Timnit Gebru says she sees no existential threat from AI

In an interview with Wired, Timnit Gebru said she believes the discussion about artificial intelligence potentially destroying humanity is a “dangerous distraction” from the technology’s concrete problems. She said the same rhetoric resurfaces periodically and criticized what she sees as an overlap between groups warning about AI’s so-called existential risk and people who funded companies and institutions involved in that debate.

Gebru rose to prominence after clashing with Google over a paper about bias in AI systems and later founded an institute focused on investigating technology-related harms. According to Wired, some members of the community that advocates concern about existential risks, including an Anthropic cofounder, have challenged the continuing relevance of her earlier research on “stochastic parrots” and said AI can think or reason.