[skywhopper]

You must not have read the article, which isn't about Gebru's (and now Mitchell's) firing. There would be a lot to say about the ongoing credibility of any of Google's statements or research concerning ethical AI at this point, and lots of folks have said those things.

This article is an analysis of the extreme weaknesses in the current seemingly-productive approach to ML language model research. The intro anecdote about the failure of game-playing models to handle games with representational elements or indirect rewards is extremely important. But the failure of the Big AI community to recognize those same failures in its approach to building language models is the pending crisis that the article's title refers to. Gebru's firing is not the cause of the impending implosion of Google's AI research, but rather a leading indicator and warning sign.

[SpicyLemonZest]

The article discusses some concrete challenges in AI research, but the author's only argument for why Google won't be able to tackle these problems is that they fired Gebru. As he mentions in the article, it's not that the Big AI community has failed to recognize these issues; "40 Google researchers, from throughout the organisation" discussed some of them just a few weeks before the Gebru controversy.

Perhaps equally importantly, the author made a very serious accusation that Google has "deep instutionalised sexism and racism". Are we really intended to just gloss over that, treat it as unimportant filler?