[hintymad]

To say the least those employees are misguided. Gebru was hired to research AI, yes she spent all her time being an activist. A pretty lousy one too. Case in point: 1. Her paper's claim on CO2 emission was not scientific in any way (projecting 100% of utilization of hundreds of desktop GPUs, really? Looking at emission without looking at how much would be saved or what other benefits are, really?). 2. Her paper claims that lacking support of all languages in BERT marginalizes minorities, which was similar to how Trofim Lysenko politicizing and moralizing biological science in Soviet. 3. See the quote blow. If this is not activism, I don't know what is. The only remaining questions are, why would Google AI hire her in the first place, and why should she work in a research org? Note it's perfectly for her to work in Google or any other company so choose the companies. I just thought people do real research in a research org.

"Citation: https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k77sxz/d_t... Sample comment:

Another ex-colleague here. I was not going to participate in the discussions but your post made me realize objective truth should come out. I do believe she actually thinks she is making the world a better place but in reality any interaction with her has been incredibly stressful having to carefully weigh every move made in her presence. When this blows over her departure will be a net positive for the morale of the company.

To give a concrete example of what it is like to work with her I will describe something that has not come to light until now. When GPT-3 came out a discussion thread was started in the brain papers group. Timnit was one of the first to respond with some of her thoughts. Almost immediately a very high profile figure has also also responded with his thoughts. He is not Lecun or Dean but he is close. What followed for the rest of the thread was Timnit blasting privileged white men for ignoring the voice of a black woman. Nevermind that it was painfully clear they were writing their responses at the same time. Message after message she would blast both the high profile figure and anyone who so much as implied it could have been a misunderstanding. In the end everyone just bent over backwards apologizing to her and the thread was abandoned along with the whole brain papers group which was relatively active up to that point. She has effectively robbed thousands of colleagues of insights into their seniors thought process just because she didn't immediately get attention.

The thread is still up there so any googler can see it for themselves and verify I am telling the truth."