Timnit Gebru’s Actual Paper May Explain Why Google Ejected Her
Several Soylentils, including aristarchus_, Runaway1956, c0lo, and an Anonymous Coward have submitted news about the departure of AI ethicist Timnit Gebru from Google.
Timnit claims that she was fired while Google claims that she made certain demands and that, if they were not met, she would resign at a later date. Google accepted that resignation and made the date effective immediately.
Timnit Gebru's actual paper may explain why Google ejected her:
A paper co-authored by former Google AI ethicist Timnit Gebru raised some potentially thorny questions for Google about whether AI language models may be too big, and whether tech companies are doing enough to reduce potential risks, according to MIT Technology Review. The paper also questioned the environmental costs and inherent biases in large language models.
[...] Gebru and her team submitted their paper, titled "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?" for a research conference. She said in a series of tweets on Wednesday that following an internal review, she was asked to retract the paper or remove Google employees' names from it. She says she asked Google for conditions for taking her name off the paper, and if they couldn't meet the conditions they could "work on a last date." Gebru says she then received an email from Google informing her they were "accepting her resignation effective immediately."
The head of Google AI, Jeff Dean, wrote in an email to employees that the paper "didn't meet our bar for publication." He wrote that one of Gebru's conditions for continuing to work at Google was for the company to tell her who had reviewed the paper and their specific feedback, which it declined to do. "Timnit wrote that if we didn't meet these demands, she would leave Google and work on an end date. We accept and respect her decision to resign from Google," Dean wrote.
[...] Gebru told Wired in an interview published Thursday that she felt she was being censored. "You're not going to have papers that make the company happy all the time and don't point out problems," she said. "That's antithetical to what it means to be that kind of researcher."
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