Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.
But... Stochastic Parrots.
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.
Could you imagine making your own movie, making like 20 million dollars, and then going “awesome, now to install a DVD duplicating machine in my house and personally burn copies by hand like a medieval monk preserving sacred texts”
Like I need people to understand the mental image here of a multimillionaire internet creator personally overseeing DVD production in his own house like he’s running an underground bootleg operation out of a basement in 2007.
It’s weirdly charming because there’s something very “old internet” about it, this energy of “I made a thing, and now I will physically hand it to people myself like an artisan at a craft fair.”
The man really said: “The future of cinema is me standing next to a humming disc burner at 2am”
And like... I can't help but believe he's onto something
Eva Stratt does NOT need a redemption arc. Eva Stratt did EVERYTHING WRONG so that no-one else would have to. Her hands are permanently stained with blood so humanity gets to keep on living.
I know that people often characterize Obi-Wan as a Stewjoni name which is great!
It's just that, personally, I've more inclined to think it is as a name given to him by the Jedi. I just don't think that it's a coincidence that two of the most prominent Jedi whom we see are named 'Qui-Gon Jinn' and 'Obi-Wan Kenobi'.
These are two characters who've had somewhat murky beginnings within both canon and legends. I think it's very notable that Obi-Wan was only given a home planet in 2010 (over 33 years later from when he was first introduced) and Qui-Gon was only given the home world of Coruscant in 2022!
There are very few main other characters like this. Luke Skywalker is from Tatooine, Leia Organa is from Aldeeran, and Han Solo is from Corellia. (This was established in 1976 in the novelization of a New Hope!)
Anakin Skywalker is from Tatooine, Padme Amidala is from Naboo. Both of these places featured predominantly in The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones.
Why? Because to understand Anakin Skywalker and to understand Padme Amidala, you have to understand where they came from.
You do not need to visit Stewjon to understand Obi-Wan Kenobi. You just need to see the Jedi Temple and meet other Jedi. You do not need to all of Corcuscant to understand Qui-Gon Jinn. You just need to see the Jedi Temple and meet other Jedi.
Culturally, they are Jedi. They are Jedi at the beginning, the middle, and the end of their lives. What if that were the origins of their names? What if Obi-Wan Kenobi means 'Child of the Light' or 'Beloved'? What if Qui-Gon Jinn means 'Protector' or 'Balanced'?
I just think that it would be neat to see it more.
Every day i think about those black musicians whose songs were made into covers by white people and now everyone thinks that these are the originals. Youtube comment sections are full of people like "is this what it feels like to find out you're adopted?" instead of celebrating and promoting the original creators of the songs.
"the most unrealistic thing about project hail mary is that a woman is in charge" WRONG look up the glass cliff. women are much more likely to be promoted to positions of power when things are going poorly and people need a woman to blame. she refers to herself as the "world's whipping boy." the person put in the position to have to commit ecological and humanitarian crimes of that scale in order to save the earth would only ever be a woman.
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germansingergirl
annaxmalina
