I am retired!!! I retired in October of 2017 and have kept my promise not to exchange my labor for money.
Since 2017, I have only done stuff that I thought was interesting or useful regardless of whether it pays, because we have more than enough money, and despite what billionaires might tell you, there is literally no difference between "more than enough" and "much more than enough."
So I no longer work for money. But in retirement one must keep busy, which is why I have taken on an unpaid gig as the social media intern for a coffee and tea business that donates 100% of its profit to charity.
I also sometimes travel to universities and other places to speak in support of Partners in Health and global access to tuberculosis care, and sometimes I write books because writing makes me happy, and every Tuesday I make a video on vlogbrothers, and I make a podcast about the world cup with my friends from high school, and so on, but none of these things constitutes work. These are just Retirement Projects, which are essential to a happy retirement.
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.
definitely read under the cut for the full overview
essentially, everything Gebru warned about LLMs in her paper has come to pass, including "model collapse," the issue where LLM datasets grow worse as more of their training data - the internet - becomes AI-generated slop, degrading the LLMs more and more as time goes on
because LLMs aren't really artificial intelligence and cannot understand anything - they're just really good at sounding like the dominant language - their "hallucinations" (nonsense and lies) will continue to worsen. they're not even really algorithms anymore, just "Stochastic Parrots"
the human, cultural, and environmental cost is awful and building. when these LLMs become unusable and all the hundreds of billions of dollars invested evaporate, the economic collapse will be unimaginable
The worst-sounding piece of advice I've ever been given that does actually work is to frame your health concerns as coming from someone close to you, whom you do not believe. Tell your doctor that you've been having pain and your mom/friend/partner thinks it might be an ovarian cyst, but you don't think so because the pain is much more intense and it has to be something else. This gives your doctor an unseen third party to fight instead of you. They can't just tell this third party, who isn't present, that you pulled a muscle, they now need to prove to this third party that it is not an ovarian cyst.
At which point they will find an ovarian cyst, but they now get whatever fucked up satisfaction they derive out of proving you wrong, because you didn't believe it could a cyst at all, but guess what? They did find a cyst! It's such a good thing you didn't listen to your intuition and came to them to verify your lay diagnosis from that third party! Bonus? Doctor doesn't have to feel like they look stupid in front of a patient, which is really what all this is about. Not your health, why would you think your medical diagnosis is about your health? It's obviously about a doctor's potential ego.
And apparently this works. Apparently you just need to be able to always play 4D chess with your medical professionals in order to find an avenue of advocating for yourself and getting you medical needs met. Isn't that great?
ok time to lock the fuck in *opens discord* ok time to lock the fuck in *opens tumblr* ok time to lock the fuck in *opens gmail* ok time to lock the fuck in *opens youtube* ok time to lock the fuck in *opens an unstable vortex in time and space* ok time to lock the fuck in *opens ao3* ok time to lock the fuck in *opens discord* ok time to lock the fuck in *opens tumblr*
why is it so expensive to fly between states and then cheap as fuck to fly between countries in europe????? what do you mean Milan to London is cheaper than Georgia to Virginia?????
germansingergirl
ellievsbear
vaporwave
stormborns
areudirty
janainaart
pixelskylines
