4 Mar 2023

AI ethicist Timnit Gebru: why we can't trust Silicon Valley

From Saturday Morning, 10:06 am on 4 March 2023
Timnit Gebru

Timnit Gebru Photo: DAIR

In the race to create and release Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools, are Silicon Valley companies such as OpenAI failing to fully consider the consequences of their work?  

The speed of development in the field is dizzying, with new tools such as ChatGPT and DALL·E offering a sneak peek at the potential of AI to work for us.

Ethiopian born US computer scientist Dr Timnit Gebru is a leading researcher on the ethics of artificial intelligence.

Google hired Dr Gebru to co-lead its Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team, but then fired her in 2020 after she co-wrote an article questioning the dangers of the large language AI models the company was developing.

In 2021 she founded the nonprofit Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR). The following year Time magazine named her one of its "100 most influential people".

The Google twitter feed is seen with an announcement for their upcoming Bard AI-powered search engine in this photo illustration in Warsaw, Poland on 09 February, 2023. Google on Monday announced the development of its own OpenAI ChatGPT competitor called Bard after Microsoft last week announced the indroduction of AI assisted search for its Bing search engine. (Photo by Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto) (Photo by Jaap Arriens / NurPhoto / NurPhoto via AFP)

Photo: JAAP ARRIENS