Google AI scientist Samy Bengio resigns

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-google-research-bengio/google-ai-scientist-bengio-resigns-after-colleagues-firings-email-idUSKBN2BT2JT

by Anon84 • 5 years ago

101 83 5 years ago

reuters.com

rahimnathwani4• 5 years ago

The word 'after' in the title suggests the two events are linked.

But the email excerpts quoted in article do not support that conclusion.

breakfastduck• 5 years ago

We must have read a different article.

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.

From his email:

"how difficult yet important it is to organize a large team of researchers so as to promote long term ambitious research, exploration, rigor, diversity and inclusion"

rahimnathwani4• 5 years ago

"We must have read a different article."

No need for sarcasm.

This article says that "He did not mention their firings in his farewell note.".

newnamenewface• 5 years ago

This title should be amended to eliminate the (imo) implication that he did so as a result of the firings.

"He did not mention their firings in his farewell note."

karaterobot• 5 years ago

This is a great example of the "post hoc ergo propter hoc" fallacy, caught in the wild!

It may very well be the case, that his leaving is related to his colleagues being fired, but there's no evidence of it in the article. So Reuters should not be strongly implying — to the extent that no reader would likely draw any other conclusion — that it is. I mean, it probably is, let's be honest, but I kind of expect better from Reuters.

coding123• 5 years ago

Well he did do it after.

The article mentions multiple links and things he said.

ska• 5 years ago

but there's no evidence of it in the article.

That's not quite correct, but true that the evidence presented is weak (e.g. anonymous "sources familiar")

whymauri• 5 years ago

IMO, would also be helpful to have the first name since there's Yoshua Bengio.

partingshots• 5 years ago

It was most likely done on purpose unfortunately.

jjulius4• 5 years ago

In the interest of eliminating implications, you included a period at the end of that quote, which suggests there's nothing else to that statement. In point of fact, the full sentence is:

"Though he did not mention the firings in his farewell note, they influenced his decision to resign, people familiar with the matter said, speaking on condition of anonymity."

A farewell note is a formality for many people. I'd wager, given that this article discusses his previous statements on the matter, the firings did influence his decision. Having said that, it seems that he's departing as professionally as he possibly can, without blowing things up on the way out. Prospective employers won't have to be afraid of him making a scene even if he disagrees with them.

refenestrator2• 5 years ago

I would really like to hope that "people familiar with the matter" means Bengio off the record, and not some non-Bengio person with an axe to grind... impossible to know, I guess.

rahimnathwani4• 5 years ago

That sentence was added to the article after GP's comment. You can see the original sentence, with the period, here: https://web.archive.org/web/20210406202729/https://www.reute...

The_Other_David• 5 years ago

I think most people would consider it to be highly inappropriate to air grievances with the company or with individuals as a part of a semi-public farewell letter, even if you are DEFINITELY leaving for a VERY SPECIFIC reason.

jjulius4• 5 years ago

Correct, and I think it's a very common thing for people to opt not to burn those bridges if they can help it. Who among us hasn't played the whole, "Thanks [company], I've really loved my time here," bit and smiled on the way out while simultaneously thinking, "Fuck this place entirely"?

gennarro• 5 years ago

I always find this sort of news confusing and completely lacking in context. I gather this person was a high level manager, but presumably he was part of a very large team. So will this have a material impact on Google? On AI research in general? Or is this just news because it’s Google and that team has been in the news a lot lately. I honestly can’t tell and I feel like I’m the only one who is confused but reflecting on it, this seems unlikely.

ejb999• 5 years ago

nobody, and I mean nobody, is irreplaceable. anyone that thinks they are should see what actually happens in the hours and days after 'irreplaceable' people leave...somehow organizations manage to move forward. and within a week or two they are forgotten (with the possible exception of tiny teams).

lukevp• 5 years ago

I don’t think this is true, but I also don’t think most of us are irreplaceable. For example, Jim Keller seems to make or break chip design projects.

whatshisface• 5 years ago

You're thinking of people who think they are irreplaceable due to general intelligence. People who are unique due to knowledge of specific systems are much less easy to swap out. Money can buy general intelligence but specific domain/application knowledge is sometimes unavailable at any price.

bo1024• 5 years ago

I am reminded of the guy who noticed a nest of termites in one of his house's support beams and said, unworried, "No beam is irreplaceable."

rurban2• 5 years ago

You have apparently no idea how certain fields work. There are a lot of cases where a person stopped working on something, and then followed a 20 year complete stop of progress. Exceptional people are not replaceable. Putting a team in charge will just increase the damage.

Barrin92• 5 years ago

he's the cofounder of Google Brain and one of the original torch library authors, also brother of Yoshua Bengio.

throwaway293034• 5 years ago

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Jeff Dean is going to leave as well. Tick tock.

dontreact2• 5 years ago

What makes you say this? I'd be willing to take the opposite side of that bet.

throwaway293034• 5 years ago

If you follow the news in general there's been a concerted effort to remove white men from positions of power (with very few exceptions). And Google has been - for a while now - one of the poster children for this agenda.

Sundar Pichai, for instance, I believe, was chosen not just because of his browser endeavours' success, his background etc, but because he could help break into the indian market (remember that these tech companies have been eager to get into and dominate the Next Billion Users market [India, China, et al]). It was actually a smart move, IMHO.

Mark Zuckerberg is going to be a tough one to get rid of because he completely controls Facebook. But the media have been doing everything they can to get at him (privacy issues, etc). I mean, it's not that the media aren't right (about some of the issues I'm aware of), but it's the best play they can do at the moment. But this Facebook, or rather, social media and media fight is a whole 'nother and different story despite sharing some variables with this topic.

sp3322• 5 years ago

As impressive as Dean's technical skills are, there's a point where Google would be better off without him than without all the people who decided not to work for Google because of him.

ironrabbit2• 5 years ago

Are there lots of people who don't work at Google because of him? My impression is that he'd very well regarded in the tech community.

prepend4• 5 years ago

My impression is that many more people join Google to work with Dean than don’t join wanting to avoid him. Hard to measure though and be certain.

mam2• 5 years ago

"After the firing of google ethics researchers, i am going to pee"

This headlines are hairpulling the issue in every news.

nojs• 5 years ago

In case anyone else is confused, this isn’t Yoshua Bengio.

mwambua• 5 years ago

It's about Samy Bengio (who is Yoshua's brother and technically related). It is confusing though, and the title should be updated to avoid confusion.

jonas212• 5 years ago

Reporting by Paresh Dave and Jeffrey Dastin, additional reporting by Munsif Vengattil; Editing by Lisa Shumaker and Anil D’Silva

It's kind of incredible that at least 5 people at Reuters worked on this story, yet nobody stopped to think that this would be a confusing headline.

Or, if you want to be cynical, maybe they knew it would be confusing, but also that it would get more clicks...

aparsons• 5 years ago

Title should be edited to disambiguate

kragen2• 5 years ago

Can we fix this headline? The implication that Yoshua Bengio has resigned from Google is extremely misleading. (If you don't follow the field, the equivalent in politics would be something like "Biden calls for probe into Google" and it turns out it's not Joe Biden, the US president, but Ashley Biden, his daughter.)

fnord123• 5 years ago

Anyone who knows who Yoshua Bengio to the point that they would be confused would know that he does not work for Google and hence it would not be possible for him to resign from Google AI.

kragen2• 5 years ago

I assumed it was Yoshua Bengio, and I assumed Google had hired him without me knowing about it. There's a long gray area in the middle between "knows that X is a famous researcher in field Y" and "knows every time X changes jobs", and I am in that gray area with respect to not only Yoshua Bengio but actually at least two dozen AI researchers: Peter Norvig, Sebastian Thrun, Richard Greenblatt, Yann LeCun, Doug Lenat, Stuart Russell, and at least another score whose names aren't occurring to me off the top of my head but who I'd easily recognize.

So I am one of these people you are saying do not exist.

I suspect that actually the vast majority of people who know who Yoshua Bengio is at all are in this gray area with respect to X = yoshuabengio. That is, the people you are saying do not exist vastly outnumber the people who are confident that they are up to date on where Yoshua Bengio works.

xiphias2• 5 years ago

Thanks, I flagged it, as it mislead me.

I still haven't seen any improvement in AI ethics, even if the article tries to suggest it: we're getting much better models without any guarantees that they won't be misused to gain control of the world. Finding model bias is the easy part, as data is always biased.

himaraya• 5 years ago

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26715360

mycologos3• 5 years ago

I see that this is your previous submission, but is there any point in linking to a previous submission with 0 comments?

pumaontheprowl• 5 years ago

Why is this news? Google has dozens of people resign every day. Many of them for polar opposite reasons. If one person resigns because Youtube is censoring too much and another person resigns because Youtube isn't censoring enough, you can't report on only the latter to imply that Youtube's lack of censorship is unpopular with the workforce. This kind of reporting is just flat-out dishonest and manipulative.

ironrabbit2• 5 years ago

This is Samy Bengio, not a random google engineer. He's a founding member of Google Brain.

darepublic• 5 years ago

Is it confirmed he left due to the firing of the ethics researcher

musicale• 5 years ago

What I still don't understand is what the possible up side could be for a company telling a staff researcher to withdraw or not to submit a research paper, as long as it didn't compromise trade secrets, privacy, etc..

Were they trying to avoid negative publicity? That seems to have worked out well.

Or were they afraid of being sued?

prepend4• 5 years ago

what the possible up side could be for a company telling a staff researcher to withdraw or not to submit a research paper

My org has a big focus on scientific integrity and doesn’t want to put out inaccurate information. So the upside is reputational to have high quality scientific output.

I’d guess they may also want some sort of review for IP or trade secrets to make sure info is appropriate for release.

Finally, I’ve worked places where there is comms and branding review where the org wants all the right product names and stuff to line up.

rirarobo• 5 years ago

Let's review. Samy Bengio, co-founder of Google Brain and Google AI scientist of 14 years, unexpectedly resigns in the aftermath of Timnit Gebru and Margaret (Meg) Mitchell's firings. Gebru and Mitchell were the founders of Google's Ethical AI team, whose work on AI fairness was previously celebrated by Google AI leadership.

Furthermore, Samy Bengio was Timnit's direct manager, but was completely blindsided by Timnit's firing, saying "I was stunned by what just happened to Timnit Gebru, who was in my team until a few days ago ... I stand by you, Timnit". Timnit was notified of her termination by Megan Kacholia, the Vice President of Google Research, who has since been removed from overseeing the remaining members of the Ethical AI team.

Regarding the publication which precipitated Timnit's ousting, "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots ...", Samy Bengio granted publication approval for the submission. It was only after this approval that the Google Ethics AI researchers were told to rescind their names from the paper (they could not withdraw the paper entirely, since it was a collaboration with external academic researchers).

Mitchell was fired shortly thereafter for allegedly violating the company's code of conduct and security policies.

Now, only a few months after Gebru and Mitchell's firings, Samy Bengio has also resigned.

Considering the sequence of events reviewed above, it seems clear to me that Samy Bengio's resignation is directly the result of Google's mishandling of this situation. If Timnit had not been fired while away on vacation, and Google leadership had instead found a way to address her concerns, or even accept her resignation more tactfully, then this debacle would have never unfolded in this manner, and Samy Bengio would still be at Google.

I am not particularly surprised by Google's mishandling of this situation though, as it seems completely predictable and even cliche that such corporate behemoths often handle these situations in the most ham-handed ways.

What I do find astonishing is the willingness of some Hacker News commenters to read into Timnit's actions and motivations, often with the most negative interpretations, but when it comes to Samy Bengio's resignation, they seem completely unable to read between the lines, and instead raise their burden of proof, so that they can deny any connection between this chain of events. Resignation letters and company wide farewell emails almost never disclose the real reasons behind a departure. Just because Samy Bengio has not explicitly said something like, "I am resigning because I stand in solidarity with Timnit Gebru", does not mean that these events are not linked, despite the assertions of some comments in this thread. In fact, it's seems to me that one would need to willfully ignore the evidence so far to conclude that these events are not linked, at least to some degree.

mycologos3• 5 years ago

Bengio and Gebru have very different public personas -- Bengio doesn't seem to have any Twitter presence at all -- and I think HN is a lot more likely to give the benefit of the doubt to somebody who relatively silently does ML research than to give benefit of the doubt to somebody who is very actively confrontational (perhaps for good reason) on Twitter.

sudosysgen3• 5 years ago

You're using benefit of the doubt in a way that indicates that your conclusions are muddled by your personal beliefs on the matter.

Google AI scientist Samy Bengio resigns

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