late Wednesday that she had been ousted from the company. Outside observers were stunned and confused: Why would Google terminate one of its top AI ethics figures who was also a highly respected name in the field?
According to an employee familiar with the situation, Google was unhappy with the research paper, which analyzed the ethical dangers of language models. Gebru subsequently pushed back on Google's request to redact author names or retract the paper entirely, asking management to provide more details on their reasoning.
According to another employee who is part of the group and asked to remain anonymous, the email group is generally used for mentorship and "enabling members to feel empowered to lean in to the workplace." Since the group had become moderated, they said, conversations had become more restricted. "Discussion and threading is severely limited," they said.
The paper, titled 'On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big?', examined how major language models trained on large amounts of data bring biases and carry the risk of ethical harms. But Google argues that the paper was not approved because it didn't follow the correct procedure and "ignored too much relevant research."
Neuralink will be in next job
I love it when these folks find out they’re working for a publicly traded company and not some university/etc — welcome to the real world of actions and consequences.
nice