7 ms·

Google is poisoning its reputation with AI researchers

52 points by luke2m 6y ago

lain98 6y ago
No
minimaxir 6y ago
An underdiscussed second-order consequence of bad press is that it does deter a subset of potential hires from joining the company. However, it's near-impossible to measure this effect, and in the case of FAANGs, there's more than enough supply of candidates (and enough compensation offered) to overcome a recruiting decline due to bad press. I myself would not join Google (or Facebook)'s data science or AI divisions without assurance that those companies are taking bad DS/AI PR into account and making impactful changes to their pipeline.
kjjjjjjjjjjjjjj 6y ago
Google has lost all of its allure. I once dreamed of working there. Now, I think their employees drink the kool aid hard, and they are generally inept. Working at google isn't really impressive.
- phonebucket 6y ago
  Why generally inept? E.g. go, jax, tensorflow and dex-lang pop straight to the top of my head as examples of eptitude.
  - kjjjjjjjjjjjjjj 6y ago
    While those are cool open source projects, Googles actual products are the things that suck. Take GCP - they don't really dogfood ANYTHING. They still run half their stuff in borg! AWS dogfoods almost all of their services. The polish and integrations speak for themselves. And look at their other product lines - android, communication apps, etc. They are generally a mess besides their absolute core offerings (Gmail, gdrive, and maps) How is it that the "best engineers" in the world can't make good products?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
lowbloodsugar 6y ago
Google is Poisoning Its Reputation with ethical AI Researchers.
andyxor 6y ago
This has nothing to do with neither AI nor ethics. Gebru was fired for throwing ultimatums and demanding to "doxx" colleagues who criticized her paper [1], and blasting group emails calling for sabotage. [2] Mitchell was fired for downloading thousands of internal files using a script and sending to external accounts. From Google response "we confirmed that there were multiple violations of our code of conduct, as well as of our security policies, which included the exfiltration of confidential business-sensitive documents and private data of other employees" [3] [1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1f2kYWDXwhzYnq8ebVtuk9CqQqz7ScqxhSIxeYGrWjK0/preview?pru=AAABdlOOKBs*gTzLnuI53B2IS2BISVcgAQ https://docs.google.com/document/d/1f2kYWDXwhzYnq8ebVtuk9CqQ... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k77sxz/d_timnit_gebru_and_google_megathread/?sort=top https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k77sxz/d_t... [3] https://venturebeat.com/2021/02/19/google-fires-ethical-ai-lead-margaret-mitchell/ https://venturebeat.com/2021/02/19/google-fires-ethical-ai-l...
- 1cvmask 6y ago
  So is Lidar racist against nightime? https://www.quora.com/Does-LIDAR-work-at-night https://www.quora.com/Does-LIDAR-work-at-night
rw2 6y ago
Unpopular opinion: I don't believe that is the case. AI has always been in the realm of math and computer science. And the researchers fired was researching only the ethics of it. A lot of researchers are apolitical and only there for the challenge or the pay. If anything, I think what happens deters investment in AI ethic research. For Google, it has only produced bad PR without any value to their influence and market value in the AI community. Edit: Also Google's strategy of giving away a production level AI library like Tensorflow has basically locked up their status in the AI community for years to come.
- jolux 6y ago
  The article mentions the impact on the broader research community too. Samy Bengio is extremely well known, not for ethics. He's one of the original authors of Torch.
- elmomle 6y ago
  They won't have trouble recruiting low and mid level AI engineers, simply because the pool is large. But the pool of highly experienced engineers and leaders in the space is much smaller, and even a moderate reduction in interest there could have huge long-term implications for the company--especially since those high-level contributors have greater financial freedom to follow their principles.
  - tinyhouse 6y ago
    You live in la la land if you think they will have a problem hiring AI leaders. If you pay them they will come. Even the couple of researchers who got fired realized they made a mistake. Bengio left but he was already there for 15 years and is a multi-millionaire. He probably would've left anyway sooner or later.
    - patcon 6y ago
      I think you misunderstand how much leading AI researchers will be learning from complexity science and networks, and how much they'll understand [informational] diversity itself as critical to all networks (including their own community of practice). My assumption is that there is a dovetail between understanding the role of randomness and diversity in neural networks, and understanding of its role in the social computation of society. Those who don't see that relationship and don't put it into practice in their own value systems will not be "at the top", because they are partially blinded. Just my hot-take. Might be wrong. But I think there's a bias that favours these value systems amongst top tier researchers, unlike traditional hard comp eng studies.
citizenpaul 6y ago
I really never understood this whole Gebru situation and it sounds like there is bad behavior on both sides. The bad behavior by Google is pretty well available online. Yet no one is talking about the fact that they hired Gebru to make these changes. All it seems they asked from her was not publicly slander the company that was paying her to do exactly what she wanted. Then Google claims she quit which should be provable and she claims she was fired which also should be provable. Yet I've seen no proof of either.
- elmomle 6y ago
  What was the bad behavior on Gebru's part, as you see it?
  - bitcharmer 6y ago
    Demanding that peer reviewers identities be revealed to her and making racist and misandric remarks about her bosses would be a good start.
    - monocasa 6y ago
      The word I've heard on the street is that her paper passed the normal internal peer review process at Google (which is open wrt to the reviewers' identities) and was then hit with a second, just for her and her paper review process that had secret identities and made ultimatums that the paper simply wouldn't allowed to be published based on it's content, even with edits. I'd be pissed in those circumstances too, seeing it as an affront to the academic process in general, and be looking at the obvious reasons why they chose me and my paper to apply these previously unheard of constraints to.
      - citizenpaul 6y ago
        The only valid point of contention here is the demanding removal of her name on the paper. My game theory'ish take on the demands. Gebru 1.The demands were reasonable so she herself should have no issue sharing them. Vindicates her position against Google and proves herself and her theories correct, scoring a huge victory for her AI research. 2.Even she know her demands were so ridiculous she is not comfortable sharing them. Option one has not happened so that leaves two. Google really has no good outcome in sharing them it could be considered all variety of violations HR so they likely never will without her permission.
kepler1 6y ago
Maybe I can rephrase the title in a more objective way: Google has lost some shine among people who wish to find bias and make an inflated political situation out of any act that happens to touch gender/race/class -- whether through the research itself, or the "meta" issues about whether someone was advanced/demoted/fired/hired for discussions about such topics. The company is decreasing its internal cultural desire to swing back and forth with every political movement and attract difficult attention that makes working there less productive. For those researchers who aren't crusading to make an example out of a tech company, and who don't care to bring college-level activism and risk into their employment, it remains a fine place to work.
- throwaway3699 6y ago
  That doesn't mean knock-on effect won't be huge. The people most outraged about the Gebru situation are the ones running our cultural institutions, specifically academia and news/media industries. They naturally have the loudest voices in the room, meaning this will harm Google even if I believe they're in the right for a change.
- commandlinefan 6y ago
  They're probably increasing their reputation with an entirely different set of AI researchers who would have otherwise stayed away from Google for fear of being forced into a particular politically-driven agenda that they themselves may well not support. If even Hollywood has their share of closet conservatives, how many more must a purely mathematical discipline?
  - FooBarBizBazz 6y ago
    Coinbase got good PR in some circles.
- DoctorNick 6y ago
  Pointing out discrimination against POC is an "inflated political situation"?
  - 6y ago
vorhemus 6y ago
I know it's an unpopular opinion but I have the feeling that most of these "Ethics in AI" movements are either pure marketing or an easy way in for free rider into the hyped field of AI even though they have little to contribute except shallow papers or promoting their political agenda.
- mempko 6y ago
  "Ethics in AI" have deep implications for improving our AI systems. For example, bias in training data has an outcome of the performance of a system. Ethics in AI movements looks deeper into this process and does improve performance in AI systems. Also because AI deeply interacts with human systems today at a large scale (think youtube recommendation algorithm) it will also have a large affect on society. So not sure what "political" agenda there is there except acknowledging the obvious.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    Google's AI ethics board in 2019, for example, was killed for explicitly political reasons. Many AI ethics commentators, including two of the board members, indicated that Kay Coles James should not be permitted to participate in AI ethics discussions because of her politics.
  - vorhemus 6y ago
    If attributes such as age or gender are strong features for certain dependent variables that improve the predictive performance of a model, then it must be allowed to use these variables. For example, it is well known that colorectal cancer is more prevalent in men over the age of 50 - so a statistical model used to allocate free colorectal exams would favor old men. Is that discriminatory? Likewise, for any given variable, one will find certain features that favor men or women, young or old; finding these dependencies is precisely the point behind statistical models.
    - monocasa 6y ago
      On the other hand, if a model fails on certain populations because not enough training data including them was input because they're historically seen as a less important subgroup, then you've simply encoded your societal biases in your model. Understanding that difference and pointing out problem spots like that is a great job for an ethical AI researcher.
olodus 6y ago
What was their research about? When I hear ethical AI things like differentiable privacy and stuff comes to mind. Is it things like that or am I way off?
- jolux 6y ago
  The paper that led to Gebru's exit from Google was exploring downsides with large language models: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-ai-ethics-research-paper-forced-out-timnit-gebru/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-a...
golemiprague 6y ago
I see it as a bit of a crime and punishment situation. They have fired this guy who pointed out some differences between the sexes to the cheers of the media and then hired this useless woman only to get it bite them in the ass. Maybe they will learn some lesson but I doubt it. I think tech companies shold make a policy to hire women only for proper technical jobs rather than all the fluff work that they do today. It will help both the company which will get serious and productive women and women themselves who will realise that they are treated equally and expected to do the main productive work, the same way they do it in hospitals or law firms.
kapuasuite 6y ago
Only a few of the items in Gebru's "controversial" paper are even worth discussing - do we really need an Ethics department to calculate the carbon footprint of training a model, or point out that a model based on scraping the internet won't necessarily align with trendy shifts in vocabulary? https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-ai-ethics-research-paper-forced-out-timnit-gebru/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-a...

52 points by luke2m 6y ago

An underdiscussed second-order consequence of bad press is that it does deter a subset of potential hires from joining the company. However, it's near-impossible to measure this effect, and in the case of FAANGs, there's more than enough supply of candidates (and enough compensation offered) to overcome a recruiting decline due to bad press. I myself would not join Google (or Facebook)'s data science or AI divisions without assurance that those companies are taking bad DS/AI PR into account and making impactful changes to their pipeline.

kjjjjjjjjjjjjjj 6y ago

Google has lost all of its allure. I once dreamed of working there. Now, I think their employees drink the kool aid hard, and they are generally inept. Working at google isn't really impressive.

phonebucket 6y ago
Why generally inept? E.g. go, jax, tensorflow and dex-lang pop straight to the top of my head as examples of eptitude.
- kjjjjjjjjjjjjjj 6y ago
  While those are cool open source projects, Googles actual products are the things that suck. Take GCP - they don't really dogfood ANYTHING. They still run half their stuff in borg! AWS dogfoods almost all of their services. The polish and integrations speak for themselves. And look at their other product lines - android, communication apps, etc. They are generally a mess besides their absolute core offerings (Gmail, gdrive, and maps) How is it that the "best engineers" in the world can't make good products?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

lowbloodsugar 6y ago

Google is Poisoning Its Reputation with ethical AI Researchers.

andyxor 6y ago

This has nothing to do with neither AI nor ethics. Gebru was fired for throwing ultimatums and demanding to "doxx" colleagues who criticized her paper [1], and blasting group emails calling for sabotage. [2] Mitchell was fired for downloading thousands of internal files using a script and sending to external accounts. From Google response "we confirmed that there were multiple violations of our code of conduct, as well as of our security policies, which included the exfiltration of confidential business-sensitive documents and private data of other employees" [3] [1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1f2kYWDXwhzYnq8ebVtuk9CqQqz7ScqxhSIxeYGrWjK0/preview?pru=AAABdlOOKBs*gTzLnuI53B2IS2BISVcgAQ https://docs.google.com/document/d/1f2kYWDXwhzYnq8ebVtuk9CqQ... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k77sxz/d_timnit_gebru_and_google_megathread/?sort=top https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k77sxz/d_t... [3] https://venturebeat.com/2021/02/19/google-fires-ethical-ai-lead-margaret-mitchell/ https://venturebeat.com/2021/02/19/google-fires-ethical-ai-l...

1cvmask 6y ago
So is Lidar racist against nightime? https://www.quora.com/Does-LIDAR-work-at-night https://www.quora.com/Does-LIDAR-work-at-night

rw2 6y ago

Unpopular opinion: I don't believe that is the case. AI has always been in the realm of math and computer science. And the researchers fired was researching only the ethics of it. A lot of researchers are apolitical and only there for the challenge or the pay. If anything, I think what happens deters investment in AI ethic research. For Google, it has only produced bad PR without any value to their influence and market value in the AI community. Edit: Also Google's strategy of giving away a production level AI library like Tensorflow has basically locked up their status in the AI community for years to come.

jolux 6y ago
The article mentions the impact on the broader research community too. Samy Bengio is extremely well known, not for ethics. He's one of the original authors of Torch.
elmomle 6y ago
They won't have trouble recruiting low and mid level AI engineers, simply because the pool is large. But the pool of highly experienced engineers and leaders in the space is much smaller, and even a moderate reduction in interest there could have huge long-term implications for the company--especially since those high-level contributors have greater financial freedom to follow their principles.
- tinyhouse 6y ago
  You live in la la land if you think they will have a problem hiring AI leaders. If you pay them they will come. Even the couple of researchers who got fired realized they made a mistake. Bengio left but he was already there for 15 years and is a multi-millionaire. He probably would've left anyway sooner or later.
  - patcon 6y ago
    I think you misunderstand how much leading AI researchers will be learning from complexity science and networks, and how much they'll understand [informational] diversity itself as critical to all networks (including their own community of practice). My assumption is that there is a dovetail between understanding the role of randomness and diversity in neural networks, and understanding of its role in the social computation of society. Those who don't see that relationship and don't put it into practice in their own value systems will not be "at the top", because they are partially blinded. Just my hot-take. Might be wrong. But I think there's a bias that favours these value systems amongst top tier researchers, unlike traditional hard comp eng studies.

citizenpaul 6y ago

I really never understood this whole Gebru situation and it sounds like there is bad behavior on both sides. The bad behavior by Google is pretty well available online. Yet no one is talking about the fact that they hired Gebru to make these changes. All it seems they asked from her was not publicly slander the company that was paying her to do exactly what she wanted. Then Google claims she quit which should be provable and she claims she was fired which also should be provable. Yet I've seen no proof of either.

elmomle 6y ago
What was the bad behavior on Gebru's part, as you see it?
- bitcharmer 6y ago
  Demanding that peer reviewers identities be revealed to her and making racist and misandric remarks about her bosses would be a good start.
  - monocasa 6y ago
    The word I've heard on the street is that her paper passed the normal internal peer review process at Google (which is open wrt to the reviewers' identities) and was then hit with a second, just for her and her paper review process that had secret identities and made ultimatums that the paper simply wouldn't allowed to be published based on it's content, even with edits. I'd be pissed in those circumstances too, seeing it as an affront to the academic process in general, and be looking at the obvious reasons why they chose me and my paper to apply these previously unheard of constraints to.
    - citizenpaul 6y ago
      The only valid point of contention here is the demanding removal of her name on the paper. My game theory'ish take on the demands. Gebru 1.The demands were reasonable so she herself should have no issue sharing them. Vindicates her position against Google and proves herself and her theories correct, scoring a huge victory for her AI research. 2.Even she know her demands were so ridiculous she is not comfortable sharing them. Option one has not happened so that leaves two. Google really has no good outcome in sharing them it could be considered all variety of violations HR so they likely never will without her permission.

kepler1 6y ago

Maybe I can rephrase the title in a more objective way: Google has lost some shine among people who wish to find bias and make an inflated political situation out of any act that happens to touch gender/race/class -- whether through the research itself, or the "meta" issues about whether someone was advanced/demoted/fired/hired for discussions about such topics. The company is decreasing its internal cultural desire to swing back and forth with every political movement and attract difficult attention that makes working there less productive. For those researchers who aren't crusading to make an example out of a tech company, and who don't care to bring college-level activism and risk into their employment, it remains a fine place to work.

throwaway3699 6y ago
That doesn't mean knock-on effect won't be huge. The people most outraged about the Gebru situation are the ones running our cultural institutions, specifically academia and news/media industries. They naturally have the loudest voices in the room, meaning this will harm Google even if I believe they're in the right for a change.
commandlinefan 6y ago
They're probably increasing their reputation with an entirely different set of AI researchers who would have otherwise stayed away from Google for fear of being forced into a particular politically-driven agenda that they themselves may well not support. If even Hollywood has their share of closet conservatives, how many more must a purely mathematical discipline?
- FooBarBizBazz 6y ago
  Coinbase got good PR in some circles.
DoctorNick 6y ago
Pointing out discrimination against POC is an "inflated political situation"?
- 6y ago

vorhemus 6y ago

I know it's an unpopular opinion but I have the feeling that most of these "Ethics in AI" movements are either pure marketing or an easy way in for free rider into the hyped field of AI even though they have little to contribute except shallow papers or promoting their political agenda.

mempko 6y ago
"Ethics in AI" have deep implications for improving our AI systems. For example, bias in training data has an outcome of the performance of a system. Ethics in AI movements looks deeper into this process and does improve performance in AI systems. Also because AI deeply interacts with human systems today at a large scale (think youtube recommendation algorithm) it will also have a large affect on society. So not sure what "political" agenda there is there except acknowledging the obvious.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  Google's AI ethics board in 2019, for example, was killed for explicitly political reasons. Many AI ethics commentators, including two of the board members, indicated that Kay Coles James should not be permitted to participate in AI ethics discussions because of her politics.
- vorhemus 6y ago
  If attributes such as age or gender are strong features for certain dependent variables that improve the predictive performance of a model, then it must be allowed to use these variables. For example, it is well known that colorectal cancer is more prevalent in men over the age of 50 - so a statistical model used to allocate free colorectal exams would favor old men. Is that discriminatory? Likewise, for any given variable, one will find certain features that favor men or women, young or old; finding these dependencies is precisely the point behind statistical models.
  - monocasa 6y ago
    On the other hand, if a model fails on certain populations because not enough training data including them was input because they're historically seen as a less important subgroup, then you've simply encoded your societal biases in your model. Understanding that difference and pointing out problem spots like that is a great job for an ethical AI researcher.

olodus 6y ago

What was their research about? When I hear ethical AI things like differentiable privacy and stuff comes to mind. Is it things like that or am I way off?

jolux 6y ago
The paper that led to Gebru's exit from Google was exploring downsides with large language models: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-ai-ethics-research-paper-forced-out-timnit-gebru/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-a...

golemiprague 6y ago

I see it as a bit of a crime and punishment situation. They have fired this guy who pointed out some differences between the sexes to the cheers of the media and then hired this useless woman only to get it bite them in the ass. Maybe they will learn some lesson but I doubt it. I think tech companies shold make a policy to hire women only for proper technical jobs rather than all the fluff work that they do today. It will help both the company which will get serious and productive women and women themselves who will realise that they are treated equally and expected to do the main productive work, the same way they do it in hospitals or law firms.

kapuasuite 6y ago

Only a few of the items in Gebru's "controversial" paper are even worth discussing - do we really need an Ethics department to calculate the carbon footprint of training a model, or point out that a model based on scraping the internet won't necessarily align with trendy shifts in vocabulary? https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-ai-ethics-research-paper-forced-out-timnit-gebru/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-a...