Timnit Gebru Believes There Is No'Existential Threat' From AI One of AI's fiercest critics believes the doom talk is about founders making money, not saving humanity. As the industry booms, an entirely new vernacular has emerged in the debates over how consequential artificial intelligence really is. Within that new parlance, two phrases have become focal points: stochastic parrots and existential risk . And at the center of is one prominent AI researcher who has never stood down from a fight, Timnit Gebru . Gebru came into the public eye several years ago after sparring with Google over a research paper she coauthored that called out biases in the company's AI, saying that LLMs basically parroted their training data and risked perpetuating biased viewpoints. The contested paper resulted in Gebru's departure from the company, and led her to found an institute that investigates harms perpetuated by technology and supports the creation of unbiased tech tools. She has also authored a new book,, expected to ship early next year. More recently, Gebru has spoken out against a faction of the industry that believes AI is so powerful it could destroy humanity. In turn, some members of that community, including an Anthropic cofounder, have alleged that Gebru's earlier research about stochastic parrots is no longer relevant, and that AI does have the ability to "think" or reason. The AI debate is no longer just about the technology itself, but about ideological groups and strategic narratives, and Gebru believes these narratives are a "harmful distraction" from the real issues with AI. I recently spoke with Gebru about what she believes these arguments are distracting from, and also got her response to critiques that her earlier research underestimates the AI of today.

Women hold some of the most consequential jobs in tech, but they're still not cult figures. Mira Murati was trying to speak. Giant piles of carved meat rested like sleeping babies on banquet tables draped in linens as red as a handmaid's robe. Bartenders served up a cocktail named Zero to One, a nod to the philosophy of Peter Thiel. It was a recent Saturday night in a converted church in San Francisco, and the Foundation for American Innovation, a center-right think tank, was hosting a black-tie affair to hype the new religion of AI. Murati, the founder and CEO of Thinking Machines Lab, was talking about the history of revolutions to a crowd of more than 350 people. The Albanian-born executive had for several years kept a relatively low profile as a VP and then CTO of OpenAI before participating in an unsuccessful coup against Sam Altman and then launching her own $12 billion AI startup. Now, with chatter bouncing off the church walls, Murati's efforts to get her points across were about as successful as that coup: No one seemed to be listening. The woman interviewing Murati asked more than once for people to stop talking or take their conversations outside. I whispered to the friend sitting next to me that this was the second time in a week that I'd seen a woman getting drowned out. Both of us were there to actually hear what Murati had to say. I tried to restrain myself from what I said next, but I sensed my friend was holding back too. "Her hair is amazing, though," I hissed. "Oh my God, I know," she replied immediately. Soon after, President Donald Trump's top science adviser, Michael Kratsios, took the stage.

One of AI's Fiercest Critics Says All the Doom Talk Is'Meant to Distract Us' Timnit Gebru argues that AI companies are stoking fears of extinction to avoid discussing actual harms, like autonomous weapons. Here at WIRED we've been trying to make sense of at least two incidents in the AI industry this week: First, the major fight over a million-dollar math problem and whether OpenAI surreptitiously borrowed the work of other researchers to solve the problem first. A day later, an Anthropic researcher--who had previously worked at OpenAI--very publicly quit his job, citing concerns about how both companies were handling AI safety. Another technical staffer at Anthropic said in response that people at the company "really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade."

Miliaku Nwabueze, a senior program manager at Code for Science & Society, had been concerned for some time about the role of technology in state violence. Then, on 7 October of last year, Hamas entered Israel, killing and kidnapping about 1,400 people. Less than a week later, as Israel ordered 1.1 million Palestinians out of northern Gaza in the onset of its deadly retaliation, Nwabueze decided to write a message to her colleagues on the US-based non-profit organization's Slack channel. "Hey y'all … I have been watching multiple genocides around the world," she began, naming Palestine as well as Sudan, the Congo and Artsakh. "All of these have heavy linkages to the tech industry." The 30-year-old went on to assert that CS&S – whose stated mission is to "advance the power of data to improve the social and economic lives of all people" – should say, at the minimum, "we support demands for a ceasefire" in Gaza.

This article aims to demonstrate how the approach to computing is being disrupted by deep learning (artificial neural networks), not only in terms of techniques but also in our interactions with machines. It also addresses the philosophical tradition of hermeneutics (Don Ihde, Wilhelm Dilthey) to highlight a parallel with this movement and to demystify the idea of human-like AI.

Popular artificial intelligence tools are becoming more covertly racist as they advance, says an alarming new report. A team of technology and linguistics researchers revealed this week that large language models like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini hold racist stereotypes about speakers of African American Vernacular English, or AAVE, an English dialect created and spoken by Black Americans. "We know that these technologies are really commonly used by companies to do tasks like screening job applicants," said Valentin Hoffman, a researcher at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and co-author of the recent paper, published this week in arXiv, an open-access research archive from Cornell University. Hoffman explained that previously researchers "only really looked at what overt racial biases these technologies might hold" and never "examined how these AI systems react to less overt markers of race, like dialect differences". Black people who use AAVE in speech, the paper says, "are known to experience racial discrimination in a wide range of contexts, including education, employment, housing, and legal outcomes". Hoffman and his colleagues asked the AI models to assess the intelligence and employability of people who speak using AAVE compared to people who speak using what they dub "standard American English".

The older Sefala became, the more she peppered her father with questions about the visible racial segregation of their neighborhood: "Why is it like this?" Now, at 28, she is helping do something about it. Alongside computer scientists Nyalleng Moorosi and Timnit Gebru at the nonprofit Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), which Gebru set up in 2021, she is deploying computer vision tools and satellite images to analyze the impacts of racial segregation in housing, with the ultimate hope that their work will help to reverse it. "We still see previously marginalized communities' lives not improving," says Sefala. Though she was never alive during the apartheid regime, she has still been affected by its awful enduring legacy: "It's just very unequal, very frustrating." In South Africa, the government census categorizes both wealthier suburbs and townships, a creation of apartheid and typically populated by Black people, as "formal residential neighborhoods."

Earlier this month, OpenAI's board abruptly fired its popular CEO, Sam Altman. The ouster shocked the tech world and rankled Altman's loyal employees, the vast majority of whom threatened to quit unless their boss was reinstated. After a chaotic five-day exile, Altman got his old job back--with a reconfigured, all-male board overseeing him, led by ex-Salesforce CEO and former Twitter board chair Bret Taylor. Right now, only three people sit on this provisional OpenAI board. Immediately prior to the failed coup, there were six.

The secret to making AI chatbots sound smart and spew less toxic nonsense is to use a technique called reinforcement learning from human feedback, which uses input from people to improve the model's answers. It relies on a small army of human data annotators who evaluate whether a string of text makes sense and sounds fluent and natural. They decide whether a response should be kept in the AI model's database or removed. Even the most impressive AI chatbots require thousands of human work hours to behave in a way their creators want them to, and even then they do it unreliably. The work can be brutal and upsetting, as we will hear this week when the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT) gets underway.

'It feels like a gold rush," says Timnit Gebru. "In fact, it is a gold rush. And a lot of the people who are making money are not the people actually in the midst of it. But it's humans who decide whether all this should be done or not. We should remember that we have the agency to do that." Gebru is talking about her specialised field: artificial intelligence. On the day we speak via a video call, she is in Kigali, Rwanda, preparing to host a workshop and chair a panel at an international conference on AI. It will address the huge growth in AI's capabilities, as well as something that the frenzied conversation about AI misses out: the fact that many of its systems may well be built on a huge mess of biases, inequalities and imbalances of power. This gathering, the clunkily titled International Conference on Learning Representations, marks the first time people in the field have come together in an African country – which makes a powerful point about big tech's neglect of the global south. When Gebru talks about the way that AI "impacts people all over the world and they don't get to have a say on how they should shape it", the issue is thrown into even sharper relief by her backstory. In her teens, Gebru was a refugee from the war between Ethiopia, where she grew up, and Eritrea, where her parents were born. After a year in Ireland, she made it to the outskirts of Boston, Massachusetts, and from there to Stanford University in northern California, which opened the way to a career at the cutting edge of the computing industry: Apple, then Microsoft, followed by Google. But in late 2020, her work at Google came to a sudden end. As the co-leader of Google's small ethical AI team, Gebru was one of the authors of an academic paper that warned about the kind of AI that is increasingly built into our lives, taking internet searches and user recommendations to apparently new levels of sophistication and threatening to master such human talents as writing, composing music and analysing images. The clear danger, the paper said, is that such supposed "intelligence" is based on huge data sets that "overrepresent hegemonic viewpoints and encode biases potentially damaging to marginalised populations". Put more bluntly, AI threatens to deepen the dominance of a way of thinking that is white, male, comparatively affluent and focused on the US and Europe. In response, senior managers at Google demanded that Gebru either withdraw the paper, or take her name and those of her colleagues off it. This triggered a run of events that led to her departure. Google says she resigned; Gebru insists that she was fired. What all this told her, she says, is that big tech is consumed by a drive to develop AI and "you don't want someone like me who's going to get in your way.