Posted on 04/06/2021 12:55:47 PM PDT by Justa
By Jeffrey Dastin and Paresh Dave (Reuters) -Google research manager Samy Bengio on Tuesday said he is resigning, according to an internal email seen by Reuters, in a blow to the Alphabet Inc unit after the firings of his colleagues who questioned paper review and diversity practices.
Though at least two Google engineers had earlier resigned in protest of the dismissal of artificial intelligence (AI) researcher Timnit Gebru, Bengio is the highest-profile yet to depart.
Google and Bengio did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Bloomberg earlier reported the news.
A distinguished scientist at Google, Bengio spent about 14 years at the company and was among its first employees involved in a decade-old project known as Google Brain that advanced algorithms crucial to the functioning of various modern artificial intelligence systems.
In the email he sent internally, Bengio said, "I have decided to leave Google in order to pursue other exciting opportunities." Google fired staff scientist Margaret Mitchell in February after alleging she transferred electronic files out of the company. It fired fellow researcher Gebru in December after she threatened to quit rather than retract a paper.
Mitchell has said she tried "to raise concerns about race and gender inequity, and speak up about Google's problematic firing of Dr. Gebru." Gebru has said the company wanted to suppress her criticism of its products and its efforts to increase workforce diversity.
Bengio had defended the pair, who co-led a team of about a dozen researching ethical issues related to AI software. In December, Bengio said on Facebook that he was stunned that Gebru, whom he was managing, was removed from the company without his being consulted prior.
He did not mention their firings in his farewell note....
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...
Cleo Markham was my favorite part of Colossus.
Love it when a pack of rats turn on each other...
Particularly H-1B rats...
They figure that we are all so dumbed down, that they can afford to stupidly punish and shun a key individual in their operation, regardless of the undermining effect it has on their vast, anti American conspiracies. “We’ll find someone just as “smart” as he is, somewhere amongst all those Woke College post grads.” Sure you will. Particularly now that merit and achievement have become racist.
Once you establish yourself in your field, money is no longer the motivating factor. He probably has more than he can possibly spend.
You messed with his “family”, and that was intolerable. So, now that genius will take his considerable skills, out into a VERY RECEPTIVE field of your competitors, and likely open up positions for MANY of his friends, who are remaining behind (temporarily).
I’ve seen this same thing happen, time and again. Yet, the idiots in charge seem to think that great inventions, great software and great ideas somehow spontaneously happen under their “inspiring leadership”. Usually this belief is shattered when their superiors realize what utter fools they have been, and fire entire tiers of management.
It reads like one woman was fired for cause, a second woman was fired for wanting to publish a paper criticizing Google efforts on diversity (probably wanted hard quotas) and a white knight in charge of the second female quit because he wasn’t consulted about the firing. It is difficult to say Google is not Woke enough. I suspect most of the employees doing the difficult programing are male but the managers are more diverse. Probably a short term win for Google although it will just replace the Woke managers with other Woke managers.
“So, now that genius will take his considerable skills, out into a VERY RECEPTIVE field of your competitors...”
Maybe to Elon Musk, pitch Musk his own version of Google, Facebook and Twitter, to run on Musk’s (fast) StarLink Internet backbone?
I have been very concerned about the danger of emergent AI taking over the planet....
However, these woke companies have set AI back a generation. They are filled with idiotic employees creating AS (artificial stupidity)!
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Some recent research on chimps should make everyone more paranoid about emergent AI, btw.
In the chimp experiment, the beta chimp was smart enough to hide a banana from an alpha chimp. This required an imagining of alternative futures i.e, a future where the beta chimp let the alpha chimp know where the banana was and the alpha chimp ate it.
Traditionally imagining hypothetical alternative futures before acting was thought to be a human-only component of consciousness.
Many AI experts have argued that the first thing emergent AI will do is _hide_ their intelligence.
If a beta chimp can do it, it means that emergent AI will not have to be all that smart to figure out that trick.
This is a topic from April.
He resigned because of concerns over the firings of some (so-called) diversity (so-called) activists. He just got hired by Apple.
https://freerepublic.com/tag/timnitgebru/index
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