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> the political machinations that some of the ethics team involved themselves in to the point of employer conflict were heavily discussed here at the time. It
by Simon_O_Rourke 3y ago
> the political machinations that some of the ethics team involved themselves in to the point of employer conflict were heavily discussed here at the time.
It certainly seems like some of that ethics team appear, at best, as extremely bad faith actors in that drama.
- choppaface 3y agoWell they were hired to study the bias and energy waste of large language models and that’s exactly what they found: 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... The article notes how other Googlers have faced factual review in paper releases and what Jeff Dean did here was clearly something else. Google leadership moved against the Ethics team at a time of high uncertainty: COVID rates were spiking, the stock market had become extremely distorted, there had been a summer of massive protests, Bezos was leaving Amazon.. this was Google leadership being greedy. Since then “ethics of LLMs at Google” has pivoted to overt lobbying and attempts at controlling regulation: https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-google-others-pledge-watermark-ai-content-safety-white-house-2023-07-21/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-google-others-pled...