After internal chaos earlier this month, OpenAI replaced the women on its board with men. As it plans to add more seats, Timnit Gebru, Sasha Luccioni, and other AI luminaries tell WIRED why they wouldn’t join.
how is the board ever supposed to get women if it needs women to ever get women on the board?
Can I get a summary?
Seems like the article is trying to combine two issues into one, the lack of representation of woman on OpenAI’s Board, and the concerns of some prominent AI researchers (who happen to be women) about OpenAI’s ambition and profitability above safety.
On the representation side, this seems like a chicken and egg problem where there won’t be any change in diversity if no one wants to make a move because the board isn’t already diverse enough.
And on the AI safety side, there won’t be any change unless someone sits on the board and pushes for safety proactively, instead of reactively through legislation.
there won’t be any change unless someone sits on the board and pushes for safety proactively, instead of reactively through legislation.
There won’t be any change because the board that pushed back just got replaced with people who won’t.
It also elides “AI safety” (Toner’s thing) and “AI ethics” (Gebru’s thing). They’re two different things. Jammed together here because both are women (FFS).
“AI safety” is the sci-fi, paperclip maximisation, fantasies about the potential future of AI.
“AI ethics” is the real actual harms done in the here and now, by embedding existing biases into decision-making, and consuming enormous amounts of resource.
Meredith Whittaker sums up the difference nicely in this interview:
So in 2020-21 when Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell from Google’s AI ethics unit were ousted after warning about the inequalities perpetuated by AI, did you feel, “Oh, here we go again”?
Timnit and her team were doing work that was showing the environmental and social harm potential of these large language models – which are the fuel of the AI hype at this moment. What you saw there was a very clear case of how much Google would tolerate in terms of people critiquing these systems. It didn’t matter that the issues that she and her co-authors pointed out were extraordinarily valid and real. It was that Google was like: “Hey, we don’t want to metabolise this right now.”
Is it interesting to you how their warnings were received compared with the fears of existential risk expressed by ex-Google “godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton recently?
If you were to heed Timnit’s warnings you would have to significantly change the business and the structure of these companies. If you heed Geoff’s warnings, you sit around a table at Davos and feel scared.
Geoff’s warnings are much more convenient, because they project everything into the far future so they leave the status quo untouched. And if the status quo is untouched you’re going to see these companies and their systems further entrench their dominance such that it becomes impossible to regulate. This is not an inconvenient narrative at all.
Article seems to be mainly about Timnit Gebru. I struggle to see ANY business wanting her on the board. Sasha luccioni, appears to be another AI Doomer, i.e. Up there with Helen toner who
The New York Times reported this week that in the weeks leading up to Altman’s firing, he and Toner had discussed an October paper she had co-authored for CSET.
In the paper, OpenAI is criticised for releasing ChatGPT at the end of last year, sparking “a sense of urgency inside major tech companies”, like Google, to ensure they did not fall behind and prompting competitors to “accelerate or circumvent internal safety and ethics review processes”.
Seriously, look at the people in the article, the organisations that they’re associated with and the opinions they’ve publicly stated. The Doomers at open.ai tried a coup and failed. The Accels won. The current board surely wouldn’t welcome or be welcoming to the Doomers. We’re clearly well past the point where people can sensibly pretend that they can hold back the avalanche of A.I. from the board of a single company in the space.
It doesn’t need to be a “prominent” woman (AKA a rich person).
How about a woman who is passionate and knowledgeable, rather than just one who is rich?
