Yann LeCun quits Twitter amid acrimonious exchanges on AI bias
I think one issue here is that Twitter makes it hard to have good conversations because it motivates people to optimize for pithiness and likeability&#x2F;retweetability over substance.<p>That said, I&#x27;m disappointed at the lack of professionalism shown by Timnit Gebru in this conversation. I understand that she&#x27;s frustrated that mainstream AI&#x2F;ML research doesn&#x27;t have a good understanding of how models can reflect and reinforce systemic racism. But her response to Yann doesn&#x27;t attempt to find common ground, doesn&#x27;t add any meaningful facts to the conversation, and is ad-hominem (&quot;why are YOU too dumb to understand this?&quot;). Timnit is a Research Scientist at Google who leads a group that works on Ethical AI. In that role I&#x27;d expect that her mission would be to elevate the collective understanding of ethical problems in AI, and solutions to those problems. Her communication here doesn&#x27;t achieve that.<p>This is important to me because I&#x27;m also a (fledgling) member of the AI&#x2F;ML community, and I want us to be able to have civil and constructive conversations.