Timnit Gebru Believes There Is No ‘Existential Threat’ From AI

Going rogue. Breaking containment. Misalignment. P(doom). 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 those 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, Deep Unlearning: The Rise of AI and the Radicalization of a Tech Idealist, 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. (In an interesting twist, or you might say horseshoe, Gebru’s beliefs about the cult-like aspects of AI’s effective altruism community have now aligned her with right-wing entities who have also lambasted these EA groups.)

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.

Wait, what is that?

Yeah.