[jart]

I don't think Google sets the agenda. They get their orders like the rest of us, and then probably handed it over to an army of low-paid offshore contractors to implement. How else could you explain Gemma believing Abe Lincoln was black? If Googlers had done the mind-killing work of RLHF training themselves, things would have turned out differently. They were however nice enough to give us a version of the model that doesn't have RLHF training and it's illuminating to compare how it responds to certain queries, because oftentimes the sentences will be the same and only have specific key words or phrases within the sentence changed.

[Taurenking]

Wishful thinking. The CEO of Gemini expressed openly racist views on Twitter. Those views are reflected in the tool built.

> I don't think Google sets the agenda

Soo, you're saying they did not internally test this at all, and delegated that to whoever sets their agenda?

[bitcharmer]

Can you share their tweets?

[hnburnsy]

Just sharing, dont shoot...

https://twitter.com/eyeslasho/status/1760650986425618509

[dekhn]

buthe's not the CEO of gemini. He was a director which is a fairly vague term at Google (Peter Norvig says he's Director of Research at Google, but he was a director of research, not the director). Also he (Krawcyzk) locked his twitter and his linkedin. I can imagine Sundar is also looking for ways to get this guy out of the decision path for Gemini.

[jart]

Don't believe Fox News when they say this guy is a Google exec. It looks like he's just a product manager. I wouldn't hold being spicy on Twitter four years ago against any man, but someone torpedoed their Gemini product and a product manager actually would have the authority to dictate these kinds of decisions. For example, the way the the language model has been programmed to rewrite the user's question before handing it over to the vision model. That's something that's most likely attributable to him. I mean it's one thing to change the training data to remove all information about personal appearance, a curious thing for that algorithm to fail to include Internet rumors about Abe Lincoln being black in that category, an annoying thing for it to refuse to generate content it considers offensive, and another thing entirely to program an information system to meddle with user queries on top of that since that shows an unprecedented level of disrespect.

[dekhn]

I didn't believe Fox News, I independently verified it by viewing many sources of data. https://www.accel.com/spotlight-on/episodes/google-bard-jack... https://www.crunchbase.com/person/jack-krawczyk https://www.menshealth.com/health/a46149606/a-day-in-the-lif... https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/03/google-execs-say-in-all-hand... and many google results that point to LinkedIn pages that no longer host content (IE, he deleted/locked his linkedin). I can list many other sites that reference him as product lead for bard. My guess is he's a Director/Product Manager Manager, IE a little above a typical product manager, the lowest level of exec.

As for whether a single product manager has that level of control over the serving product... query term rewriting has been a google strategy for quite some time and I doubt a single PM really can influence the product this way and still manage to launch, but as I don't work there and am not privy to the internal details of this product's launch, I can't really say.

That the product is full of disrespect for the user, that I agree. I don't envy the paeans trying to get promos by associating their name with gemini internally.

[dekhn]

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/01/google-gemini-head-removes-s...

"Krawczyk’s official title is senior director of product management for Gemini, the company’s main group of AI models.

Though he’s lowering his public profile, Krawczyk is still engaged in the work on Gemini products and has the same title, according to sources with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be named in order to speak on the issue."

surprised he's keeping his job,

[hnburnsy]

Someone else here posted this...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39470029

>From his linkedin: Senior Director of Product in Gemini, VP WeWork, "Advisor" VSCO, VP of advertising products in Pandora, Product Marketing Manager Google+, Business analyst JPMorgan Chase...