI research", she could easily start her own AI company, or at least a top-tier consultancy, to advance the AI research frontier at the unprecedented pace. She could even hire the top notch researchers from the SJW community and show Jeff what the real science looks like. I'm sure VCs will line up to fund her novel ideas.
• Aeolun 6y ago
  I just can’t but feel that they entirely miss the point. Nobody is outraged that Google rejected a paper because it needed some adjustments. What we want to know is if that is actually the case.
• idlewords 6y ago
  This letter reads like Exxon-Mobil chastising their climatologist for not taking into account their latest research on fuel efficiency, or Philip Morris laying into their house doctor for discounting the psychological benefits of rich, mellow flavor.
• foobarbazetc 6y ago
  Jeff tweeted that Timnit “resigned”. I mean... come on man. Jeff is way better than this so I really have no idea what’s going on here.
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• dmitrygr 6y ago
  Jeff Dean has(/had) a cult following at Google. Internally, there was even a large collection of Jeff Dean jokes (like Chuck Norris jokes of yesteryear). It is sad to see him drop his credibility and become a PR mouthpiece. I know how this happens and I know why. But it is still sad to watch. Like watching you favourite band sell out to a big label.
• geofft 6y ago
  Jeff Dean is lying: https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1335017524937756672 https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1335017524937756672 > 1/Man there’s so much to pick apart. Let’s start with one thing. I want to ask if Jeff Dean has looked at the publication approval policy that he keeps on mentioning in his email. Like, for example, a simple look at the website? Let’s read. > 2/First off “Start the PubApprove process at least 1 week in advance of any deadline”. Okay, not sure where the 2 weeks in Jeff’s email came from. > 3/ But ALSO “The perfect policy” “There is no such thing as the perfect policy. Fortunately Googlers like to do the right thing. Please do that here—read the policy and do what makes sense.” > 4/ ALSO “Meanwhile, we strive to make the PubApprove process as lightweight as possible: hopefully eliminating the temptation to skip it.” I don’t know man you might have to resign immediately if you just “do what makes sense” so beware. > 5/ Finally, I wouldn’t want to know what would happen to you if you had “the temptation to skip it” mentioned on the website. Beware researchers > 6/In spite of this, we gave a heads up BEFORE even writing the paper—on September 18. Saying that we were about to write this paper. So much to say here, so much. But I’ll stop here for now.
• emmelaich 6y ago
  Key phrase ... > Highlighting risks without pointing out methods for researchers and developers to understand and mitigate those risks misses the mark on helping with these problems You have to have sympathy for her position but in the end if all you do is offer criticism then it's hard to see you inside Google, let alone as a manager.
• darepublic 6y ago
  Remember that Google fired James Damore for a lot less and the left was really happy about it
  • bnj 6y ago
    My impression was that James Damore was fired when his memo alleged that men were essentially a target of discrimination, while here this researcher it seems has been fired in a way that seems to be an act of discrimination. I don’t think there’s a contradiction in the reaction, personally.
• LocalTrust 6y ago
  I am reluctant to accuse Jeff Dean of bad faith, but this argument doesn't scan. I've been on the inside of an AI team during a crisis and then seen how senior management spun details to obfuscate critical details to avoid responsibility. Dean is slandering Gebru in a manner that will make it easier to dismiss her work and the work of other AI ethicists (especially women and bipoc) in the future. He and Google are actually themselves guilty of a lacking rigor (i.e. ethical rigor). Worst of all, I expect that racists inside Google and the wider industry will utilize this argumentative structure in the service of neutralizing ethicists and bipoc in the future. This is truly despicable. I used to be a great admirer of Jeff Dean.
• BMSmnqXAE4yfe1 6y ago
  These kind of encounters are going to be more common. AI people want to make AI. But it can be dangerous. And, by definition, we can't control AI.
• tinyhouse 6y ago
  I read the abstract. The paper doesn't critique Google. It critiques the current focus of AI research of building bigger and bigger models. Google is one of the leaders in building those big models. So what? They also invest in research to make smaller models that perform equally well. They have a huge incentive - those big models are very expensive. I don't think anyone at Google really care if the paper is published. I'm pretty sure it will get published sooner or later. The authors could've addressed the reviewers' comments pretty quickly and then re-submit to another conference. The whole thing blew out of proportion. She picked the wrong battle. Should've bitten the bullet.