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No. Every time someone makes a big stink about someone getting fired at one of the top tech companies, it is promptly followed by an article like this. A trilli
by dealforager 6y ago
No. Every time someone makes a big stink about someone getting fired at one of the top tech companies, it is promptly followed by an article like this. A trillion dollar company that hires thousands of researchers and consistently produces some of the highest quality research with real results is not going to implode from one person being gone. Another pattern I've seen is someone leaving a company, followed by writing an article about how the company is doomed. Of course, the doom never arrives and the companies do even better. All of us are replaceable, from Bill Gates to Jeff Bezos to this researcher. This doesn't mean I agree with the firing, just saying that there is no implosion incoming.
- herodoturtle 6y agoHear hear. These clickbaity article titles are tiresome. Thanks for saying it like it is.
- DavidSumpter 6y agoPlease read the article. I address some of the issues raised. My point is that Gebru's firing is symptomatic of some deep problems Google are experiencing. Thank you.
- herodoturtle 6y agoI read the article. Doesn't change the fact that your chosen title is clickbaity. Even if you disclaim it in the article itself.
- DavidSumpter 6y agoIt is a valid criticism that the headline is clickbaity.
- Manifretto 6y agoI read the article and i'm not following the argument delivered at all. There is no real proof to this. I'm following and reading research @ google (stuff like this https://ai.googleblog.com/ https://ai.googleblog.com/ and other sources) for ages now and NOTHING indicates an 'implosion'. It is strong research with real and constant results. I have no idea why the autor would even consider using the word 'implode'. Its not rocket science that data is biased and it just will continue be researched and a solution will be found. For the single reason that biased systems in certain areas will not deliver the results you need to use it properly.
- fock 6y ago> For the single reason that biased systems in certain areas will not deliver the results you need to use it properly. well, they produce happy numbers for papers and depending on the brainwash-level of a population, they might also sufficiently often do the "right thing" towards minorities that noone cares too much about, independent of whether it would stand a chance against objective evaluation.
- Manifretto 6y agoIt is research; It doesn't need to be perfect. And the research they do is, even with this bias, ground breaking. 80% might be to get this thing running, 20% might be to finetune it for minorities. When google started the ML stuff for translation, they did start with english, now they support much more languages than before.
- hoseja 6y agoBlah blah blah racism blah blah blah lgbtiqp blah blah blah parroting blag blah blah white male redditors. Very good article.
- high_derivative 6y ago>. I don’t want to downplay the deep instutionalised sexism and racism that is at play in Gebru’s firing — that is there for all to see. This is a very badly written and uniformed article, and sentences like these essentially illustrate the thinking here (It's imploding because I don't like it). Here is an alternative reading: Google is cleaning house of toxic activists who are not interested in serious ethics research but use it as a vehicle for their ultra-progressive political agendas.
- fock 6y agobut isn't ethics inextricably linked to the worldview generally? We have some common ground nowadays (no killing in so called "civilized" countries), but to me it seems like you are just proposing the usual neo-xyz-argument: things can't be changed (which - originally developed in the thinktanks of cold-war-USA under heavy fascist influence - now has been the main global narrative without any institutionalized counter for 30 years)
- tinyhouse 6y agoNothing symptomatic about firing toxic employees. The only thing imploding is AI etichs research. There are good people doing quality research that will now have much harder time finding a job in industry because of the bad rep these Google employees "contributed" to the field.
- jmcgough 6y agoDid you read the article? Gebru's firing isn't the focus of it.
- dealforager 6y agoYes, I stopped reading when it mentioned the last good paper was from 2017. This is simply not true. I don't have time to go through all of their papers right now, but as someone else mentioned the protein folding one was a real breakthrough. They also have lots of great stuff in the NLP space (something similar to gpt-3 like 2 years earlier). Also tons of stuff on the actual training architecture/methods. Edit: I want to add that saying the title has nothing to do with the article is not helping the case. I finished reading the article in case I was being unfair, but I still stand with my original comment.
- DavidSumpter 6y agoIt says the high point is 2017, not the last good paper. There are of course other good papers coming out go Google. But the novelty is dropping and the angst is increasing.
- dealforager 6y agoI think judging the decline of a rapidly evolving field by literally one of the biggest breakthroughs in its entire history is not good. I also don't like clickbait and I think the audience here generally doesn't either, even if you justify it at the end.
- credit_guy 6y agoLots of people think protein folding is a bigger deal than beating the go champion.
- Isinlor 6y agoJournalists were asking people from DeepMind why winning in Go is important. They said because it may lead to breakthrough in e.g. medicine. Well it didn't, at least not yet and not directly. But we still got AlphaFold. And AlphaFold is the type of breakthroughs DeepMind is meant to make. Not playing games.
- Rochus 6y ago> All of us are replaceable That's a management illusion. Try to replace e.g. someone like Fabrice Bellard, Mike Pall or Claude Shannon. Of course such things happen in big companies, but mostly because management is too limited to properly assess the true value of certain individuals. But the article is actually about a different topic.
- sdevonoes 6y agoAlright. 99.999% of us are replaceable.
- Rochus 6y agoAlso this is a management illusion. There is no evidence for this assumption. You don't even know the probability distribution. There is no reason to assume that the percentage is equally distributed across all firms or countries. And anyway, the article is about something else.
- karmasimida 6y agoThen what is your distribution then? Those exceptional individuals are incredibly rare, like one or two in a generation. So you need to be Shannon-likes to be not replaced by some middle manager in a big corporate? Emm, if someone were this accomplished, why would they care about one employment? That is the wrong question to ask. Truth is, if Google thought they were not replaceable, it would not fire them this easily.
- Rochus 6y agoMuch more people than you expect have at least one exceptional skill; from my observations I would say at least 20 to 30%; the more extraordinary skills per person, the rarer of course. And if indeed the human workforce were really such a generic, easily replaceable commodity, why do most companies, including Google, go to such great lengths in recruiting, with assessment centers and so on? And why are there so many unemployed IT specialists, for example in Germany, when at the same time the industry associations claim that jobs cannot be filled?
- danielscrubs 6y agoI believe you, but just for the sake of it: What AI research has had business value from Google in the last years that you could sell?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Isinlor 6y agoAlphaFold may bring millions if not billions to DeepMind, Google and Alphabet. Figuring out structure of a single protein may cost up to 100 000 dollars. Bert as applied to search from late 2019: https://www.google.com/amp/s/blog.google/products/search/search-language-understanding-bert/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/blog.google/products/search/sea...
- Rochus 6y agoTime will show; winning the competition was just the first step.
- Isinlor 6y agoIndeed, that is why I'm saying "it may", but people are crazy if they expect that basic research will make billions of profits a year after. It normally takes some 10 to 20 years for basic research to produce profits. mRNA vaccines are technology from 1990 and are first time used commercially on mass scale on humans 30 years later.
- FartyMcFarter 6y agoWaveNet is one example: "Google Assistant adds 9 new AI-generated voices": https://venturebeat.com/2019/09/18/google-assistant-gains-9-new-voices-generated-by-ai/ https://venturebeat.com/2019/09/18/google-assistant-gains-9-... Data center cooling is another one: "How Google is Using AI for Data Center Cooling": https://www.bmc.com/blogs/data-center-cooling/ https://www.bmc.com/blogs/data-center-cooling/
- tinyhouse 6y ago
- tinyhouse 6y agoTo be fair, the article is not about the firing. In any case, the two researchers who got fired did more harm to Google than good. Internally no one cares they left. AI etichs is an esoteric academic research field.
- fmajid 6y agoMore importantly it has no connection to the bottom line, which is why Google management doesn't seem particularly concerned with disquiet in that research group, as long as it doesn't spread to the rest of the company.
- tkgally 6y agoGoogle and other companies should regard rigorous research and discussion about AI ethics as long-term protection of their bottom lines. If they start launching products and selling services that are found to unfairly favor or disfavor certain groups of people, they will be vulnerable to lawsuits, government regulation, and damage to their reputations.
- azmodeus 6y agoI think it is important to shift AI ethics to become more of an investment but that requires more tooling to evaluate AI ethics problems and the business risks.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoOne of the core issues in AI ethics, really the core issue currently, is that any product you launch or service you run will be found by some subset of the population to unfairly favor certain groups of people. No amount of research will allow Google to build a model so neutral everyone has to agree with it, because people want different things and have different ideas and assumptions about what's fair. As they found in 2019 with their AI ethics board, even basic ideas like "let's listen to everyone" are subject to this dilemma, because some groups feel that it's unfair to listen to other groups.
- 6y ago
- paulsutter 6y agoOf general interest, Jeff Dean’s comment on why the Gebru paper didn’t meet Google’s publication guidelines: “Highlighting risks without pointing out methods for researchers and developers to understand and mitigate those risks misses the mark on helping with these problems” from https://docs.google.com/document/d/1f2kYWDXwhzYnq8ebVtuk9CqQqz7ScqxhSIxeYGrWjK0/mobilebasic https://docs.google.com/document/d/1f2kYWDXwhzYnq8ebVtuk9CqQ...
- dominotw 6y agoIsn't that asking too much. How would a researcher also know how mitigate the problems they identified.
- sp332 6y agoOf course. Especially to expect all that to be in each individual published paper.
- refenestrator 6y agoThe problems they identified have been known for years and there are lots of papers exploring how to mitigate. The whole paper was a nothing burger wrapped in social justice language with asides about how global warming is Actually Racism because of disparate impact (interesting, not an ML topic). If the problems aren't novel and you're proposing zero solutions, it shouldn't be a paper.
- ausbah 6y agosurvey papers, reproducibility papers, and the like are still valid contributions to science
- jl2718 6y agoI wonder what would drive someone to do this. Anger? Loneliness? Work pressure? Imposter syndrome? Her prior work seemed more observational than theoretical, and the she got thrown into a top-level leadership position in a theoretical research organization with almost zero experience. Is there a single person that would have defended decision if that person was a straight able christian white or north asian male? (Note: please do not respond by speaking for others that do not share your own views.) I wonder when the “performative wokeness” bubble will burst.
- eli_gottlieb 6y ago>All of us are replaceable This sounds more like a reason to unionize than a reason to celebrate a firing.
- skywhopper 6y agoYou must not have read the article, which isn't about Gebru's (and now Mitchell's) firing. There would be a lot to say about the ongoing credibility of any of Google's statements or research concerning ethical AI at this point, and lots of folks have said those things. This article is an analysis of the extreme weaknesses in the current seemingly-productive approach to ML language model research. The intro anecdote about the failure of game-playing models to handle games with representational elements or indirect rewards is extremely important. But the failure of the Big AI community to recognize those same failures in its approach to building language models is the pending crisis that the article's title refers to. Gebru's firing is not the cause of the impending implosion of Google's AI research, but rather a leading indicator and warning sign.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoThe article discusses some concrete challenges in AI research, but the author's only argument for why Google won't be able to tackle these problems is that they fired Gebru. As he mentions in the article, it's not that the Big AI community has failed to recognize these issues; "40 Google researchers, from throughout the organisation" discussed some of them just a few weeks before the Gebru controversy. Perhaps equally importantly, the author made a very serious accusation that Google has "deep instutionalised sexism and racism". Are we really intended to just gloss over that, treat it as unimportant filler?
- svaha1728 6y agoUnfortunately, they’ve got the data... that alone will attract talent and money.
- uniqueid 6y agohighest quality research with real results Did you mean "highest quality research with real [risotto]"?