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Google datacenters are run off green power, so it's deceptive to compare energy costs there to jet fuel. It implies that the carbon impact is the same, which is

Google datacenters are run off green power, so it's deceptive to compare energy costs there to jet fuel. It implies that the carbon impact is the same, which isn't true, because not all energy is the same. As for being technical or not, well, none of her work seems particularly interested in technology. It's all grievance studies stuff. Having academic credentials counts for nothing because universities are so obsessed with race ideology they'd happily award black females computing-related qualifications on the back of nothing. It supplies no credibility.

SilverBirch 3y ago
I don't really see the point of getting deep into this, the logic is very clear in the peer reviewed paper. The energy consumption to train new models is marginal extra electricity consumption and so they've cited the EPA's numbers for CO2 emissions per Watt-hour of electricity. It's a perfectly fair comparison. Yes, you can caveat all sorts of "But we could do this with green energy" but that's not what the paper was about. >none of her work seems particularly interested in technology. Honestly! Her PhD in computer vision seems pretty technological to me. Fine, if the position you want to have is all universities are race ideology centres great, again, it reflects more on you than on anyone else.
- revelio 3y ago
  The logic is clear but incorrect. It's not a correct comparison because it assumes a watt-hour used by Google is the same as an average watt-hour. They actually buy enough renewable power for all their DCs (just not always locally). However, admitting that the CO2 impact of Google training LLMs is zero would reduce the impact of her paper, so she just makes this deceptive comparison. This is one of the reasons her paper was squashed, right? It effectively pretends all the efforts made by her colleagues on greening their DCs doesn't exist. Not very nice. I looked up her PhD: https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:xg519hx1735/thesis_adobe-augmented.pdf https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:xg519hx1735/thesis_ad... In her own words it "pertains to using large scale publicly available images to gain sociological insight" and is about "visual computational sociology". The primary reported finding is that you can predict things like racial demographics based on what brands of cars are being driven around. It's consistent with a primary interest in society and not technology.
  - SilverBirch 3y ago
    Honestly, this is just silly. I'm sure you've got some very interesting thoughts about the way that Google manages it's data centre energy demand. It's not relevant to the paper. In fact if you read the paper you'd know your whole schtick about Google is irrelevant because their models ran on TPUs whose power characteristics aren't public information and therefore aren't in the paper. You're quite literally making nonsensical complaints.
    - revelio 3y ago
      No, it's the other way around. The complaint being made by you and Gebru is nonsensical. The exact power characteristics of TPUs don't matter because as I keep repeating and you guys keep desperately trying to ignore, Google years ago committed to buying renewable power 1:1 for the consumption of their datacenters. It doesn't matter how that splits between CPU, TPU and GPU, it's all covered by them. Therefore, Google's computations net out to zero carbon emissions. Most organizations don't do this. On average, a kilowatt hour of consumption is not from renewable sources. Therefore, Gebru's use of average emissions would be valid at other companies but not at Google, which means she was lying in order to gain impact. Honestly, this point isn't hard to understand. It's difficult to escape the feeling that if she was a white man, it would all be clearly received.
  - biorach 3y ago
    Let's cut through your bullshit You said > none of her work seems particularly interested in technology Here is a very representative quote from her PhD thesis which you clearly did not really look up > Augmenting Existing Adaptation Algorithms with At- tribute Loss > We can augment any existing adaptation algorithm with our attribute based losses to perform adaptation at the attribute as well as the class level. Here, we describe how we apply our method to [116]. To use our method with [116], we add the domain confusion and... It's clear you will talk any amount of dishonest nonsense to make your point
    - revelio 3y ago
      The thread here started with the claim that "she has a Masters in Electrical Engineering, a PhD in Computer Vision, and has had a fantastic career". It's reasonable to expect given that description for her PhD to be actually in computer vision. You know, a new SOTA on some well known benchmark or something. Some new general technique useful to anyone who deploys computer vision. Even she doesn't claim that's the case, the dissertation title claims it to be visual computational sociology which would be a different field. Her findings are pure sociology, there's no outcome here which is about computer vision (beyond "hey CV seems to work"). The original point was she doesn't seem very interested in technology. I don't see how a PhD that is at least 50% sociology disproves this point, it clearly supports it. And that's before dealing with the general dishonesty that pervades woke universities; who knows if the thesis can even be taken at face value? A place like Stanford wouldn't hesitate to misrepresent things for equity purposes.
mempko 3y ago
[flagged]
- revelio 3y ago
  I don't think right wing media talks about Gebru's paper much one way or another. Please avoid the shallow dismissals. Unless you'd like every post you make to get a reply like, "wow guardian reader much? let me guess, you think the world is gonna end in 5 years?". It's not very interesting to read. Debate the points or don't bother.
  - mempko 3y ago
    > nothing because universities are so obsessed with race ideology they'd happily award black females computing-related qualifications on the back of nothing Just look at the point you made! This is exactly what right wing media talks about constantly. Not about Gebru, but that someone like Gebru is where she is not because of merit. Your point is completely baseless and my dismissal of it isn't shallow. Where do you suspect your point, that I quoted above, comes from? Does it come from your own personal experience? Studies and statistics? Or somewhere else? My point is that it's baseless and comes from right wing media. We are all biased based on what we read and hear. Points made without anything to back them are shallow, not those critiquing them.
    - revelio 3y ago
      The point isn't baseless because universities and corporations themselves - not "right wing media" - constantly talk publicly about how desperate they are to hire more women and blacks, and sometimes even how they're explicitly removing merit as criteria. The media thing you've come up with there is entirely your own projection; I never mentioned media and don't read or watch American media as I don't even live there. You don't need to though, to understand what institutions are doing because they say so in their own press releases and even research papers. Here's one such case from within the last month. Some academics did a study on themselves trying to find misogyny and were surprised to find pervasive and systematic bias against hiring men. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35762380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35762380 Absolutely nobody outside of hard-left bubbles is surprised by this because it's exactly what they constantly say they will do e.g. https://www.universityaffairs.ca/news/news-article/universities-are-ramping-up-targeted-hiring-to-meet-crc-equity-goals/ https://www.universityaffairs.ca/news/news-article/universit... Besides, think about how biased your framing is. The problem here isn't that it's a right wing talking point. The problem is that the left wing media refuse to tell anyone what's happening because it aligns with their ideological agenda. The fact that universities - places that claim to be merit based - are systematically doing the opposite actually is news. The left censoring discussion of it in forums they control does not make it a "right wing talking point".

SilverBirch 3y ago

I don't really see the point of getting deep into this, the logic is very clear in the peer reviewed paper. The energy consumption to train new models is marginal extra electricity consumption and so they've cited the EPA's numbers for CO2 emissions per Watt-hour of electricity. It's a perfectly fair comparison. Yes, you can caveat all sorts of "But we could do this with green energy" but that's not what the paper was about. >none of her work seems particularly interested in technology. Honestly! Her PhD in computer vision seems pretty technological to me. Fine, if the position you want to have is all universities are race ideology centres great, again, it reflects more on you than on anyone else.

revelio 3y ago
The logic is clear but incorrect. It's not a correct comparison because it assumes a watt-hour used by Google is the same as an average watt-hour. They actually buy enough renewable power for all their DCs (just not always locally). However, admitting that the CO2 impact of Google training LLMs is zero would reduce the impact of her paper, so she just makes this deceptive comparison. This is one of the reasons her paper was squashed, right? It effectively pretends all the efforts made by her colleagues on greening their DCs doesn't exist. Not very nice. I looked up her PhD: https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:xg519hx1735/thesis_adobe-augmented.pdf https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:xg519hx1735/thesis_ad... In her own words it "pertains to using large scale publicly available images to gain sociological insight" and is about "visual computational sociology". The primary reported finding is that you can predict things like racial demographics based on what brands of cars are being driven around. It's consistent with a primary interest in society and not technology.
- SilverBirch 3y ago
  Honestly, this is just silly. I'm sure you've got some very interesting thoughts about the way that Google manages it's data centre energy demand. It's not relevant to the paper. In fact if you read the paper you'd know your whole schtick about Google is irrelevant because their models ran on TPUs whose power characteristics aren't public information and therefore aren't in the paper. You're quite literally making nonsensical complaints.
  - revelio 3y ago
    No, it's the other way around. The complaint being made by you and Gebru is nonsensical. The exact power characteristics of TPUs don't matter because as I keep repeating and you guys keep desperately trying to ignore, Google years ago committed to buying renewable power 1:1 for the consumption of their datacenters. It doesn't matter how that splits between CPU, TPU and GPU, it's all covered by them. Therefore, Google's computations net out to zero carbon emissions. Most organizations don't do this. On average, a kilowatt hour of consumption is not from renewable sources. Therefore, Gebru's use of average emissions would be valid at other companies but not at Google, which means she was lying in order to gain impact. Honestly, this point isn't hard to understand. It's difficult to escape the feeling that if she was a white man, it would all be clearly received.
- biorach 3y ago
  Let's cut through your bullshit You said > none of her work seems particularly interested in technology Here is a very representative quote from her PhD thesis which you clearly did not really look up > Augmenting Existing Adaptation Algorithms with At- tribute Loss > We can augment any existing adaptation algorithm with our attribute based losses to perform adaptation at the attribute as well as the class level. Here, we describe how we apply our method to [116]. To use our method with [116], we add the domain confusion and... It's clear you will talk any amount of dishonest nonsense to make your point
  - revelio 3y ago
    The thread here started with the claim that "she has a Masters in Electrical Engineering, a PhD in Computer Vision, and has had a fantastic career". It's reasonable to expect given that description for her PhD to be actually in computer vision. You know, a new SOTA on some well known benchmark or something. Some new general technique useful to anyone who deploys computer vision. Even she doesn't claim that's the case, the dissertation title claims it to be visual computational sociology which would be a different field. Her findings are pure sociology, there's no outcome here which is about computer vision (beyond "hey CV seems to work"). The original point was she doesn't seem very interested in technology. I don't see how a PhD that is at least 50% sociology disproves this point, it clearly supports it. And that's before dealing with the general dishonesty that pervades woke universities; who knows if the thesis can even be taken at face value? A place like Stanford wouldn't hesitate to misrepresent things for equity purposes.

mempko 3y ago

[flagged]

revelio 3y ago
I don't think right wing media talks about Gebru's paper much one way or another. Please avoid the shallow dismissals. Unless you'd like every post you make to get a reply like, "wow guardian reader much? let me guess, you think the world is gonna end in 5 years?". It's not very interesting to read. Debate the points or don't bother.
- mempko 3y ago
  > nothing because universities are so obsessed with race ideology they'd happily award black females computing-related qualifications on the back of nothing Just look at the point you made! This is exactly what right wing media talks about constantly. Not about Gebru, but that someone like Gebru is where she is not because of merit. Your point is completely baseless and my dismissal of it isn't shallow. Where do you suspect your point, that I quoted above, comes from? Does it come from your own personal experience? Studies and statistics? Or somewhere else? My point is that it's baseless and comes from right wing media. We are all biased based on what we read and hear. Points made without anything to back them are shallow, not those critiquing them.
  - revelio 3y ago
    The point isn't baseless because universities and corporations themselves - not "right wing media" - constantly talk publicly about how desperate they are to hire more women and blacks, and sometimes even how they're explicitly removing merit as criteria. The media thing you've come up with there is entirely your own projection; I never mentioned media and don't read or watch American media as I don't even live there. You don't need to though, to understand what institutions are doing because they say so in their own press releases and even research papers. Here's one such case from within the last month. Some academics did a study on themselves trying to find misogyny and were surprised to find pervasive and systematic bias against hiring men. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35762380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35762380 Absolutely nobody outside of hard-left bubbles is surprised by this because it's exactly what they constantly say they will do e.g. https://www.universityaffairs.ca/news/news-article/universities-are-ramping-up-targeted-hiring-to-meet-crc-equity-goals/ https://www.universityaffairs.ca/news/news-article/universit... Besides, think about how biased your framing is. The problem here isn't that it's a right wing talking point. The problem is that the left wing media refuse to tell anyone what's happening because it aligns with their ideological agenda. The fact that universities - places that claim to be merit based - are systematically doing the opposite actually is news. The left censoring discussion of it in forums they control does not make it a "right wing talking point".