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In fact, Timnit Gebru's actual manager has issued a specific statement on this. It's on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=346973801646723

In fact, Timnit Gebru's actual manager has issued a specific statement on this. It's on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=3469738016467233&id=100002932057665 https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=34697380164672... Full text: Just wanted to say that I was stunned by what just happened to Timnit Gebru, who was in my team until a few days ago (I'm sure you've all read what happened already). I have always been and will remain a strong supporter of her scientific work to make sure that AI becomes a positive force for the minoritized, as well as her generosity and tireless actions to lift the voices of the silenced ones. She taught me a lot and still is. I stand by you, Timnit. I also stand by the rest of my team who, like me, was stunned and is trying to make sense of all this. In particular the Ethical AI team, but also the broader Brain Research team.

sjg007 6y ago
I mean that's a pretty big endorsement and something people here should think about. Also I read the highlights of the paper linked here and it seems fine and reasonable. These are reasonable questions to ask. Sure we can mitigate the cost of training these models with green energy or finding new optimization./compression techniques etc... but that doesn't mean that with ever evolving data volumes we will ever fully mitigate that. Bitcoin for all its merit consumes a lot of energy. Is that more than USD or something else? Another thing to consider is that AI right now has a rich get richer winner take all dynamic. We have titans battling it out for NLP supremacy. Deep mind just revolutionized protein folding which has direct implications into biomedical research and technology. Small academic labs are at an extreme disadvantage unless they collaborate with big tech. Interestingly physics research evolved in a similar way with large particle colliders and telescopes started up. So you can make a direct analogy to that, that the basic research can only be done with million dollar investments. That's an ethical question. GPT-3 trained on misinformation would make pizza gate look tame in comparison. So there are huge social implications. Even real datasets collected from society and social data will have implicit and explicit biases in them. There are huge ethical concerns with data, data collection and with the interpretations AI models will make. Your credit score, your social credit score, a company that refuses to hire you because a chat bot has labeled you subversive. The TSA/DHS blanket banned people from flying and gave no feedback or transparency into why. It took members of Congress to get some people redressed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapons_of_Math_Destruction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapons_of_Math_Destruction
thu2111 6y ago
There's another Googler who needs to be fired. Anyone who uses phrases like "minoritized" (that's not a word) or "the silenced ones" is quite clearly fighting the culture war and not even slightly interested in the norms of management. What kind of a manager "stands by" someone who is as completely poisonous as this woman is? What kind of "generosity" did she show to her colleagues when she demanded their identities and called them racist on Twitter? Google needs a massive clear-out. People aren't doing their jobs anymore there, they've become so obsessed with fictional narratives about non-existent racism and sexism.

sjg007 6y ago

I mean that's a pretty big endorsement and something people here should think about. Also I read the highlights of the paper linked here and it seems fine and reasonable. These are reasonable questions to ask. Sure we can mitigate the cost of training these models with green energy or finding new optimization./compression techniques etc... but that doesn't mean that with ever evolving data volumes we will ever fully mitigate that. Bitcoin for all its merit consumes a lot of energy. Is that more than USD or something else? Another thing to consider is that AI right now has a rich get richer winner take all dynamic. We have titans battling it out for NLP supremacy. Deep mind just revolutionized protein folding which has direct implications into biomedical research and technology. Small academic labs are at an extreme disadvantage unless they collaborate with big tech. Interestingly physics research evolved in a similar way with large particle colliders and telescopes started up. So you can make a direct analogy to that, that the basic research can only be done with million dollar investments. That's an ethical question. GPT-3 trained on misinformation would make pizza gate look tame in comparison. So there are huge social implications. Even real datasets collected from society and social data will have implicit and explicit biases in them. There are huge ethical concerns with data, data collection and with the interpretations AI models will make. Your credit score, your social credit score, a company that refuses to hire you because a chat bot has labeled you subversive. The TSA/DHS blanket banned people from flying and gave no feedback or transparency into why. It took members of Congress to get some people redressed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapons_of_Math_Destruction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapons_of_Math_Destruction

thu2111 6y ago

There's another Googler who needs to be fired. Anyone who uses phrases like "minoritized" (that's not a word) or "the silenced ones" is quite clearly fighting the culture war and not even slightly interested in the norms of management. What kind of a manager "stands by" someone who is as completely poisonous as this woman is? What kind of "generosity" did she show to her colleagues when she demanded their identities and called them racist on Twitter? Google needs a massive clear-out. People aren't doing their jobs anymore there, they've become so obsessed with fictional narratives about non-existent racism and sexism.