* Timnit pointed out that language models have unavoidable flaws, including reflecting racial biases in their training data. This is sort of an obvious claim if you ask me but google stands to make a lot of money if it isn't true.
* They demanded she take her name off the paper entirely. No changes requested. Research careers advance largely by publishing papers, and this is several months of her work they want disowned.
* She agreed to take her name off provided she could have an explanation of what she was and was not permitted to say. IMO being a researcher and having publications yanked at the last moment based on unspecified criteria is not a tenable position.
On one side, we have an unemployed researcher whose future credibility & employ-ability depend on not being caught lying (the easiest way to do this is not to lie, but who knows).
On the other side, we have a billion-dollar company who have not been shy about spending significant sums of money to push their PR lines.
Obviously either could be telling the truth but one seems markedly more likely than the other to me.
Assuming I am wrong about that, I'm not sure it changes much about my comment. Presumably Google has the authority to ask for a publication to be pulled, and responding with an unprofessional email to a wide list is not ideal. On the matter of not agreeing on an end date, Gebru raised resignation and Google picked the date.
I just put it in context by thinking about myself. If I acted the way Gebru did when I was upset by a professional setback, would I expect to be fired? Yes, unequivocally.
You mention her having a research career - but she's not in research. She works at Google. Her job, however they try to fancy it up, is to sell ads. Explaining to people that language models are racist and energy inefficient is not a good way to sell more ads, which is why Google wanted her paper pulled (I assume). If Gebru wants to be an academic she should work at a university. If she wants to work at Google she should realize her job is to sell ads. If her paper made Google look good (here's what Google is doing to combat the racism latent in our competitor's language models) then I have zero doubt Google would've been pleased by her work.
> You mention her having a research career - but she's not in research. She works at Google. Her job, however they try to fancy it up, is to sell ads. Explaining to people that language models are racist and energy inefficient is not a good way to sell more ads,
She was hired to do research, and her job was explicitly related to ethics, so this is very much in line with her work. My company has a research arm, and people who are hired into it are very much expected to publish papers and will be judged based on their ability to do so. Having disagreements about what the company does in public, and sending sensational emails to coworkers would not be tolerated here either, though.
I'm not really sure what your point is. At a very basic level: Of course they would not prefer it published. Just like they would prefer not to have transparency, pay competitive market salaries, give free lunches, have an HR department, etc. We all prefer things if we can get them.
I would, however, expect that if a company hired a researcher to study whether their work is ethical, then it's silly to get in that researcher's way. If my company hired someone to ensure their supply chain for manufacturing does not involve sweatshops, then it certainly wouldn't look good if my company prevents him from saying so. If we aren't prepared for uncomfortable truths, we should not hire people to look into them.
I honestly think there are other reasonable reasons to get rid of this researcher than what you are positing.
I think Gebru's reaction, the ultimatum and the email, were what led to her firing. Curious what you think the reasons to fire her were.
Fair enough. Then Google should call it what it is.
And apologized for having lied about it - and what an insult to everyone's intelligence this was.
What she definitely did wrong was misunderstand that a researcher on "Ethical AI" is a PR role, and job is to make Google look good. That doesn't mean she can't ask hard questions, she just has to do it the right way.
I get that they wanted to publish their side because they want to avoid being seen as racist, but it strikes me as unprofessional.
Traditional Hierarchies are floundering about because more and more employees are hooked into networks of influence, that in many cases are larger than the networks of their bosses.
You got that part right.
Unless I'm missing something it hardly seems outrageous.
What you're missing is the central point of contention here: that Google is claiming she "resigned" when quite plainly she was terminated. Along with the secondary point that Sundar is now trying to make it sort of look like he understands what went wrong and it apologizing for it. Except he doesn't and he isn't, really.
Gebru wrote an email to a wide audience with a series of unprofessional complaints
Would you care to enumerate what these were, specifically?
As I understand it Gebru said something like I need X, Y, and Z or I can work on an end date. Google then "accepted her resignation" or fired her. However you prefer to say it.
I can see that mattering if she needs to collect unemployment or something, but then it seems like a legal discussion which I'm not equipped for. In the vernacular, it seems like she threatened to resign and Google accepted it. Either way, I don't see why a vocabulary dispute is a big deal.
Regarding her unprofessional email, it might be easiest to read it for yourself. https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-a...
Finally, regarding Pichai's comments, I've not read them so I don't know what he did or didn't say. You seem to be assuming he should apologize and complaining that he didn't though. I'd start by asking why he should apologize? I'm not really convinced Google did anything wrong here.
I don't see how one can say this. There's a huge, intrinsic difference between the two.
Is there an agreed on definition of the terms?
When you set the date - it's a resignation. When they set the date - it's a termination.
When a company says it was the former when it was really the latter (and pretty much obviously so) - they're playing with your head.
Using your definition, yes, it seems clear this was a firing, but again, so what? Does a disagreement on terms really necessitate the drama (news articles, petition, protests)? If she was being denied money somehow because of the distinction then I could see it being a legal case, but I haven't heard anything like that. Google said she resigned, she said she didn't, okay.
If anything, saying she resigned sounds a bit nicer to me than saying she was fired. Probably best if Google had not commented on it at all.
This was the cause of her email to the list. Google hasn't disputed any of these details.
"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. We acknowledge that the authors were extremely disappointed with the decision that Megan and I ultimately made, especially as they’d already submitted the paper. "
And:
"But the paper itself had some important gaps that prevented us from being comfortable putting Google affiliation on it. For example, it didn’t include important findings on how models can be made more efficient and actually reduce overall environmental impact, and it didn’t take into account some recent work at Google and elsewhere on mitigating bias in language models. Highlighting risks without pointing out methods for researchers and developers to understand and mitigate those risks misses the mark on helping with these problems. As always, feedback on paper drafts generally makes them stronger when they ultimately appear."
I'd be surprised, having read this, if Gebru and coauthors made the requested adjustments, the paper wouldn't have been approved by Google. That's my intuition at least, maybe I'm off.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1f2kYWDXwhzYnq8ebVtuk9CqQ...
I don't know the lady well, but given her background I assume she's intelligent. So, this isn't to degrade her but that trait in general - in what job can your role be to just tell people that they're wrong? How long would a roofer last that just stood on the ground and yelled up they were doing it wrong...even if the roofers really were? Or a programmer who denies your PR because it's wrong? Communication is an invaluable life skill. Handling disagreements with tact and real suggestions in hand will always be better received.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-a...
Even if they could definitively prove their side of the story, it would just make them look like even more of a bully to target an already let go employee.