Googler here. This story makes me fucking furious.
For those who don't know: Timnit Gebru is a top researcher in AI ethics. Sounds like a smart person, right? She did a good job highlighting poor performance of facial recognition systems on black people -- that paper's been cited ~1000 times. Not bad.
So here's what happened lately:
>October: she writes a paper, skips the normal review process to submit to a conference
>November: full Google reviewers take a look and say "wtf this isn't publication quality"
>December: she freaks out and demands to know everyone who was consulted in the process of reviewing the paper.
>Refuses to retract the paper, threatens to resign
>Sends an incoherent email to an AI mailing list with hundreds of employees on it saying "stop working on DEI and fairness projects leadership doesn't care"
>Is *shocked* when they're like "OK if you hate it that much we're accepting your resignation".
The email alone is grounds for revoking your role as a manager or termination. This isn't all she's been doing though:
>She literally had been threatening to sue Google with a team of "feminist lawyers" (her words), then she was shocked when they responded to her ultimatum about resigning with an Attorney-Client Privileged document. Of fucking course they did , you're literally threatening legal action
>She's the same person who drove Yann LeCun (a fucking Turing award winner) off Twitter with her retarded "it's not my job to educate you" stance
Because I'm internal I've read the paper she's been whining about and it's utter trash. Literally her argument is "GPT-3 (and similar large models) are bad because big models require compute costs to produce and that's bad for the environment" AND "GPT-3 is bad because it encodes modern society and modern society is racist". Her recommendation seems to be "stop doing anything until society isn't racist".
Jeff Dean is a fucking great man and I have been completely seething watching this whole exchange.
