Timnit Gebru
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timnitgebru.bsky.social
Timnit Gebru
@timnitgebru.bsky.social
30K followers 800 following 950 posts

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Founder: The Distributed AI Research Institute @dairinstitute.bsky.social.

Author: The View from Somewhere, a memoir & manifesto arguing for a technological future that serves our communities (to be published by One Signal / Atria .. more

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Timnit Gebru is an Eritrean Ethiopian-born computer scientist who works in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI), algorithmic bias and data mining. She is a co-founder of Black in AI, an advocacy group that has pushed for more Black roles in AI development and research. She is the founder of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR). .. more

Computer science 77%
Mathematics 7%
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timnitgebru.bsky.social
Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.bsky.social · Apr 15
🔇🔇🔇Announcing new work from DAIR which is very close to my heart, 3 years in the making.

When #TigrayGenocide, the deadliest genocide of the 21st century thus far, started in November 2020, it was 1 month before I got fired from Google. 🧵

english.elpais.com/internationa...
Ethiopia’s forgotten war is the deadliest of the 21st century, with around 600,000 civilian deaths
Estimates by European institutions and academics say over half a million non-combatants have died during the Tigray conflict as a result of a government blockade that kept out humanitarian aid
english.elpais.com

timnitgebru.bsky.social
Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.bsky.social · 25m
And that even climate change didn't post an "existential risk to humanity" not even the collision of galaxies did, on AI. Its either utopia or apocalypse according to them.

timnitgebru.bsky.social
Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.bsky.social · 25m
“We take our job of replacing humans in all economically viable work pretty dang seriously,” he added, reassuringly."

The Future of Life Institute was started by someone who believed that only the building of so-called AGI would stop us from the "cosmocalypse" BTW

timnitgebru.bsky.social
Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.bsky.social · 25m
"Finally, KRON4 asked if the entire Replacement AI concept was satire, meant to highlight the risks of an unregulated AI industry.

“If you’re asking me if this is a joke,” Hardin said after a pause, “the punchline is obviously on humanity.”

timnitgebru.bsky.social
Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.bsky.social · 1h
"Pressed on whether marketing an addictive AI chatbot to kids is ethical, Hardin shrugged: “I mean sure, but that’s not really our problem. That’s something parents or maybe lawmakers might want to look into.”

timnitgebru.bsky.social
Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.bsky.social · 1h
They didn't name me but it was clear they were talking about me, hence the reason someone forwarded me the email.

timnitgebru.bsky.social
Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.bsky.social · 1h
This institute, cofounded by Musk, circulated an email about me not just internally but to their "partners" a couple of years ago when I started calling them out as eugenicists in the TESCREAL bundle, as we wrote in our paper.

timnitgebru.bsky.social
Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.bsky.social · 1h
Coincidentally, Hardin shares a name with the communications director for the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit focused on AI safety."

What did I tell you about so called "AI safety" and the Future of Life Institute?

timnitgebru.bsky.social
Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.bsky.social · 1h
Other messaging includes insults like “stupid, smelly, squishy,” alongside the ominous statement: “It’s time for a human solution.”

KRON4 contacted Replacement AI and spoke with someone claiming to be the startup’s “humble unpaid intern,” Chase Hardin.

timnitgebru.bsky.social
Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.bsky.social · 1h
One reads: “AI does your daughter’s homework. Reads her bedtime stories. Romances her. Deepfakes her. Don’t worry. It’s totally legal.” Visitors to the Replacement AI website are greeted with a banner declaring, “Humans are no longer necessary.”

‘Stupid. Smelly. Squishy.’

timnitgebru.bsky.social
Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.bsky.social · 1h
"The ads, from a company calling itself Replacement AI, feature dark, dystopian taglines."

The ads, from a company calling itself Replacement AI, feature dark, dystopian taglines.

Reposted by Timnit Gebru

pileque.bsky.social
pileque.bsky.social @pileque.bsky.social · 1h
www.kron4.com/news/bay-are...
www.kron4.com

timnitgebru.bsky.social
Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.bsky.social · 1h
This "singularity" they're tailing about though is more of a "rapture" or "end of times" moment.

timnitgebru.bsky.social
Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.bsky.social · 2h
For those interested in more info.

Paper: firstmonday.org/ojs/index.ph...
Resources: www.dair-institute.org/projects/tes...
My talk: www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7XT...
Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TESCREAL
firstmonday.org

timnitgebru.bsky.social
Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.bsky.social · 2h
One of these cult leaders had predicted that the "singularity" was gonna be in 2025. I think we all made it right? Barring anything happening in the next few days.

They'll update their so-called "calculations" (I.e. numbers out of asses) for the next "prediction."

Who STILL platforms these people?

timnitgebru.bsky.social
Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.bsky.social · 2h
Yikes. I thought that it was well known now with the Valley's eugenicists & Trump.

They could read our paper firstmonday.org/ojs/index.ph... or see resources at www.dair-institute.org/projects/tes... or watch my talk www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7XT... or go to Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TESCREAL
View of The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence | First Monday
firstmonday.org

Reposted by Timnit Gebru

Reposted by Timnit Gebru

jasonhowell.bsky.social
Jason Howell @jasonhowell.bsky.social · 2d
Happy holidays! @jeffjarvis.bsky.social and I spoke with Ben Goertzel of SingularityNET on AI Inside about open source AI, regulation, and AGI’s messy middle. He argues “open” often stops at code. Two moments stood out.

Full episode: aiinside.show/episode/ben-...
Ben Goertzel: What AGI Means Now, Open Source AI, and Compute Constraints | AI Inside podcast
This episode is sponsored by Your360 AI. Get 10% off through January 2026 at Your360.ai with code: INSIDE. Ben Goertzel, founder and CEO of SingularityNET,...
aiinside.show

Reposted by Timnit Gebru

timnitgebru.bsky.social
Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.bsky.social · 2d
After transformers then it wasn't even solely deep learning that became synonymous with AI, or even any task using transformers, but a specific setup with image generators, LLMs and the like, where the task is to take an input of a specific modality and generate an output of some modality.

timnitgebru.bsky.social
Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.bsky.social · 2d
And then when it goes out of favor that thing gets downgraded from "AI".

timnitgebru.bsky.social
Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.bsky.social · 2d
Every time a particular technique and/or task shows a high performance on some benchmark that was considered difficult at the time, it becomes elevated to "AI".

timnitgebru.bsky.social
Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.bsky.social · 2d
After AlexNet won the ImageNet challenge in 2012, deep learning became synonymous with "AI", and deep learning also became synonymous with all of machine learning even though the deep learning people were unpopular within machine learning before.

Reposted by Timnit Gebru

Reposted by Timnit Gebru

Reposted by Timnit Gebru

timnitgebru.bsky.social
Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.bsky.social · 3d
Yes he was against the name changed and harassed the people advocating for it 🙄

timnitgebru.bsky.social
Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.bsky.social · 3d
Oh yes Playhdoh Flamingos as we call him, because we know he likes the attention when mentioned in name, has harassed me so much that it was the subject of an article.

www.theverge.com/22309962/tim...
Timnit Gebru was fired from Google — then the harassers arrived
For months, Pedro Domingos and Michael Lissack have engaged in a campaign to discredit Gebru’s research.
www.theverge.com

Reposted by Timnit Gebru

solomonmissouri.bsky.social
Solomon @solomonmissouri.bsky.social · 3d
www.thereset.news/p/breaking-h...
BREAKING: Here’s the 60 Minutes Segment Trump and CBS News Executives Don’t Want You to See
Hours before it was set to air last night, CBS News executives pulled the segment, but Canada’s Global TV app received it prior to broadcast.
www.thereset.news

Reposted by Timnit Gebru

jedbrown.org
Jed Brown @jedbrown.org · 3d
Thanks for writing and re-upping this. I think terminology is important, but I don't think regulating based on technical or statistical properties (e.g., "generative" or "transformer") is appropriate. I think the mode of interaction and epistemic function is more important for regulation.
Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Reposted by Timnit Gebru