“It’s All Marketing” – Dr. Timnit Gebru on the Smoke and Mirrors of AI Hype – Part I

Welcome to B The Way Forward Interludes – a series of conversations that don’t necessarily fit in our regular season, but are just too good to not share.

Heard something about AI Lately? Have those two letters shown up in just about every app you use – whether you want them to or not? Yeah. Same. These days, it seems like  you can’t go an hour without hearing that Artificial Intelligence is going to radically remake our world. But… is it? There’s so much hype it can be hard to really know what people even mean when they say AI. It  can’t all be ChatGPT helping you with cover letters and AI-generated images of the Balenciaga Pope, can it?

Dr. Timnit Gebru is one of the voices speaking loudly and honestly about AI outside of the Big Tech hype bubble. And she has the bonafides to back that up. Timnit holds a BA, Masters and a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Vision from Stanford. Plus, She co-led Google’s Ethical AI research team… until, in 2020, she and her co-lead sounded the alarm about the potential harms of large language models in a paper they titled “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big.” 

That paper led to an abrupt end to her time at Google. But Timnit hasn’t stopped working on how AI and Machine Learning can be developed in ways that serve all communities – most recently as the co-founder and Executive Director of DAIR.

In part 1 of our  2-part conversation, we talk about what AI is and isn’t, the difference between AI summers and AI winters, and why bigger isn’t always better when it comes to language Models.

For more, check out Timnit and her work…

On Bluesky – @timnitgebru.bsky.social‬

On Mastodon – @timnitGebru@dair-community.social

On LinkedIn – /timnit-gebru-7b3b407

On X – @timnitGebru

And read Timnit, and Emily M. Bender’s paper, ⁠“On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big.”⁠ 

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Our guests contribute to this podcast in their personal capacity. The views expressed in this interview are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology or its employees (“AnitaB.org”). AnitaB.org is not responsible for and does not verify the accuracy of the information provided in the podcast series. The primary purpose of this podcast is to educate and inform. This podcast series does not constitute legal or other professional advice or services.

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