She was part of the "Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team" of what was then, and still is now, one of the corporations World wide spending the largest amount of resources precisely on using AI commercially.
Cf. https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/illusion-of-think...
I think she's since since lost a lot of her allure, especially when she didn't change her mind when the facts about the AI water usage changed 1000x
And this is a reply to her comment about water usage where it becomes clear she's not arguing in good faith. https://x.com/AndyMasley/status/1990498830131888173
Also to compare growing food with the totally optional, not useful in the slightest, LLMs that somehow demand local populaces bend to their will for reasons that never seem to benefit them is just bonkers level of self-blinding when it comes to populations absolutely despising big tech, big tech leadership, and big tech practices.
This mania might finally cause the software industry to become a highly regulated with licenses similar to that of other engineering disciplines due to amount of optional destruction they have decided to unleash upon on the planet in such a short time frame.
See? Middle-Eastern investors are growing alfalfa in the western desert using legal allotments of water! That is so much worse than what we’re doing! Go after them!
They can both be using an egregious amount of water for silly purposes.
The other part of the water debate is also the pollution different systems create. Many data centres went in with the promise of closed-loop systems but changed half-way through construction and couldn’t be stopped.
I think it’s more complicated than, “they’re wrong, it’s just hype.”
Your argument makes sense if ai datacenters were using something close to like alfafa farming but the difference between them is soo massive it does not make sense.
Reducing pollution is a much better problem to fight for
So, on the matter of scale: there likely isn't a cap on water use of these datacenters. Both the heat emission and usage levels for these systems will likely go up unless there is a fundamental technical breakthrough.
On the matter of utility: As a sibling of GP mentioned, the utility of food is clear.
On the matter of polution: I am not remotely read on waste water and contamination due to industrial agriculture. Is this also something where the judgmental scale is tipped in favor of food production vs cooling systems?
I am highly skeptical of layperson debunking like this.
Did she really think Google cares about ethics? Such positions seem purely performative, we all know that ethics go out the window first to make room for more profits.
She was well known to be toxic and extremely exploitive of victim privilege
So that's why "Brave minority woman unfairly fired by evil AI corporation" sells better than "Self-entitled minority woman is terrible bully to colleagues"
Meanwhile, the paper has 2 points of criticism towards AI. 1 is a bunch of carbon consumption complaints assuming NVIDIA cards with coal-fired power, while a lot of effort at contemporary Google went towards getting TPUs running on green power. I suspect this was what people wanted to object to, a lot of effort went into those green power projects and she was just denying it. The complaint seems prophetic now but it was not true about Google then.
The other criticism was about which language the LLMs use, they average the input data of normal humans instead of talking the way the paper author thinks they should talk. The phrase "women doctors" is called out as problematic. I'm less inclined to think people objected strongly to this given the zeitgeist at the time, it was probably people who worked on the green energy projects and were pissed off that their contributions were ignored, but still, nobody elected her Queen of English, she can have her opinions but she's not a victim for not having them adopted by everyone.
(BTW, quite bold to say input data from Reddit and 4Chan is how “normal” people speak. There is a lot of language in the training data of any model you really do not wish your application to use ever.)
Google forced its researchers to retract an already submitted paper because it undermined its strategic and commercial story around large language models. The "we just accepted her resignation" is just a lie. Google made harsh demands with opaque reviewers that made vague objections, and then Jeff Dean moved very quickly to get rid of Gebru. Other Google researchers reported that they usually got to work through objections, Gebru got no such opportunity. Google showed that AI labs will not tolerate internal research that seriously criticizes technology central to its business.
Gebru is not a researcher. She is a modern-age Trofim Lysenko, who politicizes everything and wields political correctness as a weapon to purge any dissent.
I'd say what's under debate is whether uncritical LLM adoption is mainly unethical or mainly religious.
>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. We accept and respect her decision to resign from Google.
This is Google's side of it; I think the following is a fair piece of primary-source journalism if you want to go deeper:
https://www.platformer.news/the-withering-email-that-got-an-...