How Google's 2021 AI ethics debate foreshadowed the future

"The Stochastic Parrots paper was pretty prescient, insofar as it definitely pointed out a lot of issues that we're still working through now," Alex Hanna, a former member of Google's AI ethics team who is now director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute founded by Gebru, told us. Since the paper's publication, buzz and debate about LLMs--one of the biggest AI advances in recent years--have gripped the tech industry and the business world at large. The generative AI sector raised $1.4 billion last year alone, according to Pitchbook data, and that doesn't include the two megadeals that opened this year between Microsoft and OpenAI and Google and Anthropic.