News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google by astrange on Thursday December 03, 2020 @02:23AM (#25286455)
> I’m not sure what else there is possibly wrong here. Is the width of their convolutions racist?

Not that parameter specifically, but if you say the data is wrong then that means any other parameter might be wrong too. More data might mean the model is too small to fit it, or the hyperparameters might be wrong to train it, or you now have the wrong ratio of other phenotypes (let's say that instead of races…) in the training set and their results regress.

Also, if you're adding people with darker skin, that of course means the pixel values are lower. That matters for image processing code, things like SAD thresholds or noise reduction will work differently.

> Their choice to work on super resolution?

Superresolution is only useful as a toy and they should have mentioned that when they put up a live colab, yes. They added a disclaimer later on and it was good - there was a big issue where people were convinced this was somehow a surveillance technology because they watched too many TV shows, even though it literally can't work that way!

Re:Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google by visarga on Thursday December 03, 2020 @10:44AM (#25289930)
Occam's razor makes us think in this case it's the data, the simplest explanation.
Re:Ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru fired from Google by astrange on Thursday December 03, 2020 @03:24PM (#25294264)
The data isn’t a separate thing from the rest of the model (unless you’ve validated it works across different datasets). It’s all just a bunch of numbers that get jointly optimized.