5 ms·

Having worked inside a few big tech companies, this outcome was practically inevitable. It would have been impossible for Googlers to raise the concerns that th

Having worked inside a few big tech companies, this outcome was practically inevitable. It would have been impossible for Googlers to raise the concerns that the public did without serious reputational or occupational hazard. The visible & spoken culture at Google, Meta, and most big tech companies is very much in favor of "anti-racism" and "ML-fairness", though a large minority harbors criticisms in private conversation. Any criticism of content or bias made during the bard/Gemini dogfooding phase would have been met swiftly with ostracization and possible termination.

renegade-otter 3y ago
It's a problem for many companies that hire young "intellectual" work force. Fresh graduates spend four years marinating in woke juices on campus and then try to bring that culture to the work place. The leaders often bend, and not to the benefit of the business. I know I am sounding like Elon Musk but I am not really "anti" progressive. The holier-than-thou moral crusaders without any life experience or deep cultural understanding often get so "woke" that they accidentally come out racist on the other end. They don't realize it, however, because they are too busy cancelling someone for what they said 25 years ago. I often equate this movement to the "family values" religious crowd of just a few years ago - both are equally self-righteous and insufferable.
- tonymet 3y ago
  the young learn from the old. their professors & TAs are the ones that indoctrinated them. And the senior business leaders are all 40s-60s . Who's to blame? It's on us to lead them
  - renegade-otter 3y ago
    Indoctrinated? That's a common conservative talking point, except that many professors will just keep quiet in the fear of losing their jobs - no one wants to deal with a social media onslaught and sometimes even physical intimidation. The young ones eventually grow out of it - but the "adults" need to have more spine.
    - tonymet 3y ago
      That doesn’t mean it’s wrong
dmitrygr 3y ago
From my 8 years at Google: s/large minority/supermajority/g
- verticalscaler 3y ago
  Yes. In other words, short sighted greed but really very simply: cowardice.
  - Ferret7446 3y ago
    On the other side of the coin: it is often said that the difference between bravery and stupidity is whether you're successful.
- threeseed 3y ago
  There are 150,000+ employees at Google. You must be pretty popular to be able to make such claims about what most of them believe in.
  - murderfs 3y ago
    Dmitry is right. The vast majority of Googlers lean somewhere between against and apathetic to the DEI nonsense that's infected the company, but no one's willing to be the nail that sticks out and complain about it visibly. Two anecdotes: 1. memegen had downvotes, and well-known instigators would continuously complain on plus about their shitty polarizing memes getting enormous numbers of downvotes, and get nothing but hugbox replies in the comments. The creator of memegen who was ideologically aligned ended up regretting adding downvotes at all, under the theory that people were conspiring to downvote instead of there being a silent majority of people that disagreed with the memes in question: https://www.mcmillen.dev/blog/20210721-downvotes-considered-harmful.html https://www.mcmillen.dev/blog/20210721-downvotes-considered-... 2. Someone made an anonymous survey about whether people thought the Damore memo stated facts, had sound logic, was a good idea to post, deserved firing, etc. It was taken down shortly after because people didn't like the results and the implication that the majority of people that filled it out didn't think that the post was worthy of being immediately fired, etc.
andy_ppp 3y ago
People are making this out to be a bigger issue than it is, making LLMs less woke will be doable and this will all be yesterday’s newspapers soon enough. I think releasing stuff and experimenting in public you’re always going to make a few mistakes, especially with something as complex as these AI systems. A genuine problem would be if Google were saying this wasn’t an issue. Let them fix it and we can all move on.
- tonymet 3y ago
  in my opinion the issue is much bigger. the subliminal influence has been there for about 10 years and it was the Gemini illustrations that made the bias so evident.
  - andy_ppp 3y ago
    I think the anti-woke nonsense is just the old saying the young are idiots as every generation does. Nobody is arguing for characters from history to all be non-Caucasian, it’s just a mistake!
    - asadotzler 3y ago
      Exactly, they overshot the target. Bugs happen. The big mistake was not having team who actually knows what's going on to say "hey, you're over-correcting, hold the train. We got a bug here."
rdtsc 3y ago
If the results are as silly as the article suggests, I wonder if it could be deliberate sabotage. They know they can’t raise the issue normally, so go the other way, turn the dial to 11. Now it’s just ridiculous and is all over the media. The CEO himself is asking the dials to be turned back to 3.
- tonymet 3y ago
  it's about the only corrective measure that would have worked.
- google234123 3y ago
  Why are you assuming that when the extreme leftist are literally in charge - have entire departments- have made it so that literally all managers must pretend they also believe in the same things. The models are working as intended
- username332211 3y ago
  When you are required to listen and obey and not to think or question the difference between loyal obedience and sabotage becomes entirely theoretical.
  - candiodari 3y ago
    And yet this is exactly what management demands. I guess it's one aspect of the self-sabotage.
- pixxel 3y ago
  > dials to be turned back to 3 Let’s not kid ourselves, it’ll be dialled back to 9. This nonsense is evident in search and image search, and has been for years.
- supriyo-biswas 3y ago
  It’s unlikely to be sabotage though. What may have happened is that the teams working on RLHF may have only trained it on a dataset containing the strictest interpretation of liberal values without also training it on other data that grounds it in reality. As a result, the model tried to inject the liberal interpretation of values where it doesn’t make sense, such as Black Nazis, and so on.
alexey-salmin 3y ago
I think Google fired the biggest "anti-racism" and "ML-fairness" proponent?
- google234123 3y ago
  They fired the single one that was way too outspoken- Also she literally went against explicit rules about publishing I think
  - hemogloben 3y ago
    As I understand it, Timnit Gebru was fired for suggesting that the power usage of training ML/AI was significant. Her other 'woke' views didn't contribute as much to her firing. (Though her firing did set off a firestorm about those issues) I think from your tone, I disagree with you about her other views. But it seems her firing was more about making Google look anti-environmental than anti-woke. MITs summary of the paper: 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... Only one section deals with already well known problem of bias.
    - dekhn 3y ago
      She was mainly fired for not withdrawing a paper when it was requested by a leader in research (the leader who asked for this had no research background and asked for a retraction, which doesn't make sense because the paper hadn't been published yet). But there were other important factors; for example, she attacked other googlers (prominent ones working on LLMs) on internally public mailing lists (about woke things). Realistically, the world would have been better off if she hadn't been hired in the first place because she was always going to eventually have a conflict with leadership over publishing works like this. I think she would have done much better to become a professor at some liberal university where she would be free to publish her work. I kind of wish the stochastic parrots paper had focused entirely on stochastic parrots, and not on energy consumption. In my opinion, Google has actually been a responsible steward of energy usage (way ahead of everybody else for at least a decade), and ML isn't really the source of most of the energy consumption in computing anyway.
threeseed 3y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- creato 3y ago
  > And maybe you can clarify how you surveyed the "large minority" who for some reason want racist, unfair behaviours. You've really betrayed your post here if you think that objecting to the current behavior of Gemini is "wanting racist, unfair behaviors". No one is going to have this conversation with you if that's your response, and that's exactly the point raised in the post you replied to.
- indy 3y ago
  The mask slipped when you wrote that last sentence.
asadotzler 3y ago
Or maybe if they hadn't fired a bunch of people whose job it was to say "I think you're over-correcting here" and with strong arguments and supporting data who cannot be so easily dismissed as cranks from the minority because it's an actual job function. This reads like the people blaming DNI for declines in software quality after a decade if eliminating quality assurance as a normal and expected participant in development. WTF? Eyes on the prize here. This is about getting it done how we expect it to be done, what ever that may be. Why are we shipping bugs? Because we don't value the function of identifying them and determining the scope of their impact and the relative urgency of addressing. We don't empower anyone to who knows what's going on to stop ship any more. What happened to that? Agree on the target and then hit it. Or don't agree on the target, but hit it none the less. That means understanding your stuff before you ship it and you pay people to do that for you. Boeing cuts the same corners. It's just plain negligence and it's completely unsustainable. Stop letting fear of falling behind lead to failed releases and empower the proper teams to evaluate so you know what's going out the door before your customers do.
- tonymet 3y ago
  Quality was not degraded across the board : the software was still performant, responsive , reliable, dynamic, useful etc. the quality degraded along a very specific vector having to do with "ML fairness" and "anti racism". You could have hired 50000 QA engineers and none of them would have been comfortable making comments in this area.
raxxorraxor 3y ago
More cynical me sees them as typical self-professed champions of tolerance that are quite selective of allowing diverging opinions. These people are interested in careers, not in technology or betterment in any form. They believe themselves to know better than universal humanism. The reality is that they just want to have something that justifies their position, because it isn't their knowledge or ability. They will want to keep racism alive too because it fits their personal needs.
- changingwords 3y ago
  You're right. There's just a very loud minority of woke fools who are actively tanking a lot of the best companies. And a good chunk of them are not actually looking for solutions, they just like that they have a problem which fits their 'expertise'. The "anti-racist" manifesto is likely the reason for a lot of this garbage where it's not just enough to report on a racist world, but you also have to modify things to fit a not-racist world. That's what gave us a black Cleopatra irl and this is what's giving us AI imaggen of diverse Nazis in WW2.

renegade-otter 3y ago

It's a problem for many companies that hire young "intellectual" work force. Fresh graduates spend four years marinating in woke juices on campus and then try to bring that culture to the work place. The leaders often bend, and not to the benefit of the business. I know I am sounding like Elon Musk but I am not really "anti" progressive. The holier-than-thou moral crusaders without any life experience or deep cultural understanding often get so "woke" that they accidentally come out racist on the other end. They don't realize it, however, because they are too busy cancelling someone for what they said 25 years ago. I often equate this movement to the "family values" religious crowd of just a few years ago - both are equally self-righteous and insufferable.

tonymet 3y ago
the young learn from the old. their professors & TAs are the ones that indoctrinated them. And the senior business leaders are all 40s-60s . Who's to blame? It's on us to lead them
- renegade-otter 3y ago
  Indoctrinated? That's a common conservative talking point, except that many professors will just keep quiet in the fear of losing their jobs - no one wants to deal with a social media onslaught and sometimes even physical intimidation. The young ones eventually grow out of it - but the "adults" need to have more spine.
  - tonymet 3y ago
    That doesn’t mean it’s wrong

dmitrygr 3y ago

From my 8 years at Google: s/large minority/supermajority/g

verticalscaler 3y ago
Yes. In other words, short sighted greed but really very simply: cowardice.
- Ferret7446 3y ago
  On the other side of the coin: it is often said that the difference between bravery and stupidity is whether you're successful.
threeseed 3y ago
There are 150,000+ employees at Google. You must be pretty popular to be able to make such claims about what most of them believe in.
- murderfs 3y ago
  Dmitry is right. The vast majority of Googlers lean somewhere between against and apathetic to the DEI nonsense that's infected the company, but no one's willing to be the nail that sticks out and complain about it visibly. Two anecdotes: 1. memegen had downvotes, and well-known instigators would continuously complain on plus about their shitty polarizing memes getting enormous numbers of downvotes, and get nothing but hugbox replies in the comments. The creator of memegen who was ideologically aligned ended up regretting adding downvotes at all, under the theory that people were conspiring to downvote instead of there being a silent majority of people that disagreed with the memes in question: https://www.mcmillen.dev/blog/20210721-downvotes-considered-harmful.html https://www.mcmillen.dev/blog/20210721-downvotes-considered-... 2. Someone made an anonymous survey about whether people thought the Damore memo stated facts, had sound logic, was a good idea to post, deserved firing, etc. It was taken down shortly after because people didn't like the results and the implication that the majority of people that filled it out didn't think that the post was worthy of being immediately fired, etc.

andy_ppp 3y ago

People are making this out to be a bigger issue than it is, making LLMs less woke will be doable and this will all be yesterday’s newspapers soon enough. I think releasing stuff and experimenting in public you’re always going to make a few mistakes, especially with something as complex as these AI systems. A genuine problem would be if Google were saying this wasn’t an issue. Let them fix it and we can all move on.

tonymet 3y ago
in my opinion the issue is much bigger. the subliminal influence has been there for about 10 years and it was the Gemini illustrations that made the bias so evident.
- andy_ppp 3y ago
  I think the anti-woke nonsense is just the old saying the young are idiots as every generation does. Nobody is arguing for characters from history to all be non-Caucasian, it’s just a mistake!
  - asadotzler 3y ago
    Exactly, they overshot the target. Bugs happen. The big mistake was not having team who actually knows what's going on to say "hey, you're over-correcting, hold the train. We got a bug here."

rdtsc 3y ago

If the results are as silly as the article suggests, I wonder if it could be deliberate sabotage. They know they can’t raise the issue normally, so go the other way, turn the dial to 11. Now it’s just ridiculous and is all over the media. The CEO himself is asking the dials to be turned back to 3.

tonymet 3y ago
it's about the only corrective measure that would have worked.
google234123 3y ago
Why are you assuming that when the extreme leftist are literally in charge - have entire departments- have made it so that literally all managers must pretend they also believe in the same things. The models are working as intended
username332211 3y ago
When you are required to listen and obey and not to think or question the difference between loyal obedience and sabotage becomes entirely theoretical.
- candiodari 3y ago
  And yet this is exactly what management demands. I guess it's one aspect of the self-sabotage.
pixxel 3y ago
> dials to be turned back to 3 Let’s not kid ourselves, it’ll be dialled back to 9. This nonsense is evident in search and image search, and has been for years.
supriyo-biswas 3y ago
It’s unlikely to be sabotage though. What may have happened is that the teams working on RLHF may have only trained it on a dataset containing the strictest interpretation of liberal values without also training it on other data that grounds it in reality. As a result, the model tried to inject the liberal interpretation of values where it doesn’t make sense, such as Black Nazis, and so on.

alexey-salmin 3y ago

I think Google fired the biggest "anti-racism" and "ML-fairness" proponent?

google234123 3y ago
They fired the single one that was way too outspoken- Also she literally went against explicit rules about publishing I think
- hemogloben 3y ago
  As I understand it, Timnit Gebru was fired for suggesting that the power usage of training ML/AI was significant. Her other 'woke' views didn't contribute as much to her firing. (Though her firing did set off a firestorm about those issues) I think from your tone, I disagree with you about her other views. But it seems her firing was more about making Google look anti-environmental than anti-woke. MITs summary of the paper: 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... Only one section deals with already well known problem of bias.
  - dekhn 3y ago
    She was mainly fired for not withdrawing a paper when it was requested by a leader in research (the leader who asked for this had no research background and asked for a retraction, which doesn't make sense because the paper hadn't been published yet). But there were other important factors; for example, she attacked other googlers (prominent ones working on LLMs) on internally public mailing lists (about woke things). Realistically, the world would have been better off if she hadn't been hired in the first place because she was always going to eventually have a conflict with leadership over publishing works like this. I think she would have done much better to become a professor at some liberal university where she would be free to publish her work. I kind of wish the stochastic parrots paper had focused entirely on stochastic parrots, and not on energy consumption. In my opinion, Google has actually been a responsible steward of energy usage (way ahead of everybody else for at least a decade), and ML isn't really the source of most of the energy consumption in computing anyway.

threeseed 3y ago

[flagged]

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
creato 3y ago
> And maybe you can clarify how you surveyed the "large minority" who for some reason want racist, unfair behaviours. You've really betrayed your post here if you think that objecting to the current behavior of Gemini is "wanting racist, unfair behaviors". No one is going to have this conversation with you if that's your response, and that's exactly the point raised in the post you replied to.
indy 3y ago
The mask slipped when you wrote that last sentence.

asadotzler 3y ago

Or maybe if they hadn't fired a bunch of people whose job it was to say "I think you're over-correcting here" and with strong arguments and supporting data who cannot be so easily dismissed as cranks from the minority because it's an actual job function. This reads like the people blaming DNI for declines in software quality after a decade if eliminating quality assurance as a normal and expected participant in development. WTF? Eyes on the prize here. This is about getting it done how we expect it to be done, what ever that may be. Why are we shipping bugs? Because we don't value the function of identifying them and determining the scope of their impact and the relative urgency of addressing. We don't empower anyone to who knows what's going on to stop ship any more. What happened to that? Agree on the target and then hit it. Or don't agree on the target, but hit it none the less. That means understanding your stuff before you ship it and you pay people to do that for you. Boeing cuts the same corners. It's just plain negligence and it's completely unsustainable. Stop letting fear of falling behind lead to failed releases and empower the proper teams to evaluate so you know what's going out the door before your customers do.

tonymet 3y ago
Quality was not degraded across the board : the software was still performant, responsive , reliable, dynamic, useful etc. the quality degraded along a very specific vector having to do with "ML fairness" and "anti racism". You could have hired 50000 QA engineers and none of them would have been comfortable making comments in this area.

raxxorraxor 3y ago

More cynical me sees them as typical self-professed champions of tolerance that are quite selective of allowing diverging opinions. These people are interested in careers, not in technology or betterment in any form. They believe themselves to know better than universal humanism. The reality is that they just want to have something that justifies their position, because it isn't their knowledge or ability. They will want to keep racism alive too because it fits their personal needs.

changingwords 3y ago
You're right. There's just a very loud minority of woke fools who are actively tanking a lot of the best companies. And a good chunk of them are not actually looking for solutions, they just like that they have a problem which fits their 'expertise'. The "anti-racist" manifesto is likely the reason for a lot of this garbage where it's not just enough to report on a racist world, but you also have to modify things to fit a not-racist world. That's what gave us a black Cleopatra irl and this is what's giving us AI imaggen of diverse Nazis in WW2.