"Control, therefore, is not solely achieved through the possession of infrastructure or capital, but through the ability to define what is compliant, certifiable, and permissible to circulate, and what becomes too risky or too costly to maintain. Regulation ceases to be a mere legal framework for a technology of power."
If you want to know what happens to those who question the new Gods, let me introduce you to Timnit Gebru.. She co-led the Ethical AI team at Google. She co-wrote a paper called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" with Emily Bender at the University of Washington and two other researchers. The paper was 14 pages long. It was submitted to a top AI ethics conference.
Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about. Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. They called these systems stochastic parrots because they would repeat patterns from training data with statistical confidence and zero comprehension. The paper predicted that this apparent intelligence would fool both users and developers into trusting outputs that were structurally incapable of being reliable.
This was 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. The paper predicted the hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it.
She told the story to the Guardian two years ago. She was still young and understood how devastating it is to be a double DEI (woman and black) I attended "
And she move on . After her departure, Gebru founded Dair, the Distributed AI Research Institute, to which she now devotes her working time. “We have people in the US and the EU, and in Africa,” she says. “We have social scientists, computer scientists, engineers, refugee advocates, labour organisers, activists … it’s a mix of people.”, the double DEI's, the triple DEI's, the White "antifada" all those want to apply science without politics.
Her firing is a warning for all consultants who are hired to participate to an "exciting project which will save humanity". Always keep in mind you are not a participant but an "employee". an orange to press and disposed of. When speaking about his plans for Voltaire (the philosopher invited at his table) King Frederick the Great of Prussia reportedly told an associate: "One squeezes the orange and throws away the rind".