Yeah, that Lecun argument was a really bad first impression of her from me. I guess she found out life isn't Twitter and you can't just go around telling everyone they are bad and wrong without consequences.
I'd even go one step further and bet that her whole career plan is ML activism. If you scan the email, all the key words are in there. Textbook agitprop.
I feel sorry for the next company that will hire her.
Rude, maybe but not very. Dismissal, yes. The belief that AI should learn reality as it exists and not some ideologically purified version of it is a completely rational one, and dismissing the "work" of those so-called "ethicists" is no more problematic than dismissing the "work" of the Chinese censors who purify the Chinese internet. Indeed being dismissive of that work is to be praised, as it shouldn't exist at all.
Well, read any AI bias paper. Facts about reality these models capture and which are considered problematic include stuff like "doctors are more often men and nurses are more often women" or "most people on the internet are white" or "most stuff on the internet is written in English". Basically the internet is mostly built by westerners and any facet of that gets classed as "bias" rather than being what it is: the truth.
Even trivial facts like in English "men chuckle, women giggle" has been used as examples of bias. That's not bias though, that's just how the English language works.
What politically uncomfortable regularities are those? Please name the specific uncomfortable true facts about reality that you think these models are capturing.
