Blackest Black

They didn't want a woman in the office because women are "too emotional," so instead, they elected a 79 year-old felon, rapist, pedophile with dementia instead.

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. Her name is 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. And it was the reason Google decided that one of the most senior Black women in AI research could no longer work there. The story Google told publicly was that she resigned. The story she told, confirmed by 2,695 of her colleagues in an open letter, was that she was fired by email while on vacation because she refused to either retract the paper or remove her name from it. The paper had not even been published yet. Here is what she actually wrote, and why every prediction inside it has now come true. The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and 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. The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints and underrepresentation of marginalized ones. The models would not just absorb this bias. They would amplify it, because the optimization process rewards confident outputs, and confidence in language patterns tracks frequency in the training set. The prediction was that hiring tools built on these models would discriminate against women. That healthcare triage tools would underperform on Black patients. That loan approval systems would entrench inequality while presenting their decisions as neutral algorithmic judgment. Every one of those things has now been documented in deployment. Amazon's hiring algorithm penalized resumes that contained the word "women" in any context. Healthcare risk scoring algorithms used by major US hospitals were found to systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients. Apple Card's credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands for the same financial profile. The third warning was about environmental cost. The paper calculated that training a single large language model produced emissions equivalent to the lifetime output of 5 cars. The prediction was that the race to scale would create an environmental footprint that would eventually rival entire industries. In 2024, Google's emissions were up 48% from 2019, and the company explicitly blamed AI infrastructure. Microsoft's were up 29%, same reason. Both companies have now quietly abandoned the climate commitments they were publicly celebrating the year Gebru was fired. The fourth warning was about documentation. The paper argued that the training datasets being assembled were too large for anyone to actually audit. Nobody at Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any other lab could tell you with confidence what was in the data their models were trained on. This was not a temporary problem to be solved later. It was a permanent feature of the approach. In 2023, researchers discovered that the LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and other major image models, contained thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. The companies that had trained on the dataset had no way of knowing. The paper predicted that category of failure 3 years before it was found. The fifth warning was the one Google cared about most. Bender and Gebru argued that the deployment of these systems would centralize linguistic and cultural power in the hands of the small number of companies that could afford to train them. The internet would become a place where the dominant voice was a statistical average of dominant voices, presented as a neutral assistant. Languages underrepresented in the training data would degrade over time as more web content was generated by these systems and fed back into the next training run. This is now happening in real time. A 2024 study found that 57% of new web content in English is AI-generated or AI-assisted. Researchers studying low-resource languages have documented active degradation in translation quality, because the synthetic content fed back into training is itself worse in those languages. The paper Google fired her for predicted the model collapse problem before model collapse had a name. The mechanism behind why this all happened is the part of her work that nobody quotes. Gebru's argument was not that AI is dangerous in some abstract sci-fi sense. Her argument was that AI is dangerous in a very specific structural sense. The technology was being built by a small group of researchers who shared similar backgrounds, worked at similar companies, and were rewarded for shipping products faster than competitors. The incentive structure made it impossible for safety, ethics, and bias concerns to slow anything down. Anyone inside the system who raised those concerns was either ignored, sidelined, or removed. She was making that argument from inside Google. Then Google proved her right by removing her. The team Google had built to make sure their AI was safe was dismantled in 90 days because they did the job they had been hired to do. Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI team, was fired two months after Gebru for searching through her own emails for evidence of how Gebru had been treated. Gebru did not stop. She founded DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute, in 2021. The mission is to do AI research outside the control of the companies that have a financial interest in not hearing the answers. Every prediction in the Stochastic Parrots paper has now been validated by deployment. Hallucinations are an industry-wide problem the largest labs cannot solve. Bias amplification has been documented in hiring, healthcare, lending, and criminal justice. Environmental costs are larger than entire small countries. Training data audits remain impossible. Model collapse is an active research crisis at every major lab. The question worth sitting with is the one almost no one in the industry will say out loud. Every researcher with the technical credibility to call out these problems watched what happened to her in December 2020 and made a calculation about their own career. The number of people willing to speak publicly about safety and ethics issues inside the major AI labs collapsed after that firing and has not recovered. The researcher Google fired for warning about exactly what is now happening was right. The company that fired her is now the second-largest deployer of the technology she warned about. And the people inside that company who agree with her are not allowed to say so.

Today is a good day to remember that Israel has never won the Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology. Strange for a country that claims to lead the world in the discipline.

I stay up for an hour. I am surprise how quiet my neighbour gets after 9:00 pm.

@Queen_primis The fact she had to follow him pretty much solidifies why he needed an hour to himself.

Gmail really played the long game with that storage subscription fee

If your company strategy /turnaround is premised on cost cutting and not revenue growth .. Then I’ve got news for you ..

Hawa wako Kangemi police post wansema wametoka Kayole Nyamavilla spread the message, maybe the parent ata ona kwa timeline yako.

Lowkey wanna see AI crash the same way NFTs did 😭

Have you watched that Al jazeera documentary exposing how safaricom is selling private citizens data with government even without a warrant signed by the judge. Safaricom!

Hello Nyakundi, Please hide my identity. I am a staff member at Artcaffé, and we are really suffering under the current management conditions at the branch. First, last week our PHs, off days, and leave days were deducted simply because of the matatu strike, something that was completely beyond our control as employees. It is unfair for management to punish staff for a nationwide transport crisis that affected everyone. Secondly, the transport situation for staff working late shifts is becoming dangerous. Imagine the staff van arriving at the branch around 1:40 AM, then dropping employees along the highway at around 2 AM and leaving everyone to figure out how to get home safely on their own. This is not secure at all, especially for staff members going home at such hours. The worst issue is the “FUNGA FUNGUA” shifts. Right now it is around 3 AM and I have just come from the PM shift, yet I am expected to wake up again at 4 AM to prepare and report back to work. We barely get any sleep. You enter the next shift already exhausted and sleepy, which is extremely risky especially in a busy restaurant environment where mistakes and accidents can easily happen because of fatigue. We are mentally and physically drained. Some of us cannot even sleep properly because by the time you reach home, it is already time to prepare for the next shift again. This is not healthy and it is affecting staff wellbeing badly. Another major issue is staff meals. There is no proper breakfast and sometimes no lunch at all, yet employees are expected to work long exhausting hours. Nobody seems concerned about staff welfare anymore. Please let this reach HR because workers are really suffering. We are asking management to listen to staff concerns and improve these working conditions before things get worse.

@mwende_kyalo_ The word Kyuk was a slur and settles used to go out to hunt down and lynch random blacks in the name of hunting Kyuks.

This is exactly how Africans started beating their children. Before colonisation, most communities only had physical punishment for adults. Not kids. But colonisation changed the stakes. A wondering child could be shot by colonialists. So beat the kids to keep them alive

Al Jazeera destroyed Ruto government mbaya Sana yesterday. That surveillance state documentary showed the evil side of this regime.

My old company did a “culture audit” and hired an outside firm to interview employees. We were told to be honest. Three people who were too honest got managed out within 6 months. The audit results were never shared.

The idea that elections will be rigged no matter what is designed to create voter apathy. Shika Kura na upige Kura. Wantam ni wantam.

A functioning democracy requires citizens who question power, not worship it.

There were 11 assassination plots against Obama that never got close to him because his FBI director wasn't a cross-eyed blackout drunk flying his girlfriend around on the government jet to shitty country music concerts

Maybe Lupita is a really good choice for Helen of Troy. All I’ve seen is men fighting about her...

@techdocpcu @droid254 I don't even understand it well enough to want to look past the noise. I will find it and figure it out because nothing she says give clarity about it.

@Oichuk @droid254 Have you used the product ? I downloaded the app and it did not have login with google. Had to uninstall.

She lost me at invented new physics theory

Mathee ashai kosana na mzae akaenda. Almost 2 weeks hatukuwahi Oga... Alirudu akapata tunakunywa Sodas na Chipo daily ni ka tulimsahau😂😂😂