alt Hacker NewsJeff Dean liquidated Google's entire AI ethics team because they wouldn't revise an academic publication to align with the corporate PR spin on AI.
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You mean he fired one person who threatened to quit if the changes to the paper weren't to their liking? Or am I misremembering?
As far as I can tell, no one seems to think much of value was lost.
That incident was the first time I ever heard of Jeff Dean and remains the main thing I associate him with.
I'm having trouble following what exactly this means.
So Jeff wanted the team to modify an existing publication to fit the PR spin on AI, the ethics team refused, and Jeff dissolved the team?
reading about this incident years later, i gotta say, dang Gebru was right on a lot of things
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-a...
Just another Jeff Dean optimizing out unneeded code story.
This is overstating it by a lot. Jeff was the AI lead at the time, and there was a big conflict between management and the ethics team
And I actually think Google needs to pay more attention to AI ethics ... but it's a publically traded company and the incentives are all wrong -- i.e. it's going to do whatever it needs to do keep up with the competition, similar to what happened with Google+ (perceived competition from Facebook)