Curious why there's so much emotion and unpleasantness in this dispute? How did it evolve from the boring academic argument about benchmarks, significance, etc to a battle of personal attacks?
This is a big part of the reason. But it behooves us to ask why a key innovation in a field (and I trust Jeff Dean that this is one, I’ve never seen any reason to doubt either his integrity or ability) should produce such a reaction. What could make people act not just chagrined that their approach wasn’t the end state, but as though it was existential to discredit such an innovation?
Surely all of the people who did the work that the innovation rests on should be confident they will be relevant, involved, comfortable, and safe in the post-innovation world?
And yet it’s not clear they should feel this way. Luddism seems an unfounded ideology over the scope of history since the origin of the term. But over the period since “AI” entered the public discussion at the current level? Almost two years exactly? Making the Luddite agenda credible has seemed a ubiquitous talking point.
Over that time frame technical people have been laid off in staggering numbers, a steadily-shrinking number of employers have been slashing headcount and posting EPS beats, and “AI” has been mentioned in every breath. It’s so extreme that even sophisticated knowledge of the kinds of subject matter that goes into AlphaChip is (allegedly) useless without access to the Hopper FLOPs.
If the AI Cartel was a little less rapacious, people might be a little more open to embracing the AI revolution.
Making extraordinary claims without a way to replicate it. And then running to the press, which will swallow anything. Because "AI designs AI... umm... I mean chips" sounds futuristic to a liberal-arts majors (and apparently programmers too, which I'd expect to know better and question everything "AI")
The whole publication process seems dishonest, starting from publishing in Nature (why not ISCCC or something similar?)
The issue is that Big Tech commercial incentives around AI have polluted the “boring academic” waters with dishonest infomercials masquerading as journal articles or arXiv preprints[1], and as a direct result contemporary AI research has a much worse “replication crisis” than the social sciences, yet with far fewer legitimate excuses.
Assuming Google isn’t lying, a lot of controversy would go away if they actually released their benchmark data for independent people to look at. They are still refusing to do so: https://cacm.acm.org/news/updates-spark-uproar/ Google thinks we should simply accept their conclusions by fiat. And don’t forget about this:
Madden further pointed out that the “30 to 35%” advantage of RePlAce was consistent with findings reported in a leaked paper by internal Google whistleblower Satrajit Chatterjee, an engineer who Google fired in 2022 when he first tried to publish the paper that discredited the “superhuman” claims Google was making at the time for its AI approach to chip design.
It is entirely appropriate to make “personal attacks” against Jeff Dean, because the heart of the criticism is that his personality is dishonest and authoritarian: he publishes suspicious research and fires people who dissent.
[1] Jeff Dean hypocritically sneering about the critique being a conference paper is especially galling. What an unbelievable asshole.
