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because once Jeff Dean had solved Google's maslow problems (scaling web search, making ads profitable, developing high performance machine learning systems) he

• marricks 4y ago
  [flagged]
  • mupuff1234 4y ago
    Or maybe it's just not perceived as controversial? Her boss told her to do something, she refused and got sacked.
  • qumpis 4y ago
    Wiki doesn't seem to give detail into the situation, nor the paper in question
  • dekhn 4y ago
    That's a very simplified version of the story, but I would say that Dean greatly reduced his stature when he defended Megan Kacholia for her abrupt termination of Timnit. Note that Timnit was verbally abusive to Jeff's reports, anybody who worked there could see what she was posting to internal group discussions, so her time at Google was limited, but most managers would say that she should had at least been put on a pip and given 6 months. Dean has since cited the paper in a subsequent paper (which tears apart the Stochastic Parrots paper).
    • marricks 4y ago
      Google has since fired other folks on her team and was in crisis mode to protect Dean. Like, I’m not really going to give them the benefit of the doubt on this. When people brought Dean up Timnit came up as something to consider, it’s interesting to see how all anyone has to say in these threads is reverence towards him. People should try to see the whole picture.
      • opportune 4y ago
        Being somewhat involved in one bad thing doesn’t justify cancelling someone. To my knowledge Dean was essentially doing post-hoc damage control for what one of the middle managers in his org did. Even if they did want Timnit gone (as others mention, you are getting only one side of the story in media) they did it in a bad way, for sure. At the same time I don’t think one botched firing diminishes decades of achievements from a legitimately kind person.
      • jeffbee 4y ago
        Timnit and the other ex-ML ethics crowd who got fired from Google seem like some of the most ignorant people around. I don't defend Dean reflexively, it just seems like he is on the right side of the issue. For example, here is Emma Strubell accusing Dean of creating a "toxic workplace culture" after he and David Patterson had to refute her paper in print. https://twitter.com/strubell/status/1634164078691098625?lang=en https://twitter.com/strubell/status/1634164078691098625?lang... The thing is if David Patterson and Jeff Dean think your numbers for the energy cost of machine learning might be wrong, then you are probably wrong. These ML meta-researchers are not practitioners and appear to have no idea what they are talking about. Keeping a person like Timnit or Strubell on staff seems like it costs more than its worth.
        • dragonwriter 4y ago
          > Timnit and the other ex-ML ethics crowd Timnit is ex-Google, but very much not ex-ML ethics (fouded Distributed AI Research Institute focussed on the field in late 2021). Very much also true of Margaret Mitchell, who has been at Hugging Face since 2021.
  • Traubenfuchs 4y ago
    A lot of people, especially on hacker news, feel disdain for researchers of ethics, bias and fairness, as they are perceived as both holding technology back and profiting from advances in it (that they can then analyse and criticize).
    • calrissian 4y ago
      I don't think you're necessarily wrong in your assesment about HN and AI enthusiasts, but also in this case I think it's more accurate to talk about a Twitter agitator and race-baiter [1], rather than a "researcher of ethics, bias and fairness". [1] https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1651055495271137280?s=20 https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1651055495271137280?s...
  • renewiltord 4y ago
    These safety people guarantee a useless product that never does unsafe things. ChatGPT proved that you can have a product do unsafe things and still be useful if you put a disclaimer on it. Overall, as a user, I couldn't give a damn if things are unsafe by the definition of this style of ethicist. They were a ZIRP and my life is better for their absence.
  • Silverback_VII 4y ago
    She appears to be a symbol for everything that went wrong at Google. These are the kind of problems that arise when life is too easy, just before the downfall. In other words, decadence. How else can one explain that Google's AI research was dethroned by OpenAI?
    • hintymad 4y ago
      Yeah, Dean's fault is hiring such people in the first place. If you hire an activist, you get activism. And if you hire someone whose livelihood depends on finding more problems, well, they will scream more problems, one way or another. Otherwise, why would state U of Mich got one DEI officer per three staff members?
  • calrissian 4y ago
    > Also not surprised at the immediate down votes for questioning Googles new AI lead! That's because you are wrong to pretend he did anything wrong by firing T.G. And also, because you added this weird lie/mudslinging/whatever on top of it: > while she was on vacation
  • hintymad 4y ago
    Controvery of what? Did you read Gebru's paper? For instance, her calculation of carbon footprint of training BERT assumes that companies will train BERT 24x7. Gebru is a disgrace to the community because she always, I mean literally always, attacks her critics by motives. You think bias is a data problem? You're a bigot (See her dispute with LeCun). You disagree with my assessment on an ML model? You are white male oppressor (her attacking a Google's SVP). Gebru is not a researcher. She is a modern-age Trofim Lysenko, who politicizes everything and weaponizes political correctness. And yeah, she deserves to be fired. Many times.
    • marricks 4y ago
      Crazy that her boss and people she mentored all loved her. It’s almost like the system screwed her and she’s rightly angry at it. I get it, easier to type cast her as an angry black woman though!
    • erenyeager 4y ago
      Ok but the lack of underrepresented minorities in the field and the important role people like Gebru played in extending the political and status of minorities is ok to extinguish? We need more than just white male / Chinese male / Indian male monoculture “STEM lords”. This is already recognized in fields like medicine, where minorities treating minorities results in better outcomes and the greater push to open positions of status to minorities.
      • qumpis 4y ago
        Yes, uplifting minorities is great, but anyone should be accountable equally when it comes to workplace conduct
      • logicchains 4y ago
        >Ok but the lack of underrepresented minorities in the field and the important role people like Gebru played in extending the political and status of minorities is ok to extinguish? Yes it's okay to extinguish it if hiring underrepresented minorities means hiring bad actors like her who contribute nothing of value. Scientific truth is scientific truth; if you hire people for the color of their skin or their sexuality instead of their ability to produce truth, you slow the progress of science and make the world worse for everyone.
• choppaface 4y ago
  I agree that the OP makes a bunch of interesting points, but I think historically Brain really grew out of what Dean wanted to do and the fact that he wanted it to be full-stack, e.g. including the TPU. Also, crucially, Brain would use Google data and contribute back to Ads/Search directly versus Google X which was supposed to be more of an incubator. But it's also notable how the perspective of an ex-Brain employee might differ from what sparked the Brain founders in the first place.
• leoh 4y ago
  Waymo?
  • dekhn 4y ago
    waymo hasn't produced anything of long-term value yet. And everything about it that worked well wasn't due to Google X
    • ra7 4y ago
      Can you expand why being part of Google X hinders a team? I believe Waymo "graduated" from Google X to its own entity.
      • dekhn 4y ago
        X exists as a press-release generation system, not as a real technology creation system. They onboard many impractical projects that are either copies of something being done already in industry ("but with more Google and ML!") or doesn't have a market (space elevators).
        • alphabetting 4y ago
          Waymo has developed the modern autonomous vehicle from the ground up. It's basically a matter of scale now. It's a mindblowing tech stack. The first time riding in one is much more otherwordly than using GPT for the first time. The value of the technology is far greater whatever PR they have generated (not many people know about it)
          • dekhn 4y ago
            I have infinite respect for the process that Waymo followed to get to where they are. And I'm impressed that Google continued to fund the project and move it forward even when it represents such a long-term bet. but it's not a product that has any real revenue. and most car companies keep their distance from google self-driving tech because they're afraid. afraid google wants to put them out of business. It's unclear if google could ever sell (as a product, as an IP package, etc) what they've created because it depends so deeply on a collection of technology google makes available to waymo.
• dgacmu 4y ago
  I generally agree with this though with some tweaks. I think Jeff wanted to do something that he thought was both awesome (he's liked neural networks for a long time - his undergrad thesis was on them) and likely to have long-term major impact for Google, and he was able to justify the Awesome Thing by identifying a way for it to have significant potential revenue impact for Google via improvements to ad revenue, as well as significant potential "unknown huge transformative possibilities" benefits. But I do suspect that you're right that the heart of it was "Jeff was really passionate about this thing". Of course, this starts to get at different versions of the question: Why did Google Brain exist in 2012 as a scrappy team of builders, and why did Brain exist in 2019 as a mega-powerhouse of AI research? I think you and I are talking about the former question, and TFA may be focusing more on the second part of the question. [I was randomly affiliated with Brain from 2015-2019 but wasn't there in the early days]
  • dekhn 4y ago
    It grew from the scrappy group to the mega-powerhouse by combining a number of things: being the right place at the right time with the right resources and people. They had a great cachet- I was working hard to join Brain in 2012 because it seemed like they were one of the few groups who had access to the necessary CPU and data sets and mental approaches that would transform machine learning. And at that time, they used that cachet to hire a bunch of up and coming researchers (many of them Hinton's students or in his sphere) and wrote up some pretty great papers. Many people outside of Brain were researchers working on boring other projects who transferred in, bringing their internal experience in software development and deployment, which helped a lot on the infra side.