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> in part because Google fired two of the authors, Timnit Gebru I remember being angry about this situation when I first saw it on social media, until I read t

> in part because Google fired two of the authors, Timnit Gebru I remember being angry about this situation when I first saw it on social media, until I read the details: This person submitted a list of demands to her employer and said that if they weren’t met, she quit. Google wasn’t going to meet her demands so they considered it acceptance of her resignation. There has been a movement trying to debate whether it was a firing or resignation ever since. The original paper they published gets recirculated every year or two as some landmark history of AI safety, but as other commenters have noted it wasn’t really a great paper nor was it groundbreaking at the time. If not for the controversy surrounding the resignation/firing (depending on your POV), I don’t think it would have been notable.

utopiah 4mo ago
True but also... she wasn't a software engineer putting code in production nor a researcher working no the fundamentals of machine learning negotiating a raise. She was part of the "Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team" of what was then, and still is now, one of the corporations World wide spending the largest amount of resources precisely on using AI commercially.
- Aurornis 4mo ago
  I'm saying the paper itself wasn't a bombshell or even that noteworthy. The reason it got PR and continues to come up was because the authors manufactured this self-inflicted drama around it, not because it was leaking secret revelations that harmed the company.
  - marshray 4mo ago
    Never underestimate the power of a catchy title that resonates with the intuitions and preconceptions of people who will never read the paper. Cf. https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/illusion-of-thinking https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/illusion-of-think...
- simianwords 4mo ago
  Timnit got popular because she was part of Woke 1.
  - gordian-mind 4mo ago
    [flagged]
arthurjj 4mo ago
I think part of it is she had excellent PR skills and a dedicated fan base. I was at Google when she quit, working in ML, and hadn't heard of her until the story broke. I remember there were a large number of Memegen posts about it, but no one I spoke with knew about her, so I assumed it was brigading. I think she's since since lost a lot of her allure, especially when she didn't change her mind when the facts about the AI water usage changed 1000x
- NeutralCrane 4mo ago
  What exactly are the facts about AI water usage? I have trouble separating hysteria from reality but most of what I see still claims water usage is enormous
  - scarmig 4mo ago
    The hysteria around water usage rests on people not knowing the scale of industrial civilization. First thing to do is compare any estimate of data center water usage with the water usage of almond farming. Or, if you want to focus on individual consumer choices, the water footprint of eating a hamburger.
    - QuercusMax 4mo ago
      Or even better: the footprint of doing something like farming corn for ethanol
    - agentultra 4mo ago
      Breaking it down this way is a great way to minimize the numbers so that it appears reasonable. See? Middle-Eastern investors are growing alfalfa in the western desert using legal allotments of water! That is so much worse than what we’re doing! Go after them! They can both be using an egregious amount of water for silly purposes. The other part of the water debate is also the pollution different systems create. Many data centres went in with the promise of closed-loop systems but changed half-way through construction and couldn’t be stopped. I think it’s more complicated than, “they’re wrong, it’s just hype.”
nixon_why69 4mo ago
Her demands included wanting to know the identities of anyone who wanted to comment on her paper, after she had a history of going after people publicly. That's enough right there, nobody should tolerate toxic behavior regardless of whether you agree with the politics. Meanwhile, the paper has 2 points of criticism towards AI. 1 is a bunch of carbon consumption complaints assuming NVIDIA cards with coal-fired power, while a lot of effort at contemporary Google went towards getting TPUs running on green power. I suspect this was what people wanted to object to, a lot of effort went into those green power projects and she was just denying it. The complaint seems prophetic now but it was not true about Google then. The other criticism was about which language the LLMs use, they average the input data of normal humans instead of talking the way the paper author thinks they should talk. The phrase "women doctors" is called out as problematic. I'm less inclined to think people objected strongly to this given the zeitgeist at the time, it was probably people who worked on the green energy projects and were pissed off that their contributions were ignored, but still, nobody elected her Queen of English, she can have her opinions but she's not a victim for not having them adopted by everyone.
- delis-thumbs-7e 4mo ago
  I think this is completely misleading. If your employer asks to redact your paper because it ignores relevant research, naturally you want to know what research they are talking about and on what grounds, and also which researches reviewed the paper (probably assuming there was none, review process was used as an excuse to silence criticism, G has done it many times). (BTW, quite bold to say input data from Reddit and 4Chan is how “normal” people speak. There is a lot of language in the training data of any model you really do not wish your application to use ever.)
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
- mondrian 4mo ago
  One of the key points of that paper is that the body of written works is biased and those biases will be amplified by compressing that body into LLMs, with outlier data, with low coincidence rate, being suppressed as unreliable - data that is structurally dissimilar to the bulk is noise. Similarly to how PageRank suppressed nodes with low number of edges, probably contributing significantly to the homogenous corporate mall-internet we enjoy today.
myhf 4mo ago
Pressuring an employee to add unethical behavior or specific religious practices to their job description is constructive termination. I'd say what's under debate is whether uncritical LLM adoption is mainly unethical or mainly religious.
- ToValueFunfetti 4mo ago
  This is not why she was fired and wouldn't have been a plausible reason in 2020 when it happened. >Timnit responded with an email requiring that a number of conditions be met in order for her to continue working at Google, including revealing the identities of every person who Megan and I had spoken to and consulted as part of the review of the paper and the exact feedback. Timnit wrote that if we didn’t meet these demands, she would leave Google and work on an end date. We accept and respect her decision to resign from Google. This is Google's side of it; I think the following is a fair piece of primary-source journalism if you want to go deeper: https://www.platformer.news/the-withering-email-that-got-an-ethical/ https://www.platformer.news/the-withering-email-that-got-an-...
- naasking 4mo ago
  I don't see why it's those are the only two options, nor why they are even mutually exclusive.
hintymad 4mo ago
I'm surprised that people still take Gebru seriously. She 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). Oh, did I mention that she even said that some loss functions are more racists than others on X? Gebru is not a researcher. She is a modern-age Trofim Lysenko, who politicizes everything and wields political correctness as a weapon to purge any dissent.
guelo 4mo ago
Ugh. Ok if you're going to push one-sided propaganda I'll push the other side. Google forced its researchers to retract an already submitted paper because it undermined its strategic and commercial story around large language models. The "we just accepted her resignation" is just a lie. Google made harsh demands with opaque reviewers that made vague objections, and then Jeff Dean moved very quickly to get rid of Gebru. Other Google researchers reported that they usually got to work through objections, Gebru got no such opportunity. Google showed that AI labs will not tolerate internal research that seriously criticizes technology central to its business.
- thx67 4mo ago
  Dean pulled a sweet Dungeon Master move in "accepting her resignation." She should have made them fire her, esp for ostensibly doing the job she was hired to do.
ebiederm 4mo ago
I think a better summary is that google gave someone the responsibility to ensure AI was developed and used ethically, and didn't give them the power to execute that responsibility. Apparently google did not even give them the freedom to come to their own conclusions. I just skimmed through the paper again and what it says seems to hold up well. The paper is heritical in that it suggests slowing down, using carefully chosen less biased data, and understanding how it all works. Basically challenging the AI bitter lesson. I can see how that would meet with a lot of resistance from people who have gone all in on the bitter lesson.

utopiah 4mo ago

True but also... she wasn't a software engineer putting code in production nor a researcher working no the fundamentals of machine learning negotiating a raise. She was part of the "Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team" of what was then, and still is now, one of the corporations World wide spending the largest amount of resources precisely on using AI commercially.

Aurornis 4mo ago
I'm saying the paper itself wasn't a bombshell or even that noteworthy. The reason it got PR and continues to come up was because the authors manufactured this self-inflicted drama around it, not because it was leaking secret revelations that harmed the company.
- marshray 4mo ago
  Never underestimate the power of a catchy title that resonates with the intuitions and preconceptions of people who will never read the paper. Cf. https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/illusion-of-thinking https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/illusion-of-think...
simianwords 4mo ago
Timnit got popular because she was part of Woke 1.
- gordian-mind 4mo ago
  [flagged]

arthurjj 4mo ago

I think part of it is she had excellent PR skills and a dedicated fan base. I was at Google when she quit, working in ML, and hadn't heard of her until the story broke. I remember there were a large number of Memegen posts about it, but no one I spoke with knew about her, so I assumed it was brigading. I think she's since since lost a lot of her allure, especially when she didn't change her mind when the facts about the AI water usage changed 1000x

NeutralCrane 4mo ago
What exactly are the facts about AI water usage? I have trouble separating hysteria from reality but most of what I see still claims water usage is enormous
- scarmig 4mo ago
  The hysteria around water usage rests on people not knowing the scale of industrial civilization. First thing to do is compare any estimate of data center water usage with the water usage of almond farming. Or, if you want to focus on individual consumer choices, the water footprint of eating a hamburger.
  - QuercusMax 4mo ago
    Or even better: the footprint of doing something like farming corn for ethanol
  - agentultra 4mo ago
    Breaking it down this way is a great way to minimize the numbers so that it appears reasonable. See? Middle-Eastern investors are growing alfalfa in the western desert using legal allotments of water! That is so much worse than what we’re doing! Go after them! They can both be using an egregious amount of water for silly purposes. The other part of the water debate is also the pollution different systems create. Many data centres went in with the promise of closed-loop systems but changed half-way through construction and couldn’t be stopped. I think it’s more complicated than, “they’re wrong, it’s just hype.”

nixon_why69 4mo ago

Her demands included wanting to know the identities of anyone who wanted to comment on her paper, after she had a history of going after people publicly. That's enough right there, nobody should tolerate toxic behavior regardless of whether you agree with the politics. Meanwhile, the paper has 2 points of criticism towards AI. 1 is a bunch of carbon consumption complaints assuming NVIDIA cards with coal-fired power, while a lot of effort at contemporary Google went towards getting TPUs running on green power. I suspect this was what people wanted to object to, a lot of effort went into those green power projects and she was just denying it. The complaint seems prophetic now but it was not true about Google then. The other criticism was about which language the LLMs use, they average the input data of normal humans instead of talking the way the paper author thinks they should talk. The phrase "women doctors" is called out as problematic. I'm less inclined to think people objected strongly to this given the zeitgeist at the time, it was probably people who worked on the green energy projects and were pissed off that their contributions were ignored, but still, nobody elected her Queen of English, she can have her opinions but she's not a victim for not having them adopted by everyone.

delis-thumbs-7e 4mo ago
I think this is completely misleading. If your employer asks to redact your paper because it ignores relevant research, naturally you want to know what research they are talking about and on what grounds, and also which researches reviewed the paper (probably assuming there was none, review process was used as an excuse to silence criticism, G has done it many times). (BTW, quite bold to say input data from Reddit and 4Chan is how “normal” people speak. There is a lot of language in the training data of any model you really do not wish your application to use ever.)
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
mondrian 4mo ago
One of the key points of that paper is that the body of written works is biased and those biases will be amplified by compressing that body into LLMs, with outlier data, with low coincidence rate, being suppressed as unreliable - data that is structurally dissimilar to the bulk is noise. Similarly to how PageRank suppressed nodes with low number of edges, probably contributing significantly to the homogenous corporate mall-internet we enjoy today.

myhf 4mo ago

Pressuring an employee to add unethical behavior or specific religious practices to their job description is constructive termination. I'd say what's under debate is whether uncritical LLM adoption is mainly unethical or mainly religious.

ToValueFunfetti 4mo ago
This is not why she was fired and wouldn't have been a plausible reason in 2020 when it happened. >Timnit responded with an email requiring that a number of conditions be met in order for her to continue working at Google, including revealing the identities of every person who Megan and I had spoken to and consulted as part of the review of the paper and the exact feedback. Timnit wrote that if we didn’t meet these demands, she would leave Google and work on an end date. We accept and respect her decision to resign from Google. This is Google's side of it; I think the following is a fair piece of primary-source journalism if you want to go deeper: https://www.platformer.news/the-withering-email-that-got-an-ethical/ https://www.platformer.news/the-withering-email-that-got-an-...
naasking 4mo ago
I don't see why it's those are the only two options, nor why they are even mutually exclusive.

hintymad 4mo ago

I'm surprised that people still take Gebru seriously. She 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). Oh, did I mention that she even said that some loss functions are more racists than others on X? Gebru is not a researcher. She is a modern-age Trofim Lysenko, who politicizes everything and wields political correctness as a weapon to purge any dissent.

guelo 4mo ago

Ugh. Ok if you're going to push one-sided propaganda I'll push the other side. Google forced its researchers to retract an already submitted paper because it undermined its strategic and commercial story around large language models. The "we just accepted her resignation" is just a lie. Google made harsh demands with opaque reviewers that made vague objections, and then Jeff Dean moved very quickly to get rid of Gebru. Other Google researchers reported that they usually got to work through objections, Gebru got no such opportunity. Google showed that AI labs will not tolerate internal research that seriously criticizes technology central to its business.

thx67 4mo ago
Dean pulled a sweet Dungeon Master move in "accepting her resignation." She should have made them fire her, esp for ostensibly doing the job she was hired to do.

ebiederm 4mo ago

I think a better summary is that google gave someone the responsibility to ensure AI was developed and used ethically, and didn't give them the power to execute that responsibility. Apparently google did not even give them the freedom to come to their own conclusions. I just skimmed through the paper again and what it says seems to hold up well. The paper is heritical in that it suggests slowing down, using carefully chosen less biased data, and understanding how it all works. Basically challenging the AI bitter lesson. I can see how that would meet with a lot of resistance from people who have gone all in on the bitter lesson.