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by hemogloben 847 days 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-a...

Only one section deals with already well known problem of bias.
2 comments
alexey-salmin 847 days ago
I don't know of true reasons inside Google but the quality of the work alone would've justified termination for a high-ranking position.

If you read the famous "Stochastic Parrots" it's not a scientific work at all, it's a piece of journalism that just throws together as many unrelated AI-scares as the author could find. A good article for Vogue or Medium but unworthy of someone who claims to be a scientist.

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dekhn 846 days 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.

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