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Oh, that's not the scandal at all, and I don't know why people think it is. The scandal is that Google, already one of the most powerful entities in the world,

by geofft 6y ago

Oh, that's not the scandal at all, and I don't know why people think it is. The scandal is that Google, already one of the most powerful entities in the world, is building an AGI and doesn't even want the slightest veneer of accountability for it. Nobody who isn't on Gebru's old team has any realistic access to know what they're really building. All we know is that the AI keeps outsmarting humans. And now they've fired the manager in charge of the "AI ethics" team. What are they doing such that they felt obligated to hire an AI ethics team and then ensure that team could not criticize Google?

refenestrator 6y ago
The paper in question's big claim was that language generators could repeat phrases like "both genders". There are actual ethical concerns here, you mention some bigger ones, why die on that hill?
Cacti 6y ago
If you worked in this field you would know how ridiculous your claims are. Dr Gebru wasn’t trying to stave off the robot apocalypse, she was interrogating biases exhibited by some neural networks due to the data they are trained on and how they are trained, which is something people have been looking at since statistical learning and statistics has existed. And when her colleagues raised reasonable scientific objections to her claims she went on the warpath and started calling her colleagues a bunch of dumb racist and sexist dirt bags. And it is actually fairly well known what Google is working on because they publish most of their work, and anyone in the field can go out and pull up all their research and have a pretty reasonable idea of what they’re working on, there’s not much mystery there. And despite claims to the contrary, the “AI ethics team” isn’t some grand overarching team, they’re a small team in one small part of the Google hierarchy—the leads of the AI Ethics are/were essentially first line managers, which is hardly the grandiose mandate that everyone seems to be attaching to it. People are attaching far more significance to this whole flap than is remotely reasonable to anyone who works in this area or has any experience in the corporate world.
- geofft 6y ago
  If the AI ethics team is a small team subservient to the AI practitioners, and they don't have the ability to raise concerns about small and apparently well-known problems, how could they ever hope to raise concerns about big problems? And whether I work in the field or not is irrelevant (though, as it happens, I was fighting with deep learning GPU drivers just yesterday). The whole problem is the idea that nobody has the right to direct the AI beyond the people who are running the AI, that if practitioners have been "looking at" a specific concern, then it's illegitimate for anyone else to ask questions.

by geofft 6y ago

refenestrator 6y ago

The paper in question's big claim was that language generators could repeat phrases like "both genders". There are actual ethical concerns here, you mention some bigger ones, why die on that hill?

Cacti 6y ago

If you worked in this field you would know how ridiculous your claims are. Dr Gebru wasn’t trying to stave off the robot apocalypse, she was interrogating biases exhibited by some neural networks due to the data they are trained on and how they are trained, which is something people have been looking at since statistical learning and statistics has existed. And when her colleagues raised reasonable scientific objections to her claims she went on the warpath and started calling her colleagues a bunch of dumb racist and sexist dirt bags. And it is actually fairly well known what Google is working on because they publish most of their work, and anyone in the field can go out and pull up all their research and have a pretty reasonable idea of what they’re working on, there’s not much mystery there. And despite claims to the contrary, the “AI ethics team” isn’t some grand overarching team, they’re a small team in one small part of the Google hierarchy—the leads of the AI Ethics are/were essentially first line managers, which is hardly the grandiose mandate that everyone seems to be attaching to it. People are attaching far more significance to this whole flap than is remotely reasonable to anyone who works in this area or has any experience in the corporate world.

geofft 6y ago
If the AI ethics team is a small team subservient to the AI practitioners, and they don't have the ability to raise concerns about small and apparently well-known problems, how could they ever hope to raise concerns about big problems? And whether I work in the field or not is irrelevant (though, as it happens, I was fighting with deep learning GPU drivers just yesterday). The whole problem is the idea that nobody has the right to direct the AI beyond the people who are running the AI, that if practitioners have been "looking at" a specific concern, then it's illegitimate for anyone else to ask questions.