"when i was there it was so sad to me that none of the senior leadership in deepmind dared to question this ideology

[...]

i watched my colleagues at nvidia (like @tunguz), openai (roon), etc. who were literally doing stuff that would get you kicked out of google on a daily basis and couldn't believe how different google is"

Aleksa Gordić, https://x.com/gordic_aleksa/status/1760266452475494828

Interestingly enough the same terror of political correctness seems to take center stage at Mozilla. But then it seems much less so at places like Microsoft or Apple.

I wonder if there’s a correlation with being a tech company that was founded in direct relation to the internet vs. being founded in relation to personal / enterprise computing, and how that sort of seeds the initial culture.

Is Microsoft really better? Remember this[1] bizarre intro during Microsoft Ignite?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBRtucXGeNQ

The "land acknowledgement" part is somewhat common in the Pacific Northwest.

The "stating my appearance, dress, and race" is just bizarre. My most charitable interpretation is that they're trying to help visually impaired people to imagine what the speakers look like. Perhaps there are visually impaired users here who could comment on whether that's something they'd find helpful?

You can always do described video, so this is just awkward and sloppy.

It's cringy, but it's harmless.

I’d imagine Google’s culture is more Mao-ist public shaming. Here at Mozilla, we like Stalin. Go against the orthodoxy? You’re disappeared and killed quickly.

We have hour long pronoun training videos for onboarding; have spent millions on DEI consultants from things like Paradigm to boutique law firms; tied part of our corporate bonus to company DEI initiatives.

Not sure why anyone uses FF anymore. We barely do any development on it. You basically just sit here and collect between 150-300k depending on your level as long as you can stomach the bullshit.

I really doubt there are any Stalinists at Mozilla. My 85 y/o grandpa who's a communist's communist calls the modern DEI left "Trotskyists to a fault": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trotskyism

He would dismiss any whiff of intersectionality as "dividing the working class in the interests of bourgeoisie."

Or perhaps it's Google's hiring process - they are so obsessed with Leetcode-style interviews, they do not vet for the actual fit.

If it was just leetcode I think they would have gotten someone who was politically incorrect enough to point it out.

Like this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_Ideological_Echo_Ch...

Yes.

That was 2017.

I am sure the response to that case made smart people avoid sticking their necks out.

For me it probably was the straw that broke the camels back for me. I was in the hiring pipeline at that point and while I doubt that they would have ended up hiring me anyway, I think my absolute lack of enthusiasm might have simplified that decision.

It was a dark time. It generated so much internal controversy (many googlers agreed with Damore) that Sundar had to cut his vacation short, and an interest group managed to get the "company-wide chat" about it cancelled because they said they were at risk of physical harm. memegen and plus were a mess for months. People argued (as they do here) about the semantics of what he said, and what his underlying thinking about women was, whether "the science" was valid, etc. People saying smart things would get yelled down, and people saying dumb things would get upvotes. And vice versa.

You probably made the right choice. Google had already been in decline at that point, but it was clear that Sundar was no leader, just somebody Larry Page appointed to maintain the peace between his lieutenants so the engine could keep printing money.

I honestly think that incident helped make the type of people who would have the nerve to stick their neck out and say "This is racist" avoid Google like the plague.

Sundar absolutely had to fire Damore because he came out with the arguments like that women are too neurotic for high stress jobs. The thing is even Damore's more reasonable points were ignored and Google's ideological echo chamber only strengthened.

Must be why, despite the fact that I can recognise OpenAI's product does have clear biases against affluent groups, it seems well intentioned and proportionate. It's clear the internet is bias not just towards the data of the affluent, but also the viewpoints and prejudices, so a reasonable person can recognise there is some unfairness and a bit of a problem. Also that any solution to this problem will be imperfect.

Whereas with Google, I just have to imagine they let some bigot go wild, and everybody was afraid to say anything about how fucking bad the product was due to the optics, so nothing kept them in check.

TBH if I were at Google and they asked all employees to dogfood this product and give feedback, I would not say anything about this. With recent firings why risk your neck?

They should put James Damore in charge of a new ideological red team.

Yeah, no way am I beta-testing a product for free then risking my job to give feedback.

Yea, if you were dogfooding this, would you want to be the one to file That Bug?? No way, I think I'd let someone else jump into that water.

Here’s a simpler explanation. Google is getting their butt kicked by OpenAI and rushed out an imperfect product. This is one of probably 50 known issues with Gemini but it got enough attention that they had to step in and disable a part of the product.

That's a simpler explanation but one that I think misses the point completely. A huge reason "Google is getting their butt kicked by OpenAI" in the first place is because they had lots of people internally who acted as nothing but "vetoers", demanding the pace of AI slow down less it accidentally show too many white people. And this outcome is wholly unsurprising given that Google's second most important AI principle is "Avoid creating or reinforcing unfair bias.": https://ai.google/responsibility/principles/

In other words, you talk about "50 known issues with Gemini", but this issue was not a result of technical underperformance, on the contrary, is was the result of Google making things more difficult for themselves in an effort to satisfy a (false) idealized view of the world.

Well they succeeded at their second principle, by using "fair" bias.

It was certainly not some random issue that popped up, they specifically designed it that way: https://x.com/jonst0kes/status/1761190093669437559