Notices by Timnit Gebru (she/her) (timnitgebru@dair-community.social)

You gotta be kidding me with this bullshit.

"But DeepSeek & Meta’s recent research suggests that more AI capabilities (& efficiency savings) could be gained by going down a more dangerous path — where AIs develop their own alien language."

The journalists amplifying this garbage will not be held accountable when the hype cycle is gone because the next cycle of journalists will do the same thing during the next hype cycle.

I don't want to amplify the article so not posting the actual article.

"By connecting the dots between financial actors, privacy-violating technologies, and human rights impacts, we’re making the VC investments behind this abuse traceable and public, helping to drive a new standard of privacy-conscious due diligence in tech investments. As privacy violations in the Global Majority continue to impact human rights, legal liability will become a real concern."

@alshafei https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-fund/programs/vcs-will-face-their-privacy-reckoning-in-2025/

If you haven't checked out Surveillance Watch yet, I suggest you do so.

https://www.surveillancewatch.io/

OpenAI has to be the most insufferable company in the world. They can steal from the whole world and guzzle all possible resources. But no one can give them a taste of their own medicine even a little bit.

How long till they use this to say give us even more resources and this is why we can't release anything.

PS: Didn't OpenAI say if a competitor achieves "beneficial AGI" that they'll consider their mission accomplished 😂
https://www.ft.com/content/a0dfedd1-5255-4fa9-8ccc-1fe01de87ea6

Friends, for something to be open source, we need to see

1. The data it was trained and evaluated on

2. The code

3. The model architecture

4. The model weights.

DeepSeek only gives 3, 4. And I'll see the day that anyone gives us #1 without being forced to do so, because all of them are stealing data.

Friends, now might be a good time to revisit our Stochastic Parrots Day held in March 2023. You can find the recording of the session and additional resources on our website: https://www.dair-institute.org/stochastic-parrots-day/

@ozoned In retrospect they truly did.

@Teratogenese @mempko Honestly can't be interested in the stuff they're doing even w.r.t. it being fun and interesting. I was interested in designing circuits because it was like a puzzle. Algorithms were the same. Whatever this is that they're doing is like "what happens if we throw unlimited data and compute?"

@mempko I think its a combination.

At Google, I asked why they were fixated on building THE LARGEST model.

Why are you going for size?

What function are you trying to achieve?

Why is having THE LARGEST model the goal?

Why is the thing you were upset about that you didn't have THE LARGEST model?

They responded by firing me 🤷🏼

When I was at Google, I was asking WHY they were interested in building THE LARGEST model. Why?

Why were you going for size?

What function are you trying to achieve?

Why was the thing you were interested in having THE LARGEST model?

Why is the thing you were upset about that you didn't have THE LARGEST model at the time?

They responded by doing me the favor of firing me 🤷🏼

@mempko Here the academics themselves are in on the grift and misleading the public 😡

No one, and I mean NO ONE wanted to listen to us when we screamed at the top of our lungs that the emperor has no clothes...

Nothing else has taught me more about how propaganda works and spreads across these institutions, whether it is the Nobel Prize, the United Nations, all these governments and whatnot, and how the stock market is basically like gambling, as seeing how everyone treated OpenAI, Deepmind, and friends since their inception.

@shankarux "Artificial General Intelligence" they've even called it a "digital god" 🙄

What's interesting about algorithms?

The challenge of doing X with as few resources as possible (memory, etc).

What do OpenAI + friends do? The opposite.

"Lets assume we have unlimited resources & try to build a god."

No wonder they're losing their shit with the DeepSeek thing.

Addendum: whether DeepSeek or OpenAI, there's no such thing as AGI & attempting to build it results in harm: https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13636.

Don't make this into a "US vs China US has to win on AGI" thing please 🙄

“Torture and sexual abuses of conscripts are commonplace, according to Babiker’s office. One former prisoner…recalls how he was made to stand up to his ankles in scorching desert sand for hours at a time while in detention. He takes off his plastic sandals to reveal feet covered in blotchy red scars. Another describes being hog-tied in a stress position known as the “helicopter”. A third says he was beaten so severely he became blind in one eye.”

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/jan/20/eritrea-torture-terror-prisons-former-prisoners

@mbr I wish we weren’t so right. It is truly depressing.

Anyways...a little bit about the policies that many right wing political parties are pushing these days with regards to immigration.

Among those beheaded that day, 30 year old Tesfay Kidane. He fled Eritrea, and applied for asylum in Israel and was rejected. Israel keeps migrants like him in detention facilities, offering to let them out if they take up an offer & leave the country.

With no prospects, Tesfay decided to leave and try Libya. Israeli xenophobic migration policies sealed his fate.

The problem with #AI regulation is that it is regulation about AI. Not only because it regulates something as vague as the concept of AI, but also because it again compartmentalizes, diffuses and decontextualizes systemic problems into categories.

Why do you all think you can regulate the harms and risks of AI with laws that use exactly the same standardization methods and procedures? How come you criticize the thinking behind AI but ignore the thinking behind law?