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Google AI scientist Samy Bengio resigns
- rahimnathwani 6y agoThe word 'after' in the title suggests the two events are linked. But the email excerpts quoted in article do not support that conclusion.
- breakfastduck 6y agoWe must have read a different article. > Gebru has said the company wanted to suppress her criticism of its products and its efforts to increase workforce diversity. > Bengio had defended the pair, who co-led a team of about a dozen researching ethical issues related to AI software. From his email: > "how difficult yet important it is to organize a large team of researchers so as to promote long term ambitious research, exploration, rigor, diversity and inclusion"
- rahimnathwani 6y ago"We must have read a different article." No need for sarcasm. This article says that "He did not mention their firings in his farewell note.".
- jjulius 6y agoSure, but perhaps he chose to keep his professional career as free of drama as he could while still quitting because of this. Prospective employers are now more likely to hire him, knowing that he won't be likely to blow things up on his way out. Keep in mind that there's more to the sentence you're quoting... >"Though he did not mention the firings in his farewell note, they influenced his decision to resign, people familiar with the matter said, speaking on condition of anonymity."
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ryandrake 6y agoIf I was mildly famous and resigned as a software engineer from Amazon today, the headline might be “Xyz resigns from Amazon amid company’s union-busting efforts.” The headline would be technically the truth, but imply a completely fabricated story.
- marcinzm 6y agoYou mean also if managers under you were very publicly fired for union organization without you being in the loop and then had the whole union friendly group moved out from under you? Otherwise you're making straw man arguments.
- rahimnathwani 6y ago"Keep in mind that there's more to the sentence you're quoting..." No, that's a different sentence, that replaced the one I read. The article was edited after I wrote my comment. When I wrote my comment, that sentence said "He did not mention their firings in his farewell note." You can see this original sentence here: https://web.archive.org/web/20210406202729/https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-google-research-bengio/google-ai-scientist-bengio-resigns-after-colleagues-firings-email-idUSKBN2BT2JT https://web.archive.org/web/20210406202729/https://www.reute...
- PeterisP 6y agoWell, sure, but the farewell note isn't the only thing he's written or said.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- newnamenewface 6y agoThis title should be amended to eliminate the (imo) implication that he did so as a result of the firings. "He did not mention their firings in his farewell note."
- karaterobot 6y agoThis is a great example of the "post hoc ergo propter hoc" fallacy, caught in the wild! It may very well be the case, that his leaving is related to his colleagues being fired, but there's no evidence of it in the article. So Reuters should not be strongly implying — to the extent that no reader would likely draw any other conclusion — that it is. I mean, it probably is, let's be honest, but I kind of expect better from Reuters.
- coding123 6y agoWell he did do it after. The article mentions multiple links and things he said.
- ska 6y ago> but there's no evidence of it in the article. That's not quite correct, but true that the evidence presented is weak (e.g. anonymous "sources familiar")
- Natsu 6y agoAt this point, I honestly mistrust that kind of source and treat it as no more than a rumor someone heard.
- whimsicalism 6y agoI mean, it comes down to whether you trust Reuters. I find that people tend to trust anonymous sources on issues that they agree with, and distrust on issues they don't.
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- gennarro 6y agoI always find this sort of news confusing and completely lacking in context. I gather this person was a high level manager, but presumably he was part of a very large team. So will this have a material impact on Google? On AI research in general? Or is this just news because it’s Google and that team has been in the news a lot lately. I honestly can’t tell and I feel like I’m the only one who is confused but reflecting on it, this seems unlikely.
- ejb999 6y agonobody, and I mean nobody, is irreplaceable. anyone that thinks they are should see what actually happens in the hours and days after 'irreplaceable' people leave...somehow organizations manage to move forward. and within a week or two they are forgotten (with the possible exception of tiny teams).
- rurban 6y agoYou have apparently no idea how certain fields work. There are a lot of cases where a person stopped working on something, and then followed a 20 year complete stop of progress. Exceptional people are not replaceable. Putting a team in charge will just increase the damage.
- lukevp 6y agoI don’t think this is true, but I also don’t think most of us are irreplaceable. For example, Jim Keller seems to make or break chip design projects.
- whatshisface 6y agoYou're thinking of people who think they are irreplaceable due to general intelligence. People who are unique due to knowledge of specific systems are much less easy to swap out. Money can buy general intelligence but specific domain/application knowledge is sometimes unavailable at any price.
- neatze 6y ago"specific domain/application knowledge", in addition to, passion with deep understanding of project plans (vision) and objectives.
- throwaway29303 6y agoI've said it before and I'll say it again: Jeff Dean is going to leave as well. Tick tock.
- sp332 6y agoAs impressive as Dean's technical skills are, there's a point where Google would be better off without him than without all the people who decided not to work for Google because of him.
- ironrabbit 6y agoAre there lots of people who don't work at Google because of him? My impression is that he'd very well regarded in the tech community.
- ketzo 6y agoWell, at the very minimum, the recent firings/resignations certainly seem... correlated to him.
- strangeattractr 6y agoI mean it's a big leap to say that. Insinuating that he's a troublesome character to work with when most people say the opposite is quite strange. Even if it is related to his personality, sometimes people just don't get along in a workplace. The choice between Dean and Gebru for Google is a fairly easy one in this situation.
- ryan93 6y agoIf you have something to accuse him of just go ahead and say it. Regardless the recent firings and resignations were for "AI ethics" researchers who were hired for political reasons in the first place. Real engineers wont care.
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- mam2 6y ago"After the firing of google ethics researchers, i am going to pee" This headlines are hairpulling the issue in every news.
- nojs 6y agoIn case anyone else is confused, this isn’t Yoshua Bengio.
- mwambua 6y agoIt's about Samy Bengio (who is Yoshua's brother and technically related). It is confusing though, and the title should be updated to avoid confusion.
- jonas21 6y ago> Reporting by Paresh Dave and Jeffrey Dastin, additional reporting by Munsif Vengattil; Editing by Lisa Shumaker and Anil D’Silva It's kind of incredible that at least 5 people at Reuters worked on this story, yet nobody stopped to think that this would be a confusing headline. Or, if you want to be cynical, maybe they knew it would be confusing, but also that it would get more clicks...
- codetrotter 6y agoI dunno how Reuters works, but afaik in newspapers it’s often different people that write the article and who decide what the title will be. So if Reuters is anything like that then 5 people may not have had much to do with the title.
- gowld 6y agoWhy do you expect many people at Reuters to know who Yoshia Bengio is? And even if they did, why would expect a non trivial portion of readers to know?
- jonas21 6y agoYoshua Bengio recently won a Turing Award, which was covered widely in the press at the time. He also appears frequently in other news articles (for example, 14 articles in the New York Times). So yes, I would expect most people in the "Technology News" section at Reuters to at least be familiar with his name. And even if they didn't expect many readers to know who Yoshua Bengio is, he's still more well-known than Samy.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- kragen 6y agoCan we fix this headline? The implication that Yoshua Bengio has resigned from Google is extremely misleading. (If you don't follow the field, the equivalent in politics would be something like "Biden calls for probe into Google" and it turns out it's not Joe Biden, the US president, but Ashley Biden, his daughter.)
- fnord123 6y agoAnyone who knows who Yoshua Bengio to the point that they would be confused would know that he does not work for Google and hence it would not be possible for him to resign from Google AI.
- kragen 6y agoI assumed it was Yoshua Bengio, and I assumed Google had hired him without me knowing about it. There's a long gray area in the middle between "knows that X is a famous researcher in field Y" and "knows every time X changes jobs", and I am in that gray area with respect to not only Yoshua Bengio but actually at least two dozen AI researchers: Peter Norvig, Sebastian Thrun, Richard Greenblatt, Yann LeCun, Doug Lenat, Stuart Russell, and at least another score whose names aren't occurring to me off the top of my head but who I'd easily recognize. So I am one of these people you are saying do not exist. I suspect that actually the vast majority of people who know who Yoshua Bengio is at all are in this gray area with respect to X = yoshuabengio. That is, the people you are saying do not exist vastly outnumber the people who are confident that they are up to date on where Yoshua Bengio works.
- xiphias2 6y agoThanks, I flagged it, as it mislead me. I still haven't seen any improvement in AI ethics, even if the article tries to suggest it: we're getting much better models without any guarantees that they won't be misused to gain control of the world. Finding model bias is the easy part, as data is always biased.
- himaraya 6y agoPreviously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26715360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26715360
- mycologos 6y agoI see that this is your previous submission, but is there any point in linking to a previous submission with 0 comments?
- modularform123 6y agoLol I hope the door didn't hit him on the way out!
- pumaontheprowl 6y agoWhy is this news? Google has dozens of people resign every day. Many of them for polar opposite reasons. If one person resigns because Youtube is censoring too much and another person resigns because Youtube isn't censoring enough, you can't report on only the latter to imply that Youtube's lack of censorship is unpopular with the workforce. This kind of reporting is just flat-out dishonest and manipulative.
- ironrabbit 6y agoThis is Samy Bengio, not a random google engineer. He's a founding member of Google Brain.
- darepublic 6y agoIs it confirmed he left due to the firing of the ethics researcher
- CharlesW 6y agoFrom TFA: “Though he did not mention the firings in his farewell note, they influenced his decision to resign, people familiar with the matter said, speaking on condition of anonymity.”
- bellyfullofbac 6y agoThis will be downvoted to hell, but I can't tell if Gebru really is brilliant or if she was like the emperor with no clothes, and people were praising her for reasons similar to the fable: so they aren't ostracized. The famous paper was IMO very weak, trying to say AI research is bad because [add random stuff pulled out of thin air, like energy waste]. But well, since HN nowadays is full of zealots of both sides, I don't expect to find a nuanced discussion.
- whimsicalism 6y ago> But well, since HN nowadays is full of zealots of both sides, I don't expect to find a nuanced discussion. In my view, prefacing your comment with "This will be downvoted to hell" dilutes the quality of the conversation here. It also I think falsely suggests some sort of victimhood narrative when many of the comments in this thread and others about the subject are quite critical of Timnit.
- eat_veggies 6y agoIt wasn't random stuff pulled out of thin air -- it's a well researched paper that cites 158 academic sources. Of course it will seem weak if you will dismiss its arguments and evidence out of hand rather than critically engaging it. If nuance is what you want from this site, then try it yourself, yeah?
- ryan93 6y agoI don't understand what people want from AI. There is no way to make AI algorithms inherently equitable. If the models are trained on white power literature they will be racist. No company needs ai ethics researchers to know that they cant put models out into the wild without being manually curated.
- bo1024 6y agoThis sets up a false dichotomy, I think. There's no need to believe that only one of the two extremes is possible, nor to decide on and commit to a specific belief/worldview about a person. I think there's evidence that her research is great (and not every paper by brilliant people is expected to be brilliant), and also evidence that people who disagreed with her viewpoints were placed under pressure because of it (maybe not directly by her). Also, her research and her general viewpoints on social media might not all be about the same things.
- musicale 6y agoWhat I still don't understand is what the possible up side could be for a company telling a staff researcher to withdraw or not to submit a research paper, as long as it didn't compromise trade secrets, privacy, etc.. Were they trying to avoid negative publicity? That seems to have worked out well. Or were they afraid of being sued?
- prepend 6y ago> what the possible up side could be for a company telling a staff researcher to withdraw or not to submit a research paper My org has a big focus on scientific integrity and doesn’t want to put out inaccurate information. So the upside is reputational to have high quality scientific output. I’d guess they may also want some sort of review for IP or trade secrets to make sure info is appropriate for release. Finally, I’ve worked places where there is comms and branding review where the org wants all the right product names and stuff to line up.
- rirarobo 6y agoLet's review. Samy Bengio, co-founder of Google Brain and Google AI scientist of 14 years, unexpectedly resigns in the aftermath of Timnit Gebru and Margaret (Meg) Mitchell's firings. Gebru and Mitchell were the founders of Google's Ethical AI team, whose work on AI fairness was previously celebrated by Google AI leadership. Furthermore, Samy Bengio was Timnit's direct manager, but was completely blindsided by Timnit's firing, saying "I was stunned by what just happened to Timnit Gebru, who was in my team until a few days ago ... I stand by you, Timnit". Timnit was notified of her termination by Megan Kacholia, the Vice President of Google Research, who has since been removed from overseeing the remaining members of the Ethical AI team. Regarding the publication which precipitated Timnit's ousting, "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots ...", Samy Bengio granted publication approval for the submission. It was only after this approval that the Google Ethics AI researchers were told to rescind their names from the paper (they could not withdraw the paper entirely, since it was a collaboration with external academic researchers). Mitchell was fired shortly thereafter for allegedly violating the company's code of conduct and security policies. Now, only a few months after Gebru and Mitchell's firings, Samy Bengio has also resigned. Considering the sequence of events reviewed above, it seems clear to me that Samy Bengio's resignation is directly the result of Google's mishandling of this situation. If Timnit had not been fired while away on vacation, and Google leadership had instead found a way to address her concerns, or even accept her resignation more tactfully, then this debacle would have never unfolded in this manner, and Samy Bengio would still be at Google. I am not particularly surprised by Google's mishandling of this situation though, as it seems completely predictable and even cliche that such corporate behemoths often handle these situations in the most ham-handed ways. What I do find astonishing is the willingness of some Hacker News commenters to read into Timnit's actions and motivations, often with the most negative interpretations, but when it comes to Samy Bengio's resignation, they seem completely unable to read between the lines, and instead raise their burden of proof, so that they can deny any connection between this chain of events. Resignation letters and company wide farewell emails almost never disclose the real reasons behind a departure. Just because Samy Bengio has not explicitly said something like, "I am resigning because I stand in solidarity with Timnit Gebru", does not mean that these events are not linked, despite the assertions of some comments in this thread. In fact, it's seems to me that one would need to willfully ignore the evidence so far to conclude that these events are not linked, at least to some degree.