![]() ![]() Rather than dying out over the weekend, the anger has escalated. The pushback against Google and Dean specifically here has reached a pretty unprecedented level - and I try to avoid using the word unprecedented. Google did not immediately respond to request for comment. Others on her team and in the AI ethics community more broadly have written about their disappointment with Dean specifically, who has been a hero for many in the field.Gebru's boss, Samy Bengio, said he was "stunned" at her firing in a Facebook post.More than 1,500 Googlers signed a petition in support of Gebru and calling for changes to Google's paper review process, with signatories including senior engineers and team leaders. Her team has coined a new word for what happened: "resignated," according to her former colleague and co-lead Margaret Mitchell. The letter also states that Gebru was fired and did not actually resign, despite Dean's insistence on calling it a resignation in his email to the team.He used that claim to justify why Google tried to force Gebru to retract or take her name off of the paper, and this letter seems to debunk that main defense. The biggest revelation from the new letter is that almost half of all research papers submitted for approval through Google's internal process are done so with a day or less of notice to reviewers, despite Dean's claim that the process requires two weeks. Gebru's forced departure stemmed from conflict over a research paper about ethical questions for large-language models (which are a big research focus at Google Brain): Google wanted Gebru to take her name off the paper, Gebru threatened to resign, and then Google took that opportunity to remove her from the team. ![]() Should things have moved faster? Or are the stakes high enough to warrant this (or even more) caution? Will you use CA Notify? Reply to this email with your thoughts, or send a note to Gebru did not resign'Īnna Kramer writes : Google AI lead Jeff Dean is in hot water with members of Timnit Gebru's team at Google, who published a letter yesterday challenging his story about Gebru's resignation and calling the research paper review process discriminatory. It doesn't help that everything about the pandemic has been so politicized, to the point where nobody trusts anybody.A few states' apps have gotten traction, but all have been slow to launch and certainly could have benefited from the marketing muscle of Google and Apple. Beyond that, haphazard launches with various health agencies really haven't worked.There are no simple answers, but the tech works! And it's hard not to look at the fact that the initial CA Notify pilot started in September, before a second wave of cases hit the state (and the country). I've heard a number of tech execs express frustration that things haven't been able to move faster in such an important moment. The whole thing has been a case study in public-private partnerships: Tech wanting to move quickly the government wanting to make sure every t gets crossed. Privacy preservation is obviously crucial, particularly with such high-stakes personal and medical data, but lives have been at stake. We didn't want to jump in, ready-fire-aim." "That's why we've been, frankly, a little stubborn," he said, "and kept our eyes wide open in terms of this technology.This is not contact tracing, this is notification technology." He went on like this for a while, but you get the idea. Apple and Google have been working with the California government for months, Governor Gavin Newsom said, before taking great pains to tell people that CA Notify is an opt-in service.The app is called CA Notify, and it's using the exposure notification tech developed by Google and Apple. ![]() All it took was eight months, multiple lockdowns, 1.37 million cases, and nearly 20,000 deaths. Tech bemoans the exposure notification slow walkĬalifornia's finally getting an exposure notification app. ![]()
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