Share this page!

Smerity Profile picture
Twitter logo
Nov 6, 2019 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
In Dec 2016 Uber started taking _paid rides_ in _self driving cars_ without even filing for an autonomous testing permit in CA. That first day in SF it blew multiple red lights and had disengagement numbers hundreds of times worse than other companies.
Less than two years later, Uber having upped and left San Francisco due to their egregious behaviour, their self driving car killed someone. I collected why, in a thread, I had zero faith in their ability to safely execute and their checkered past.
Today: National Safety Transportation Board (NTSB) noted the system "did not include a consideration for jaywalking pedestrians". Elaine Herzberg was classified as a flurry of objects {other, bike, vehicle, ...} 5.6 seconds before impact.
theregister.co.uk/2019/11/06/ube…
The system, even with this ambiguity, doesn't decide to slow / a path of action until 1.2 seconds before impact when it's far too late. There is no buffer for good will here. There were continued demonstrations of incompetence and carelessness, obstruction and arrogance.
Back to Dec 2016, after Uber's horrific debut in SF, @dougducey of Arizona's statement:
"While California puts the brakes on innovation and change with more bureaucracy and more regulation, Arizona is paving the way for new technology and new businesses."
Self driving is the clearest example of unchecked large scale public experiments in machine learning but it's not alone.
Medicine, justice, education, recruitment, ...
How many have omissions of logic as unforgivable as "forgetting jaywalkers" yet will never see proper scrutiny?
On finishing this thread I re-open the feed to decompress and what do I see? A company threatening to sue researchers who found flaws in their breath testing system.
This is the default state of the world.
Our bureaucratic and legal dystopia.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
　

Keep Current with Smerity

Smerity Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @Smerity

Smerity Profile picture
Nov 7, 2019
For those in the language modeling space, a question regarding perplexity as a metric with varying tokenization:
- Is there a hard proof showing for a dataset D being tokenized using A and B that the perplexity is equivalent?
- Does that proof take into account teacher forcing?
I ask as I have never seen a proof and always assumed smarter people than myself had thought about it. Intuitively I felt it reasonable until I recently began pondering over the teacher forcing aspect which is essentially giving your model supervision, including at test time.
Imagine you had the task of language modeling:
"Bob and Alice were fighting for first place but who won? [predict: Bob or Alice]"
The claim is that the language model's perplexity (confusion) should be equal regardless of how we split the text.
Read 8 tweets
Smerity Profile picture
Sep 19, 2019
Deep learning training tip that I realized I do but never learned from anyone - when tweaking your model for improving gradient flow / speed to converge, keep the exact same random seed (hyperparameters and weight initializations) and only modify the model interactions.
- Your model runs will have the exact same perplexity spikes (hits confusing data at the same time)
- You can compare timestamp / batch results in early training as a pseudo-estimate of convergence
- Improved gradient flow visibly helps the same init do better
Important to change out the random seed occasionally when you think you've isolated progress but minimizing noise during experimentation is OP. You're already dealing with millions of parameters and billions of calculations. You don't need any more confusion in the process.
Read 5 tweets
Smerity Profile picture
Sep 1, 2019
I'm incredibly proud that the low compute / low resource AWD-LSTM and QRNN that I helped develop at @SFResearch live on as first class architectures in the @fastdotai community :)
I think the community has become blind in the BERT / Attention Is All You Need era. If you think a singular architecture is the best, for whatever metric you're focused on, remind yourself of the recent history of model architecture evolution.
Whilst pretrained weights can be an advantage it also ties you to someone else's whims. Did they train on a dataset that fits your task? Was your task ever intended? Did their setup have idiosyncrasies that might bite you? Will you hit a finetuning progress dead end?
Read 13 tweets
Smerity Profile picture
Aug 21, 2019
A brilliant article with insights from @emilymbender, @sarahbmyers (@AINowInstitute), and more. But taking a step back:
As an NLP researcher, I'm asking what the freaking hell is anyone doing grading student essays with automated tools that I'd not trust on my academic datasets?
In 18 states "only a small percentage of students’ essays ... will be randomly selected for a human grader to double check the machine’s work".
In writing you're tasked with speaking to and convincing an audience through a complex, lossy, and fluid medium: language.
Guess what NLP is still bad at? Even if the marks aren't determining your life (!) the feedback you receive will be beyond useless. You're not having a conversation with a human. You're not convincing them. You're at best tricking a machine. A likely terribly ineffective machine.
Read 9 tweets
Smerity Profile picture
Jul 22, 2019
What is OpenAI? I don't know anymore.
A non-profit that leveraged good will whilst silently giving out equity for years prepping a shift to for-profit that is now seeking to license closed tech through a third party by segmenting tech under a banner of pre/post "AGI" technology?
The non-profit/for-profit/investor partnership is held together by a set of legal documents that are entirely novel (=bad term in legal docs), are non-public + unclear, have no case precedence, yet promise to wed operation to a vague (and already re-interpreted) OpenAI Charter.
The claim is that AGI needs to be carefully and collaboratively guided into existence yet the output of almost every other existing commercial lab is more open. OpenAI runs a closed ecosystem where they primarily don't or won't trust outside of a small bubble.
Read 8 tweets
Smerity Profile picture
Apr 26, 2019
This is such an extreme outlier I'm ready to believe that a nation state actor may have an expert AI team* reverse engineering and gaming social graphs and recommendation algorithms at scale silently.
* Asymmetric black hat research (see below) and/or StuxNet level competent
1/N
It's quite possible for machine learning to have exploits as fundamentally severe and retrospectively obvious as the NSA's 13+ year head start in differential cryptography. White hat research is a terrible proxy for black hat research - especially for AI.
Our social media companies have issues:
- Most social media companies aren't yet competent at blocking even obvious issues let alone adversarial
- There's little to no transparency for good actors (researchers, journalists, ...)
- Profit motives above all
Read 11 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!

This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

Like this author's thread?

Get emails when @Smerity has new unrolls!

Check out other threads from @Smerity!

Read all threads by @Smerity

:(