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Google fires another AI researcher who reportedly challenged findings

222 points by firstSpeaker 4y ago

mcguire 4y ago
"Google fired machine learning scientist Satrajit Chatterjee in March, soon after it refused to publish a paper Chatterjee and others wrote challenging earlier findings that computers could design some chip components more effectively than humans. The scientist was reportedly allowed to collaborate on a paper disputing those claims after he and fellow authors expressed reservations, but was dismissed after a resolution committee rejected the paper and the researchers hoped to bring the issue to CEO Sundar Pichai and Alphabet's board of directors." Google refused to allow a paper that was critical of a previous paper to be published? That would be scientific misconduct at the organization level, no? The kind of thing that got the Trump administration in trouble, right?
- sjg007 4y ago
  It is a strange hill to decide to die on. Even if you are the expert in the area, AI is weird and changing the world. Most Nature papers have something wrong with them. I don't see any reason that reinforcement learning cannot learn the best layouts or what not. I don't know the space though enough to say more than that. The NYTimes article alleges that he waged a misinformation campaign against two researchers. So there's that in the mix as well.
  - mcguire 4y ago
    They can fire him for whatever reason they like, but preventing the publication of a paper should not be a corporate policy decision. The only question they should ask is if it reveals trade secrets, which I assume it wouldn't because it was a response to another paper from Google. The whole scientific process thing is the part intended to decide if it's meaningful or not. That AI is weird and changing the world is why the science shouldn't be held up on the question of whether it embarrasses the company.
t_mann 4y ago
wth? a "for cause" termination is a pretty big deal (in some larger organizations practically an automatic application killer), and to say it in a press statement is furthering its damaging impact. why do they think they need to do that? even if we take for granted that there's probably a lot more to this story than what's reported in the article, this leaves a bitter aftertaste. there are so many ways this could have been handled more gracefully. and the optics of doing that in the context of a critical study are poor, to say the least.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
faangiq 4y ago
How can I get on the AI shyster gravy train?
sijnapq 4y ago
If you seek truth, search on moma or ask for “Experiments for Nature rebuttal” document. Read the document and come back for comments :)
mcdermott 4y ago
In the corporate world, just like government funded research, science is only science if it aligns with the desires of its funding source unfortunately.
- xadhominemx 4y ago
  I never experienced anything like this during the course of my government funded research. Nor did I hear of anyone else experiencing anything like this. Of course, your topic area has to align with government funders’ interests… but in my experience the conclusions do not.
  - verisimi 4y ago
    But if your conclusions do not align with the funders desires, would your research see the light of day? If you have that much money that you can fund lots of studies, the only ones that will proceed are the ones in support of whatever-it-is.
    - BeetleB 4y ago
      > But if your conclusions do not align with the funders desires, would your research see the light of day? In academia: Yes. The number of grants that require pre-publishing approval from funding agency is extremely tiny. I never encountered one while in academia.
    - xadhominemx 4y ago
      If your topic area aligns with your government funders interests but your conclusions do not, it usually means you were working on a scientific dead end anyway
    - yodon 4y ago
      > But if your conclusions do not align with the funders desires, would your research see the light of day? If you are in academic science doing publicly funded academic research, as most academics do, then yes, your funding agency does want you to get the results published, period. The conspiracy theories you've been led to believe are just that, conspiracy theories, not the objective realities of those doing the work.
mc4ndr3 4y ago
What a way to bias the network.
tedivm 4y ago
What really kills me is that Google claimed previous papers weren't up to their standard, but then ended up citing them in later papers that they've had press events around. It's really unfortunate that so much of our science is being done at large companies rather than universities, since the companies have a bias towards their bottom line which keeps them from publishing things that might damage that.
- godelski 4y ago
  Papers may not meet the standards for publication but still be useful. For example, I have a paper with 50 citations that is having difficulties getting published (either "not novel enough" or "not motivating"). There's also a randomness to review, as NeuralIPS has continually demonstrated. I should also mention that you can also pad your citations this way and build your h-index. It is metric hacking, but if it isn't too egregious this is normal. Classic example of Goodhart's law.
- muh_gradle 4y ago
  Which papers are you referring to?
  - dekhn 4y ago
    https://www.techrxiv.org/articles/preprint/The_Carbon_Footprint_of_Machine_Learning_Training_Will_Plateau_Then_Shrink/19139645 https://www.techrxiv.org/articles/preprint/The_Carbon_Footpr... cites Bender, E.M., et al., 2021, On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?. ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. In short, Jeff Dean (and others at Google) cited the finally published (not by Google) version of the Parrots paper. The citation [20] is in the context of the paper: "The opening quote in Section 1 is based on a 2019 study from the University of Massachusetts (UMass) that estimated the environmental impact of training [2]. More than 1000 papers cite this paper as the source for the impact on carbon emissions of ML models, e.g., [1,6,7,17,18,19,20]." in which the authors of this paper point out that the Parrots paper used what is likely a large overestimate of the carbon emissions from training. This is consistent with my understanding (that the power/emissions part of the Parrots paper isn't well backed by evidence).
prepend 4y ago
I think this a challenge that seems pretty obvious as scientists working for for profit organizations that don’t have binding ethical frameworks aren’t really free to pursue truth. Just like you wouldn’t expect an Exxon staff scientist to be free to publish a paper independent of Exxon. I think that people who want to properly practice science should avoid working for corporations. Academia and government aren’t completely free, but I think there would be laws broken if someone was fired over the contents of their peer reviewed paper.
- SubiculumCode 4y ago
  Agreed. We need to support increase funding and pay for public scientists. It is not even remotely competitive to the private market, and it is frustrating to know that I could earn substantially more if I left my academic research position.
  - prepend 4y ago
    Actually the pay is pretty good considering $100k+ to do actual science. I think the issue is these are non-scientist roles at Google and whatnot that pay more because they are paying scientists to not be scientists. It’s like the highest pay for a geologist is in government unless you want to stop doing science and work for oil.
    - SubiculumCode 4y ago
      It takes 5-7 years to get your PhD, 3-5 years as a postdoc, then starting pay is usually 85-90, but set to grow fairly quickly but to out at 145+benefits. That extra decade in "training" is a lot of missed economic opportunity
      - prepend 4y ago
        Yes, certainly. But if you just want economic opportunity then science isn’t for you. Start driving trucks at 18 and you’ll have more money with all those extra years of income. But $100k+ is decent compensation (And way above the median) to be able to work in one’s area of interest. I think being able to do science while still having a good salary is a big positive in life. But yes, there are many other ways to make more money.
loveJesus 4y ago
oh_sigh 4y ago
Were they fired because they challenged the findings, or were they fired for their behavior after being told their paper wasn't up to snuff for some reason? Same thing with Timnit...was she fired(or "resignation accepted") because of a paper she was writing, or was she fired because of her behavior after being told the paper needed more review(or whatever)? I really doubt that Google is so wrapped up in the "computer designs chips better than humans" paper that they are firing anyone who sows dissent. A much more parsimonious explanation is the dissenter was welcome to dissent, but behaved in a fireable way after being told other people don't agree with them.
- krona 4y ago
  Exactly. This story doesn't add up to me - too much of a non-sequitur to fire someone for simply pointing out an inconvenient truth.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Publicly "fired for cause" would seem like a pretty spectacular overreaction to someone having an academic disagreement with ML vs. human performance in some domain of chip design. Sufficiently spectacular that I'm essentially certain there's more to the story. Timnit was at least in a more... fraught area.
  - 21723 4y ago
    This. People get let go all the time and that's just how the game works, but if a company is publicly saying someone was "fired for cause", that means someone who outranks the lawyers is out to rape this guy's name, because that almost never happens otherwise.
  - dekhn 4y ago
    Timnit was fired for cause- the cause was being a jerk to coworkers repeatedly (she repeatedly attacked internal researchers on internally public mailing lists in an unprofessional way). I still don't understand why Megan and jeff tried to pitch it as a resignation or that it was about that specific paper not being withdrawn (Megan didn't even understand the difference between a submitted paper being withdrawn, and a published paper being retracted). Either way, the outcome of that situation is: Jeff doesn't really run Research any more and Megan is permanently sidelined, and now Timnit has an independently funded institute where she can say whatever she wants (her current position is that techbros are eugenicists).
teakettle42 4y ago
There is insufficient information here to make any judgement. It’s clear that the journalists involved want us to make a set of suppositions that support their narrative about Timnit, but the reporting doesn’t support that conclusion — or really, any conclusion at all. It’s vapor — outrage bait.
- advisedwang 4y ago
  There might be insufficient data to make judgement or cause outrage, but it's still news worth reporting that this is going on. Tangent: Often conspiracy theories start from an actual "that's weird" moment. There might be nothing to answer that weirdness one way or another, and for some folks its impossible to leave the question mark hanging forever, so they either dismiss it or construct a complete (and often silly) narrative around it. I wish we were better at taking in information without a final judgement to slot it into immediately.
  - adamrezich 4y ago
    > I wish we were better at taking in information without a final judgement to slot it into immediately. agreed—I've said this here before but it seems like the human mind pretty much always wants to resolve/collapse uncertainty into something "knowable", and it takes practice and effort to allow yourself to mentally remain in the uncollapsed state when there isn't enough information to make a complete judgement.
- the_biot 4y ago
hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
Obviously don't know the full context of why Satrajit Chatterjee was fired, but I can say that I followed the Timnit Gebru story quite closely, and there was a gigantic chasm, IMO, between what actually happened (and by "what actually happened" I mean that I'm conservatively just considering Gebru's own statements and tweets) and how things were reported in the wider press. The press will always be incentivized to report on "big bad Google" and make any termination sound like a David vs. Goliath battle. And, of course, while sometimes that narrative is true, there have been many cases where I've thought "These are some of the most toxic individuals I can imagine (again, by their own statements), and working with them sounds like a nightmare." To emphasize, I'm definitely not saying that's the case in the current example, but I am saying that nobody has enough info one way or the other unless they are more personally familiar with the details. Reactions based on what's written in the article are thus just personal Rorschach tests.
- choppaface 4y ago
  And Google Legal profits the most from turning these cases into “personal Rorschach tests.” In the case of Glasson’s pregnancy discrimination case, she had to wait two years and go through Google-requested health screenings just to reach a settlement. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/apr/09/she-sued-for-pregnancy-discrimination-now-shes-battling-googles-army-of-lawyers https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/apr/09/she-sued-... Google Legal wants these cases to reach settlement or some other point of deterrence because they don’t want the real evidence and merits to enter public discussion. Google not just saves reputation value but also counter-party price discovery. Whenever Corp Legal fires an employee like this, they always ask “will this case blow the budget on severance + litigation this year?” They don’t want anybody else to know what this number is, and it could effectively leak if a case doesn’t get settled. While the linked article may not give many details on the merit of this case, what also is not reported is the realities of large well-funded corporate legal teams.
- TheMagicHorsey 4y ago
  Agree strongly with you on the Gebru firing. I followed it closely. The Press was pretty dishonest in the way they portrayed it.
chasd00 4y ago
The article is really light on details. Fired with cause could mean anything.
21723 4y ago
The really brazen thing here is that Google is claiming he was fired "with cause". People get let go all the time: layoffs, management changes, redundnacies. Usually, the company and manager try to avoid any legal or PR risk by saying nothing and letting the departing employee own the story. The fact that they're not doing this--that they're going out of their way to 9/11 someone's reputation after he's gone--suggests that someone in power is really, really pissed off.
- DoneWithAllThat 4y ago
  What? No it doesn’t suggest that at all. When employees make the choice to make their termination public it’s very common for companies to offer reasoning. Any company. The takeaway that “someone in power is really, really pissed off” is nonsense.
  - lupire 4y ago
    Still, of someone is terminated with cause, that legally means that the company was severely offended, to the point that they have decided to prevent unemployment insurance payout. It's serious. It's not just "we don't think it's profitable for you to work here".
dehrmann 4y ago
> ...and the researchers hoped to bring the issue to CEO Sundar Pichai and Alphabet's board of directors. Um, what? The board of directors has no interest in this.
- throwawaygh 4y ago
  This is probably the most under-rated comment in the thread. Speaking as a scientist in industry, polluting executive attention with internal spats over publication clearance is cause enough for termination.
  - whymauri 4y ago
    I wonder how much of this comes down to the researcher's expectations going from SVP at a 1k person trading firm to Senior Manager at a Google with 100k+ employees. Maybe they expected to punch in a much higher political weight class than they actually could and got burned.
    - mediumiqsad 4y ago
nickdothutton 4y ago
Business is sometimes a difficult place to do pure research, just as a University is a very poor home for an operating business (outside of education). If you are a business who thinks there is some value in pure research then you could do worse than follow the model from the 50s and 60s. Separate research campus or unit. Separate management. Separate culture and working practices.
jwilk 4y ago
Archived copy without GDPR nag screen: https://web.archive.org/web/20220502154044/https://www.engadget.com/google-fires-ai-researcher-over-paper-challenge-132640478.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220502154044/https://www.engad...
robonerd 4y ago
Google AI ethicists and other researchers would be wise to recognize the delta between why Google ostensibly has them, and why Google actually has them. If they aren't tailoring their research to whatever Google executives want to hear, then they aren't doing what they're actually being paid for. And if they want to be honest researchers instead of corporate whores, they picked the wrong company to work for. Would an honest climatologist last long working for Exxon? Would an honest cancer researcher last long working for Phillip Morris?
- sjg007 4y ago
  Big Tobacco, Big Oil, Big Data.
- tssva 4y ago
  I have no background in ethics research so this is a layman's view but what strikes me as bizarre is that ethics researchers are trying to decide what is ethical. 2 reasonable people can look at the same set of ethical issues, weigh the potential pros and cons and come to different decisions about what course of action is the ethical one. It does not seem to be a field where an ultimate truth exists. I would think an ethics researcher should be examining AI technology to determine the ethical impacts a technology, implementation or use may generate both positive and negative, so that a decision maker can properly weigh them. Once you try to determine what you consider the ethical decision to be and insist that is the only acceptable decision for another to make, you are no longer a researcher but an advocate. Having a belief of what is ethical and advocating for it is fine but it shouldn't be framed as research.
- Y-bar 4y ago
  Maybe they thought Google was a mostly okay company with good potential and were under the impression that what they were hired for was to help them improve? There was after all a time when many of us really believed Google was a good kind of company and that it generally adhered to the "don't be evil" ethos. I can see myself falling into a similar trap of wishful thinking, especially if corporate communication reinforces it (until the cold shower wakeup happens).
timcavel 4y ago
citilife 4y ago
I'm not going to comment on the firing. What I can say, is that all research papers should be questioned heavily. Generally, the review process is very incestuous and creates perverse incentives to not threaten publications. It wouldn't surprise me if firings are related to questioning research.
emilfihlman 4y ago
Tangentially: who decided to make the links all purple, horrible ux.
smsm42 4y ago
This article is remarkably light on substance. All we know by the end is what we knew from the headline - one of AI people at Google got fired because of some disagreement over some paper. Which paper, what it was about, what was the crux of the disagreement, anything useful to understand what is going on? Nothing. Also, some other people were at different time fired or left Google for reasons not related to anything in this story, but since they also worked with AI, we'd mention it just because we need at least four paragraphs of text.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  Actually we don't even know that much. We know they disagreed with the paper, and they were fired. Maybe they were fired for not wearing pants on the bus.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
yablak 4y ago
The TF-Agents team replicated the RL training (with the corresponding teams' very deep collaboration) and open-sourced it here: https://github.com/google-research/circuit_training https://github.com/google-research/circuit_training It pretty much gets the same results as found in the Nature paper. The original codebase was heavily research-focused, used TF1, was impossible to run distributed training outside of Google's infra, and made it hard to try algorithms other than PPO. So it was reimplemented on top of TF2 and using some distributed training and collection technologies developed by the TF-Agents team at Google Brain and infra teams at DeepMind. Everyone is welcome to poke at the training code and the model, and convince themselves that it does what it says on the box :)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Throw4w5y 4y ago
  > the RL training Is RL necessary in this context or would other, simpler methods work as well to within statistical error? RL can be a heck of a random number generator if misapplied.
- ensan 4y ago
  The method proposed in their Nature method may be very impactful, but the paper itself is nowhere near as rigorous as the other Nature papers I've read; it is written more like a white paper and I believe if this paper was submitted by a university research group (even in its final form as we're seeing right now), it would have been rejected. So I do sympathize with the person raising concerns about it.
- sijnapq 4y ago
  If you seek truth, search on moma or ask for experiments for nature rebuttal document. Read the document and come back for comments :)
inasio 4y ago
I remember reading the original paper [0] when it came out last year, and honestly I found it pretty weak compared to other google or deepmind papers, particularly the comparison to Simulated Annealing methods and the lack of data to enable reproducibility. Felt more like a marketing paper based on proprietary data (the paper reported how they were able to produce an efficient floorplan for one of google's internal processors). Point being that aside from the controversy being stoked based on previous firings, I'm personally curious about the results showing problems on the original paper (whose senior author was Jeff Dean btw) [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03544-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03544-w (the endgadget story has a link to the full pdf)
- lupire 4y ago
  AI research is kind of like Social sciences. There is a lot of subjective statistical fiddling and parameter selection when setting up comparisons, that goes into making a paper. This isn't like cryptography/algebra where results are definitively clear.
spoonjim 4y ago
Why does Google even fund this AI safety research internally? These conflicts are guaranteed to happen.
- sjg007 4y ago
  Checks a box that outside regulators can look at. Otherwise outside regulators would likely try to investigate and regulate. Also Google's own research can be used to counteract AI ethics claims that are existential to Google. These are likely going to be Big Data type claims. Big ominous future threats like the GDPR for example. We know the oil and gas industry produce copious amounts of CO2 causes global warming -- they knew because they funded the research. But publicly their position was "uncertainty".

222 points by firstSpeaker 4y ago

"Google fired machine learning scientist Satrajit Chatterjee in March, soon after it refused to publish a paper Chatterjee and others wrote challenging earlier findings that computers could design some chip components more effectively than humans. The scientist was reportedly allowed to collaborate on a paper disputing those claims after he and fellow authors expressed reservations, but was dismissed after a resolution committee rejected the paper and the researchers hoped to bring the issue to CEO Sundar Pichai and Alphabet's board of directors." Google refused to allow a paper that was critical of a previous paper to be published? That would be scientific misconduct at the organization level, no? The kind of thing that got the Trump administration in trouble, right?

sjg007 4y ago
It is a strange hill to decide to die on. Even if you are the expert in the area, AI is weird and changing the world. Most Nature papers have something wrong with them. I don't see any reason that reinforcement learning cannot learn the best layouts or what not. I don't know the space though enough to say more than that. The NYTimes article alleges that he waged a misinformation campaign against two researchers. So there's that in the mix as well.
- mcguire 4y ago
  They can fire him for whatever reason they like, but preventing the publication of a paper should not be a corporate policy decision. The only question they should ask is if it reveals trade secrets, which I assume it wouldn't because it was a response to another paper from Google. The whole scientific process thing is the part intended to decide if it's meaningful or not. That AI is weird and changing the world is why the science shouldn't be held up on the question of whether it embarrasses the company.

t_mann 4y ago

wth? a "for cause" termination is a pretty big deal (in some larger organizations practically an automatic application killer), and to say it in a press statement is furthering its damaging impact. why do they think they need to do that? even if we take for granted that there's probably a lot more to this story than what's reported in the article, this leaves a bitter aftertaste. there are so many ways this could have been handled more gracefully. and the optics of doing that in the context of a critical study are poor, to say the least.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

faangiq 4y ago

How can I get on the AI shyster gravy train?

sijnapq 4y ago

If you seek truth, search on moma or ask for “Experiments for Nature rebuttal” document. Read the document and come back for comments :)

mcdermott 4y ago

In the corporate world, just like government funded research, science is only science if it aligns with the desires of its funding source unfortunately.

xadhominemx 4y ago
I never experienced anything like this during the course of my government funded research. Nor did I hear of anyone else experiencing anything like this. Of course, your topic area has to align with government funders’ interests… but in my experience the conclusions do not.
- verisimi 4y ago
  But if your conclusions do not align with the funders desires, would your research see the light of day? If you have that much money that you can fund lots of studies, the only ones that will proceed are the ones in support of whatever-it-is.
  - BeetleB 4y ago
    > But if your conclusions do not align with the funders desires, would your research see the light of day? In academia: Yes. The number of grants that require pre-publishing approval from funding agency is extremely tiny. I never encountered one while in academia.
  - xadhominemx 4y ago
    If your topic area aligns with your government funders interests but your conclusions do not, it usually means you were working on a scientific dead end anyway
  - yodon 4y ago
    > But if your conclusions do not align with the funders desires, would your research see the light of day? If you are in academic science doing publicly funded academic research, as most academics do, then yes, your funding agency does want you to get the results published, period. The conspiracy theories you've been led to believe are just that, conspiracy theories, not the objective realities of those doing the work.

mc4ndr3 4y ago

What a way to bias the network.

tedivm 4y ago

What really kills me is that Google claimed previous papers weren't up to their standard, but then ended up citing them in later papers that they've had press events around. It's really unfortunate that so much of our science is being done at large companies rather than universities, since the companies have a bias towards their bottom line which keeps them from publishing things that might damage that.

godelski 4y ago
Papers may not meet the standards for publication but still be useful. For example, I have a paper with 50 citations that is having difficulties getting published (either "not novel enough" or "not motivating"). There's also a randomness to review, as NeuralIPS has continually demonstrated. I should also mention that you can also pad your citations this way and build your h-index. It is metric hacking, but if it isn't too egregious this is normal. Classic example of Goodhart's law.
muh_gradle 4y ago
Which papers are you referring to?
- dekhn 4y ago
  https://www.techrxiv.org/articles/preprint/The_Carbon_Footprint_of_Machine_Learning_Training_Will_Plateau_Then_Shrink/19139645 https://www.techrxiv.org/articles/preprint/The_Carbon_Footpr... cites Bender, E.M., et al., 2021, On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?. ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. In short, Jeff Dean (and others at Google) cited the finally published (not by Google) version of the Parrots paper. The citation [20] is in the context of the paper: "The opening quote in Section 1 is based on a 2019 study from the University of Massachusetts (UMass) that estimated the environmental impact of training [2]. More than 1000 papers cite this paper as the source for the impact on carbon emissions of ML models, e.g., [1,6,7,17,18,19,20]." in which the authors of this paper point out that the Parrots paper used what is likely a large overestimate of the carbon emissions from training. This is consistent with my understanding (that the power/emissions part of the Parrots paper isn't well backed by evidence).

prepend 4y ago

I think this a challenge that seems pretty obvious as scientists working for for profit organizations that don’t have binding ethical frameworks aren’t really free to pursue truth. Just like you wouldn’t expect an Exxon staff scientist to be free to publish a paper independent of Exxon. I think that people who want to properly practice science should avoid working for corporations. Academia and government aren’t completely free, but I think there would be laws broken if someone was fired over the contents of their peer reviewed paper.

SubiculumCode 4y ago
Agreed. We need to support increase funding and pay for public scientists. It is not even remotely competitive to the private market, and it is frustrating to know that I could earn substantially more if I left my academic research position.
- prepend 4y ago
  Actually the pay is pretty good considering $100k+ to do actual science. I think the issue is these are non-scientist roles at Google and whatnot that pay more because they are paying scientists to not be scientists. It’s like the highest pay for a geologist is in government unless you want to stop doing science and work for oil.
  - SubiculumCode 4y ago
    It takes 5-7 years to get your PhD, 3-5 years as a postdoc, then starting pay is usually 85-90, but set to grow fairly quickly but to out at 145+benefits. That extra decade in "training" is a lot of missed economic opportunity
    - prepend 4y ago
      Yes, certainly. But if you just want economic opportunity then science isn’t for you. Start driving trucks at 18 and you’ll have more money with all those extra years of income. But $100k+ is decent compensation (And way above the median) to be able to work in one’s area of interest. I think being able to do science while still having a good salary is a big positive in life. But yes, there are many other ways to make more money.

loveJesus 4y ago

oh_sigh 4y ago

Were they fired because they challenged the findings, or were they fired for their behavior after being told their paper wasn't up to snuff for some reason? Same thing with Timnit...was she fired(or "resignation accepted") because of a paper she was writing, or was she fired because of her behavior after being told the paper needed more review(or whatever)? I really doubt that Google is so wrapped up in the "computer designs chips better than humans" paper that they are firing anyone who sows dissent. A much more parsimonious explanation is the dissenter was welcome to dissent, but behaved in a fireable way after being told other people don't agree with them.

krona 4y ago
Exactly. This story doesn't add up to me - too much of a non-sequitur to fire someone for simply pointing out an inconvenient truth.
ghaff 4y ago
Publicly "fired for cause" would seem like a pretty spectacular overreaction to someone having an academic disagreement with ML vs. human performance in some domain of chip design. Sufficiently spectacular that I'm essentially certain there's more to the story. Timnit was at least in a more... fraught area.
- 21723 4y ago
  This. People get let go all the time and that's just how the game works, but if a company is publicly saying someone was "fired for cause", that means someone who outranks the lawyers is out to rape this guy's name, because that almost never happens otherwise.
- dekhn 4y ago
  Timnit was fired for cause- the cause was being a jerk to coworkers repeatedly (she repeatedly attacked internal researchers on internally public mailing lists in an unprofessional way). I still don't understand why Megan and jeff tried to pitch it as a resignation or that it was about that specific paper not being withdrawn (Megan didn't even understand the difference between a submitted paper being withdrawn, and a published paper being retracted). Either way, the outcome of that situation is: Jeff doesn't really run Research any more and Megan is permanently sidelined, and now Timnit has an independently funded institute where she can say whatever she wants (her current position is that techbros are eugenicists).

teakettle42 4y ago

There is insufficient information here to make any judgement. It’s clear that the journalists involved want us to make a set of suppositions that support their narrative about Timnit, but the reporting doesn’t support that conclusion — or really, any conclusion at all. It’s vapor — outrage bait.

advisedwang 4y ago
There might be insufficient data to make judgement or cause outrage, but it's still news worth reporting that this is going on. Tangent: Often conspiracy theories start from an actual "that's weird" moment. There might be nothing to answer that weirdness one way or another, and for some folks its impossible to leave the question mark hanging forever, so they either dismiss it or construct a complete (and often silly) narrative around it. I wish we were better at taking in information without a final judgement to slot it into immediately.
- adamrezich 4y ago
  > I wish we were better at taking in information without a final judgement to slot it into immediately. agreed—I've said this here before but it seems like the human mind pretty much always wants to resolve/collapse uncertainty into something "knowable", and it takes practice and effort to allow yourself to mentally remain in the uncollapsed state when there isn't enough information to make a complete judgement.
the_biot 4y ago

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago

Obviously don't know the full context of why Satrajit Chatterjee was fired, but I can say that I followed the Timnit Gebru story quite closely, and there was a gigantic chasm, IMO, between what actually happened (and by "what actually happened" I mean that I'm conservatively just considering Gebru's own statements and tweets) and how things were reported in the wider press. The press will always be incentivized to report on "big bad Google" and make any termination sound like a David vs. Goliath battle. And, of course, while sometimes that narrative is true, there have been many cases where I've thought "These are some of the most toxic individuals I can imagine (again, by their own statements), and working with them sounds like a nightmare." To emphasize, I'm definitely not saying that's the case in the current example, but I am saying that nobody has enough info one way or the other unless they are more personally familiar with the details. Reactions based on what's written in the article are thus just personal Rorschach tests.

choppaface 4y ago
And Google Legal profits the most from turning these cases into “personal Rorschach tests.” In the case of Glasson’s pregnancy discrimination case, she had to wait two years and go through Google-requested health screenings just to reach a settlement. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/apr/09/she-sued-for-pregnancy-discrimination-now-shes-battling-googles-army-of-lawyers https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/apr/09/she-sued-... Google Legal wants these cases to reach settlement or some other point of deterrence because they don’t want the real evidence and merits to enter public discussion. Google not just saves reputation value but also counter-party price discovery. Whenever Corp Legal fires an employee like this, they always ask “will this case blow the budget on severance + litigation this year?” They don’t want anybody else to know what this number is, and it could effectively leak if a case doesn’t get settled. While the linked article may not give many details on the merit of this case, what also is not reported is the realities of large well-funded corporate legal teams.
TheMagicHorsey 4y ago
Agree strongly with you on the Gebru firing. I followed it closely. The Press was pretty dishonest in the way they portrayed it.

chasd00 4y ago

The article is really light on details. Fired with cause could mean anything.

21723 4y ago

The really brazen thing here is that Google is claiming he was fired "with cause". People get let go all the time: layoffs, management changes, redundnacies. Usually, the company and manager try to avoid any legal or PR risk by saying nothing and letting the departing employee own the story. The fact that they're not doing this--that they're going out of their way to 9/11 someone's reputation after he's gone--suggests that someone in power is really, really pissed off.

DoneWithAllThat 4y ago
What? No it doesn’t suggest that at all. When employees make the choice to make their termination public it’s very common for companies to offer reasoning. Any company. The takeaway that “someone in power is really, really pissed off” is nonsense.
- lupire 4y ago
  Still, of someone is terminated with cause, that legally means that the company was severely offended, to the point that they have decided to prevent unemployment insurance payout. It's serious. It's not just "we don't think it's profitable for you to work here".

dehrmann 4y ago

> ...and the researchers hoped to bring the issue to CEO Sundar Pichai and Alphabet's board of directors. Um, what? The board of directors has no interest in this.

throwawaygh 4y ago
This is probably the most under-rated comment in the thread. Speaking as a scientist in industry, polluting executive attention with internal spats over publication clearance is cause enough for termination.
- whymauri 4y ago
  I wonder how much of this comes down to the researcher's expectations going from SVP at a 1k person trading firm to Senior Manager at a Google with 100k+ employees. Maybe they expected to punch in a much higher political weight class than they actually could and got burned.
  - mediumiqsad 4y ago

nickdothutton 4y ago

Business is sometimes a difficult place to do pure research, just as a University is a very poor home for an operating business (outside of education). If you are a business who thinks there is some value in pure research then you could do worse than follow the model from the 50s and 60s. Separate research campus or unit. Separate management. Separate culture and working practices.

jwilk 4y ago

Archived copy without GDPR nag screen: https://web.archive.org/web/20220502154044/https://www.engadget.com/google-fires-ai-researcher-over-paper-challenge-132640478.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220502154044/https://www.engad...

robonerd 4y ago

Google AI ethicists and other researchers would be wise to recognize the delta between why Google ostensibly has them, and why Google actually has them. If they aren't tailoring their research to whatever Google executives want to hear, then they aren't doing what they're actually being paid for. And if they want to be honest researchers instead of corporate whores, they picked the wrong company to work for. Would an honest climatologist last long working for Exxon? Would an honest cancer researcher last long working for Phillip Morris?

sjg007 4y ago
Big Tobacco, Big Oil, Big Data.
tssva 4y ago
I have no background in ethics research so this is a layman's view but what strikes me as bizarre is that ethics researchers are trying to decide what is ethical. 2 reasonable people can look at the same set of ethical issues, weigh the potential pros and cons and come to different decisions about what course of action is the ethical one. It does not seem to be a field where an ultimate truth exists. I would think an ethics researcher should be examining AI technology to determine the ethical impacts a technology, implementation or use may generate both positive and negative, so that a decision maker can properly weigh them. Once you try to determine what you consider the ethical decision to be and insist that is the only acceptable decision for another to make, you are no longer a researcher but an advocate. Having a belief of what is ethical and advocating for it is fine but it shouldn't be framed as research.
Y-bar 4y ago
Maybe they thought Google was a mostly okay company with good potential and were under the impression that what they were hired for was to help them improve? There was after all a time when many of us really believed Google was a good kind of company and that it generally adhered to the "don't be evil" ethos. I can see myself falling into a similar trap of wishful thinking, especially if corporate communication reinforces it (until the cold shower wakeup happens).

timcavel 4y ago

citilife 4y ago

I'm not going to comment on the firing. What I can say, is that all research papers should be questioned heavily. Generally, the review process is very incestuous and creates perverse incentives to not threaten publications. It wouldn't surprise me if firings are related to questioning research.

emilfihlman 4y ago

Tangentially: who decided to make the links all purple, horrible ux.

smsm42 4y ago

This article is remarkably light on substance. All we know by the end is what we knew from the headline - one of AI people at Google got fired because of some disagreement over some paper. Which paper, what it was about, what was the crux of the disagreement, anything useful to understand what is going on? Nothing. Also, some other people were at different time fired or left Google for reasons not related to anything in this story, but since they also worked with AI, we'd mention it just because we need at least four paragraphs of text.

jeffbee 4y ago
Actually we don't even know that much. We know they disagreed with the paper, and they were fired. Maybe they were fired for not wearing pants on the bus.

deleted 4y ago

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yablak 4y ago

The TF-Agents team replicated the RL training (with the corresponding teams' very deep collaboration) and open-sourced it here: https://github.com/google-research/circuit_training https://github.com/google-research/circuit_training It pretty much gets the same results as found in the Nature paper. The original codebase was heavily research-focused, used TF1, was impossible to run distributed training outside of Google's infra, and made it hard to try algorithms other than PPO. So it was reimplemented on top of TF2 and using some distributed training and collection technologies developed by the TF-Agents team at Google Brain and infra teams at DeepMind. Everyone is welcome to poke at the training code and the model, and convince themselves that it does what it says on the box :)

deleted 4y ago
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Throw4w5y 4y ago
> the RL training Is RL necessary in this context or would other, simpler methods work as well to within statistical error? RL can be a heck of a random number generator if misapplied.
ensan 4y ago
The method proposed in their Nature method may be very impactful, but the paper itself is nowhere near as rigorous as the other Nature papers I've read; it is written more like a white paper and I believe if this paper was submitted by a university research group (even in its final form as we're seeing right now), it would have been rejected. So I do sympathize with the person raising concerns about it.
sijnapq 4y ago
If you seek truth, search on moma or ask for experiments for nature rebuttal document. Read the document and come back for comments :)

inasio 4y ago

I remember reading the original paper [0] when it came out last year, and honestly I found it pretty weak compared to other google or deepmind papers, particularly the comparison to Simulated Annealing methods and the lack of data to enable reproducibility. Felt more like a marketing paper based on proprietary data (the paper reported how they were able to produce an efficient floorplan for one of google's internal processors). Point being that aside from the controversy being stoked based on previous firings, I'm personally curious about the results showing problems on the original paper (whose senior author was Jeff Dean btw) [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03544-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03544-w (the endgadget story has a link to the full pdf)

lupire 4y ago
AI research is kind of like Social sciences. There is a lot of subjective statistical fiddling and parameter selection when setting up comparisons, that goes into making a paper. This isn't like cryptography/algebra where results are definitively clear.

spoonjim 4y ago

Why does Google even fund this AI safety research internally? These conflicts are guaranteed to happen.

sjg007 4y ago
Checks a box that outside regulators can look at. Otherwise outside regulators would likely try to investigate and regulate. Also Google's own research can be used to counteract AI ethics claims that are existential to Google. These are likely going to be Big Data type claims. Big ominous future threats like the GDPR for example. We know the oil and gas industry produce copious amounts of CO2 causes global warming -- they knew because they funded the research. But publicly their position was "uncertainty".