I suspect it was Timnit’s behavior after the paper didn’t pass internal review that actually got her fired (issuing an ultimatum and threatening to resign unless the company met her demands; telling her coworkers to stop writing documents because their work didn’t matter; insinuations of racist/misogynistic treatment from leadership when she didn’t get her way).
I think it was a well calculated career move, she wanted fame, she got what she wanted. Now she's leading a new research institute
> We are an interdisciplinary and globally distributed AI research institute rooted in the belief that AI is not inevitable, its harms are preventable, and when its production and deployment include diverse perspectives and deliberate processes it can be beneficial. Our research reflects our lived experiences and centers our communities.
It was Megan Kacholia, who had put Timnit Gebru and others close to her down for a long time constantly within Google, always talking down and being condescending and rude, failing to respect Timnit in how she confronted Timnit about the paper (which she was ordered to retract by way of not Google's normal paper review process, but by a then-newly-implemented and since retracted secondary "sensitive topics review" process, due to a combination of actual mistakes like the environment numbers, and also Google being too afraid of reputational damage for her discussion of the very real and tangible harms of LLMs).
Timnit tried to raise this to Jeff Dean to get help (Jeff was Megan's manager at the time). Jeff completely misunderstood what she was asking for, and instead sent some response about the environment numbers being incorrect (and they are, but that doesn't at all justify the way Timnit was treated). Not beginning to imagine that Jeff could have missed this signal, Timnit responded sarcastically. Jeff didn't pick up on the sarcasm and thought all was good.
Timnit then reacted by describing her frustrations with how she was treated in an internal diversity mailing list. She also emailed Megan Kacholia with a number of demands, mostly to be treated reasonably. Appalled at how she and her coauthors were treated, she refused to retract the paper. Megan reacted by taking her note that she would work on a resignation date if demands were not met in combination with Timnit's email completely pedantically and out of context, using them as an excuse to fire her by rushing her out, without allowing her to follow the actual resignation process. She also acted over Timnit's manager's head (Samy Bengio), who was so annoyed he later quit. (Megan cc'd Jeff, but hadn't spoken to Jeff about any of this, and was acting on her own.)
Interestingly, Timnit's email to the diversity list was so resonant that several of the changes it asked for in how Google approaches diversity were enacted after her firing. But Megan and Google's official line on all of this chose to obsess over Timnit's rhetorical devices and take them literally instead, using an email to a diversity list about diversity against her. People are still too afraid to talk about diversity on diversity lists, now, because of Google using that email against her.
Google reacted by gaslighting Timnit to protect its ass. After Timnit Tweeted that Jeff had fired her (Timnit probably really thought that Jeff and Megan had spoken to each other before Megan had sent that email), Jeff participated in this part in public, on Twitter, with a lot of serious consequences for Timnit and others, without considering power dynamics. (Jeff suffered a lot on Twitter, too, but that doesn't excuse not considering power dynamics in such a consequential way on such a consequential medium.) Timnit and others, including me, were harassed and threatened because of this, by way of third-party harassers. I was not even involved on the paper, just proximal damage. I was afraid for my life honestly.
Meg Mitchell, feeling lost, having seen the truth of how Timnit was treated internally, and trusting Jeff to protect her, tried to put together some things for Jeff to get him to see how Timnit was mistreated. She panicked and backed them up on her personal email because she was afraid of retaliation from Google (a reasonable fear---doing any diversity or community work at Google that at all challenges the status quo IME gets you retaliatorily reported to PeopleOps, who then try to get you in trouble and read your private communications and so on). She was transparent about doing this and gave instructions for Google to remove her personal copy if needed. Sundar Pichai fired her and then comms smeared her publicly with outright lies. She was harassed and threatened for this, too, and a number of places refused to hire her because of Google's treatment of her. Really tangible damage emotionally, financially, and reputationally.
Out of fear of being sued, Google's comms and legal departments reacted by continuing to censor and gaslight. Sundar was extremely complicit in this, too. Megan was moved out of Research, but not much else happened; she continues to send monthly emails about diversity, as if her continued contact with Research is not actively harmful to diversity.
So sick of internet people speculating about this without knowing anything about the situation. Sorry if I broke anyone's trust here. Just can't deal with this incorrect speculation anymore. (I have extremely thorough information about this, but to those directly involved, please feel free to correct me about any details I got wrong, or about important details I omitted.)
Cheers. That's way much more information than I ever wanted to know about that sorry affair. If it can quell the torrent of ad-hominems, it's worth it, but I doubt it. All those hardcore soft. engineers here on HN who spend 99.99999% of uptime close to the bare metal think that people like Gebru who work on ethics are useless hangers-on without any "real contributions" (probably because none of them has bothered to check her background on wikipedia).
Nevertheless, hoping to check your sources I clicked through your profile and I have a question, totally unrelated to all this. Can you say something about the state of the art in "neural proof synthesis"? To clarify, I'm scare-quoting because I didn't even know that's a thing. For context, my background is in the European tradition of Resolution-based automated theorem proving (Prolog and all that) but also statistical machine learning, so don't worry about simplifying terminology too much.
Btw, the "proof engineering" link in your profile gives me a security alert on firefox.
ML folks often call it "neural theorem proving." SOTA results are still from combinations of tactic prediction models with specialized tree search processes. They do OK on some interesting benchmarks, but still can handle mostly only fairly simple proofs. So far, they seem strictly complementary to symbolic methods. Interest is growing dramatically, though, and progress is accelerating, so I'm excited about the near future.
Language models are showing a lot of promise for autoformalization: automatically converting natural language mathematics to formal definitions, specifications, and proofs. This is a task where symbolic methods do not seem particularly promising in general, and one that meshes nicely with synthesis.
A good conference to look at is AI for Theorem Proving (AITP). It's small but has a lot of relevant work. All of the talks from this past year are recorded and on the website. MATH-AI at NeurIPS had some good work this year, too.
There is a bit of a culture and citation gap dividing the work in the AI community from the work in the PL/SE communities; in PL/SE I'd recommend work by Emily First and Alex Sanchez-Stern. They are undercited in AI work despite having SOTA results on meaningful Coq benchmarks. In AI, I'm particularly psyched about work by Yuhuai (Tony) Wu, Markus Rabe, Christian Szegedy, Sean Welleck, Albert Jiang, and many others. Tony's papers are a good gateway into other AI papers since the AI papers tend to cite each other.
Thanks. I'm a bit more familiar with neural theorem proving. It's an interesting area. For example, if I could train me a model to speed up (NP-complete) θ-subsumption for very long terms that would be a worthy addition to the purely symbolic toolbox I'm more at home with.
Autoformalization also sounds interesting. I've had some conversations about automatically turning big corpora of natural language text into Prolog with language models, for example. I don't reckon anyone is even researching how to do this with symbolic methods at the moment.
I'll check out AITP. Thanks for the pointers. I'm used to small conferences [and to underciting between disciplines] :)
I went to AITP for the first time last September, and I found it an absolute pleasure. Everyone was kind and wonderful and open-minded. The venue was wonderful too. Highly recommended if you're interested at any point.
BTW what you say about the sadly common assumption Timnit and other AI ethics folks don't have "real contributions" is too real. It has impacted me even though my work isn't on AI ethics at all, just because I bother to talk about it online in public sometimes. Similarly for any social justice work or any work improving the work environment in research. It is like some people cannot comprehend that one can be technically proficient and still care about social justice and ethics and other "soft" issues. I love how confused those people are when they learn my expertise is in formal logic and proof haha
It's lack of training I think. A good engineer should think about the consequences of her actions. People in the industry, it seems, just don't. Very disappointing.
OK, first clarification after further correspondence, the mistake on the environment numbers was small---accidentally misunderstanding the context in which Strubell mentioned particular numbers, I think? And Strubell's numbers were off because they used only public data they had access to, and I think misunderstood some things too. Some of the authors did not even know about it and it is news to them now. And it could have been addressed in a camera-ready, nonetheless. It was no reason to force the authors to retract a paper or remove their names, and that is part of the treatment of them that was extremely messed up.
Nah, this is the actual truth. You can feel free not to believe me, but I have more complete information about this situation than anyone else you'll ever talk to.
None of that disputes what I said or excuses her behavior. The “resonant” email is public, we can’t pretend it was in any way professional or appropriate.
Vanishingly few people can get away with acting like that at work without getting fired. She thought she was an exception and she wasn’t.
It was fine, unless you reach far enough to take it literally, which is quite obviously not what Timnit intended. The call to stop DEI work was a rhetorical device to highlight to an audience that presumably cares strongly about diversity that the current work is not meaningful without broader systemic change within Google. Plus an emotional plea to what should have been a sympathetic audience to understand how exhausting doing any real diversity work within Google is. This is true and resonant and so triggered a lot of said change after she was fired. The change is still ongoing.
Everyone who tries to actually enact real systemic change within Google Research to improve how women and people of color are treated, or the work environment in general, burns out or gets fired. It is only toeing the company line when it's officially your role to do so, taking extremely conservative actions while ignoring real issues like abuse, harassment, and discrimination, that lets you survive while doing DEI work at Google in Research without burning out or getting fired. The sole exception I know of right now is Kat Heller, god bless her.
The feeling of "none of this is worthwhile, what's the point of any of it" is something everyone who tries to do real diversity and culture work within Google Research or even within the computer science research community more broadly has felt, and a diversity mailing list ought to have been a safe place to share that feeling.
Instead it was used against her. Now nobody feels safe sharing these feelings anywhere within Google Research.
Jeff to his credit is now working on many of these things. As is the DEI committee. I hope they all succeed. But I don't think any of that would have happened without Timnit highlighting these very real issues. It's depressing that she was fired for it. She wanted to change things and keep her job and her team, not to be a martyr.
Timnit’s backpedaling regarding her email and her ultimatum was absurd. You seem completely unwilling to factor Timnit’s own behavior into the chain of events, so it doesn’t make sense to continue this. This elimination of personal responsibility when it’s inconvenient to the narrative has become endemic among the activist employees. To your credit, it seems like your heart is in the right place with wanting to help her and others.
Will my car still get broken into every few months? Will I still have to walk over needles and human waste on my walk home? Will toothpaste still be locked up? San Francisco has a long way to go before it’s an attractive place to live and work again
It was an accurate description of mine having lived at two places on market (and east of VanNess) over a 4yr period.
You're right in that it's not "Most" in the sense that there's a lot more areas of SF, but if you work/life basically anywhere boxed in East of Van Ness, South of California St. , North of 16th street (Potrero Hill area) Then you're going to experience that daily. I'm a decent sized guy and I was physically assaulted twice in by homeless(mentally unstable) people.
I was tired of paying ~10% more in taxes than else where (and they still have their claws in me thanks to equity)
I was tired of being treated as an extremist when on the national scale I'm a moderate (and classically liberal relative to the national scale).
I was tired of living in a place where even as a 97th percentile income earner I'd never find a 3 bedroom home ownership (I want kids) affordable without also having a 97th percentile earning spouse. And also tired of moving because my landlord wanted to play a game of "Your rent is going up 10%", "Oh you gave notice, just kidding only 5%"... when I could live blocks away for 5% less. It's exhausting to have to fight that fight ever 12 or so months, and just feel straight up used by people who are playing games hoping the grief of moving is enough they can extract more out of someone who is basically the perfect tenant. And don't give me "Rent control" BS, essentially every rent controlled unit I saw was falling apart, old (thin walls, no amenities etc), and generally terrible places to live.
I was tired of being constantly treated unfairly or as less than due to my race, gender, and religious views.
I was tired of Newsom and other elites hypocrisy, and the people who refused to call him out on it.
I was also a bit tired of the hype culture, where the lowest mental state you could be is "Excited, and so happy", everyone is a "CEO/Founder", and if you're not going to Tahoe, then are you even alive? I want to live somewhere that I can be honest about how life is going and not be ostracized.
You could have saved yourself a lot of typing by just stating that you are Republican. California has a super high median family income that easily overcomes the extra tax [1].
You probably shouldn't have moved to California in the first place. You can get almost as much pay by working remotely for California based tech companies.
I've lived in SF for over 6 years, in at least 10 different neighborhoods from fidi to Mission to lower pac heights. This is completely accurate in my experience.
In 30 years of being around SF, this is really only accurate of Tenderloin, Civic Center, SOMA, Market and Mission St, roughly 10% of SF. Almost every time someone complains about SF, they're describing their experience in SOMA or near BART.
I don't think so, and even if that were the case you've described the locations where a huge portion of SFs population lives.
I currently live in Haight, it's nearly just as bad as those you listed. I'm on Divisidero right now, there is poo everywhere and I can see needles in some gutters nearby.
The areas where there are only single family homes are fairly clean, but anywhere people actually go when they leave their homes is filthy.
In 30 years of being around SF, this is really only accurate of Tenderloin,
Civic Center, SOMA, Market and Mission St, roughly 10% of SF
Most of San Francisco has been pretty rough for most of its history. The Haight has struggled with being a destination for street kids for going on fifty years. Vis Valley? Probably the most infamous projects west of the Mississippi. Chinatown? That's pretty much always been tenement housing and the sort of grunge that you get with that many people essentially living on top of each other.
Those are two very cherry picked examples. And I agree I'd probably have a totally different view of SF if I had lived there instead. But you're also talking like 30+ minutes commute to an office near Market street/Civic Center/SOMa
Fair, but people throughout the Bay Area- those living in South Bay for instance- deal with commutes of such lengths every day, if not longer. Plenty of people live in Oakland and the East Bay and commute to San Francisco. Richmond and Sunset seem to be a destination for the savvy who want S.F. amenities and manageable commutes at cheaper rents without living outside of the city. Not to even mention those who live in Portola, Excelsior, or even Daly City.
Also, Portrero Hill and Dogpatch are just east of the Mission. Dogpatch is (was) on the up and up before the pandemic.
For those taking ^^ advice, NB: but also to deal with not being protected from the crazy weather patterns by Twin Peaks. The weather west of twin peaks is quite a bit more chaotic (stronger wins, more fog) than elsewhere at least as I recall living in it.
like, half of the city is a 'cherry picked example'?
what about the marina. or noe valley? or corona heights?
i think tech people live/visit in soma/mission/market and then write off the entire city based on that--like the only place to live in 7th and minna and everything else isn't close enough to.... something....
I guess I basically think of stuff west of van ness to be like the "suburbs" of San Francisco. It's not nearly the same density as the core. Sure it's much more dense than like the suburbs of Austin, but also far far less going on besides little pockets like Divis or Cow Hollow .
Maybe it's not accurate for someone who lives in Twin Peaks and never leaves their house, but anyone who goes to any part of the city that could be called "downtown" sees needles and human waste every single day, and is very likely to have their car broken into if they leave it overnight.
As an SF resident for over a decade, it is absolutely accurate. SF was not as much like this before, but over the past 15 years, it has become an absolute hive of scum and villainy. I am not joking about this at all, several times I have seen people get into physical altercations on the street with mentally deranged drug addicts. I've had my car broken into so many times that I've had to rent a garage space for $550/month. This used to be only characteristic of the Tenderloin and its surroundings, but it has spread far and wide. Well into SOMA, the mission district, and beyond.
As a Bay Area resident for 2+ decades, SF was very much like this before the Twitter boom brought tech into SF. SOMA, Mission etc were never areas where you could, 'leave your car' and not expect it to be broken into. I read your garage space comment and laughed, in '99 my friends in SF faced the same issues.
SOMA was mostly residential hotels before those were converted into nice apartments and the residents were kicked to the streets. Before the ballpark there was never really any reason for tech workers to go in there.
Mission was quite dangerous to walk around after night before it was deemed hip and thus gentrified.
The period around the 2010 era was the nicest SF has ever been since Mark Twain walked the sidewalks.
This sums up the problem with the pro-cheating side – the argument boils down to:
“This person didn’t behave how I think I would behave in this situation, so she’s probably guilty.”
But many people get extremely defensive and indignant when caught cheating or lying. Do returning half the money when cornered by Adelstein is evidence of nothing, either way.
This arguably makes cheating less likely. If someone in production knew both players’ hole cards, which was the theory, this would be a nonsensical place to cheat. It was still a coin flip to either lose everything or, best case scenario, win a hand with a remarkable call that was sure to draw scrutiny.
If they were that unbelievably reckless, this wouldn’t be the only hand they cheated in. Yet there weren’t other examples of notable calls or folds that indicated cheating.
The simplest explanation in my mind is that this rather inexperienced player made a very loose call and got lucky. I can’t rule out the possibility of cheating, but there’s not enough evidence to make it more than a conspiracy theory.
Yes, there were enough coincidences to at least make cheating a possibility, but without any credible evidence I don’t think the “100% guilty” people should be taken seriously.
Additionally to me it makes much more sense as a cheat than as a legitimate play.
Notice that people allegedly involved in the cheating aren't good poker players. And that as shown by some comments in this hn thread there are people who think that reasoning "I think he bluffs so I call" makes sense.
The whole evening she was setting it up taking how she is gonna read him and call his bluffs, etc. She was fishing for the spot like that. It can come once or twice during the evening or not at all. Of course it makes sense that she goes for it rather than waiting for a better spot that might never happen.
She could have got e.g. a binary signal that her hand is good and didn't bother to rethink if it makes poker sense or maybe she thought it did.
FWIW, after doing a quick scan through the forum post, I could be convinced that Robbi and RIP where using signals to coordinate hands. There did appear to be a fair bit of subtle communication between the two throughout the game.
Of course, if the only cheating they were doing was signaling between each other (i.e. no fancy electronic gadgets), then they would not have had an advantage on the J4 hand. So it is possible that that hand was just plain luck. But because the session was being recorded, and because they were signaling, they decided to give the money back on that hand to try and ward off any accusations.
You’re linking to the “report” by the accuser that consisted entirely of character attacks and borderline paranoid speculation. It contained none of the evidence he had promised.
Similarly, nothing we’ve said is any more than speculation. That’s fine, but that’s all this is.
Yes, he believed the covert cheating device was an industrial-strength vibrator powerful enough to visibly shake the chair she was sitting in. Because that wouldn’t arouse suspicion. Truly a brilliant theory by Doug.
You have to give the "lawnmower engine vibrator" hypothesis some credit for its sheer hilarity. Imagine Lew sitting there getting signals loud enough for the entire table to hear, see, and feel, like the water cup in Jurassic Park
It’s common knowledge to keep your mouth shut at this point. You don’t need to have highly-regarded lawyers advising you to know this, but SBF had (at least) two: his parents, who were with him in the Bahamas.
Even if he was under a delusion that the rules wouldn’t apply to him, we can assume his parents would do everything in their power to reign him in if this was not some sort of strategy.
From what I understand of the interviews, he carefully avoided going into details, and instead used the opportunity to present himself as an “aw, shucks” borderline simpleton with a heart of gold who just got in over his head. He was going to be arrested either way, so how do you see this as not a carefully-planned attempt to improve his public image?
>You don’t need to have highly-regarded lawyers advising you to know this, but SBF had (at least) two: his parents, who were with him in the Bahamas.
My experience has been that working with family or very close friends often nullifies or severally weakens professional sensibilities. It would be very understandable and almost expected if his parents are too closely involved emotionally and financially to be objective in this situation, and even if they were, the parent-child relationship also affects how one takes advice.
I would never rely on a close family member for important legal services, it seems almost as bad an idea as relying on yourself for legal services.
MS and PhD students start out behind and they’ll spend most of their time during the next 2-5 years on irrelevant things (e.g. 95%+ of their graduate coursework will be behind the state of the art; most PhDs will focus on a niche project that fails to have major impact or relevance by the time they graduate).
It sounds like OP just wants to learn out of general interest, which is fine. But others shouldn’t be discouraged. A sufficiently-dedicated person with talent and a strong classic ML foundation can catch up reasonably fast, to the point of getting their foot in the door professionally.
Exactly this. Having a MS/PHD does not guarantee that you are on the forefront of a field. When I started my MS program, I was behind, and when I finished, I was behind.
ChatGPT solves this problem readily. Maybe they should hire ChatGPT.
The problem always bugged me though. The word “inverting” makes me think of flipping something upside down rather than horizontally. Although that’s not strictly necessary, I’ve never heard the word “invert” used elsewhere in the same way.
It makes the powerful people he colluded with, his parents and their network, and powerful politicos like Waters, appear less culpable.
He is making sure that he doesn’t appear smart enough to have the capacity to collude though clearly if you follow the money trail that’s exactly what happened. He is making himself to be the scapegoat by playing the fool.
Just like Bernie Made-off, he isn’t an island of culpability as is being conveniently portrayed. He was surrounded by various people who can be documented to have benefitted in the millions of dollars and will magically, by slight of hand, walk away from the whole thing scot free.
He is the opposite of stupid. He’s playing the fool to help the politically powerful patrons he served. That’s effective “altruism” for sure.
Most people would be advised to say nothing in this situation.
Instead, he’s launching an aggressive PR tour to rebrand himself from a genius wunderkind to a hapless fool who made some innocent mistakes. It’s a risky strategy, but he has two lawyer parents who are almost definitely helping him thread this needle, legally speaking, plus who knows who else through their connections.
