Nope, they were fired for being a douche.
> Unfortunately, this particular paper was only shared with a day’s notice before its deadline — we require two weeks for this sort of review — and then instead of awaiting reviewer feedback, it was approved for submission and submitted.
Then, when called out on it, they made "an ultimatum" and said they would leave if certain demands weren't met. I'm not sure what every demand was, but one of them was indeed disclosing the name of the reviewers.
> Timnit responded with an email requiring that a number of conditions be met in order for her to continue working at Google, including revealing the identities of every person who Megan and I had spoken to and consulted as part of the review of the paper and the exact feedback. Timnit wrote that if we didn’t meet these demands, she would leave Google and work on an end date.
Jeff declined to meet the conditions, and let them go. Seems pretty straight forward to me.
Ex-ethical AI researcher, we don't know what her next job will be, and she certainly lost an opportunity to lead by losing her place at Google. We are yet to see if this maneuver will cost her social capital or add to her reputation. Also, do you seriously believe being an ethics researcher automatically excludes one from misconduct?
From what we know so far, she seems to have overplayed her hand, assumed she should be treated above rules and when failed at it wanted to take names and encouraged mutiny, in a company where she is a junior manager. Not only there are actual legal complications for a manager to do that, it also sounds like narcissistic and toxic.
Her goals might be laudable, but she have executed poorly and emotionally, and lost an immediate chance to deliver ongoing impact for the ethics causes she cared about. I hope aspiring activist-ethicist-researcher-techies take note of this. Tantrums don't deliver long term impact. Narcissism clouds your judgement. Impassioned supporters mislead you. You have great power, if you wield it responsibly and pay attention not to overestimate it.
"Timnit responded with an email requiring that a number of conditions be met in order for her to continue working at Google, including revealing the identities of every person who Megan and I had spoken to and consulted as part of the review of the paper and the exact feedback."
I can imagine wanting to know the feedback, but she didn't ask for that she asked for the identity of everyone person who they consulted.
It could also be that disclosing the feedback would've identified the individual.
Timnit claims that she was told at a meeting called on short notice that her paper was being retracted because of anonymous feedback. She said she asked about the substance of the feedback and they refused to tell her.
After that meeting, she is told she can be read a private document with some, but not all of the anonymous feedback.
That led to Gebru sending a frustrated email to her colleagues and a separate email with conditions that she was willing to resign over. In that email it seems like she asked to knows the identities of the people who gave the feedback that let to the demand for retraction.
Jeff Dean says that Timnit wanted the identity of the people who gave the feedback as a condition for staying. Then he describes what that feedback was. He doesn't acknowledge that Timnit was not given the substance of the feedback in the first meeting when she asked for it. And it sounds like the full feedback wasn't given later during that private reading.
The feedback Dean cites that led to the retraction doesn't at all sound like something that required the protection of identities, and certainly nothing that required keeping that feedback secret. If the reviewers felt like the paper left out some relevant research, why wasn't that communicated fully and clearly in the first meeting?
Jeff Dean's email seems to leave out a lot of context about everything leading up to Timnit threatening to resign. At the very least it doesn't seem like the reasons the surprise retraction order came down weren't revealed at all until some time after that first meeting.
Per Dean, Timnit appears to have precipitated this by violating internal process for a 2 week internal review period and approval before external submission of a paper. (I have no idea how regularly this process is enforced, but I think it's standard in the industry). And then -- reading between the lines -- reacted poorly to the lack of approval. Whence Dean and Megan made the decision to force a retraction.
Then Timnit demanded the names and feedback of the reviewers. Again, as an outsider, I have no idea if the provision of this is customary. But not just the reviewers; also everyone that Dean and Megan had spoken with.
I do wonder how much of this was the irregular process around the paper, her reaction to criticism of the paper, or her public criticism of DEI efforts, particularly as a manager. Or all of the above.
Calling out your leadership chain, both for DEI metrics and for behavior about the paper -- while also disclosing that you seriously considering suing Google -- seems unwise if you don't wish to be terminated.
Perhaps the reviewers were afraid of being dragged on Twitter and possibly having their careers destroyed as a result.
"A cross functional team then reviewed the paper as part of our regular process and the authors were informed that it didn’t meet our bar for publication and were given feedback about why. It ignored too much relevant research — for example, it talked about the environmental impact of large models, but disregarded subsequent research showing much greater efficiencies. Similarly, it raised concerns about bias in language models, but didn’t take into account recent research to mitigate these issues."
Is it true that this information was not shared with her?
If internally she has a history of bringing race or sex into every discussion I could see why they'd rather be anonymous. Even being accused of being racist can ruin someone's career in this current climate.