A Martian Eclipse: Phobos Crosses the Sun
Video Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, ASU MSSS, SSI
Explanation: Whatâs that passing in front of the Sun? It looks like a moon, but it canât be Earthâs Moon, because it isnât round. Itâs the Martian moon Phobos. The featured video was taken from the surface of Mars in 2022 by the Perseverance rover. Phobos, at 11.5 kilometers across, is 150 times smaller than Luna (our moon) in diameter, but also 50 times closer to its parent planet. In fact, Phobos is so close to Mars that it is expected to break up and crash into Mars within the next 50 million years. In the near term, the low orbit of Phobos results in more rapid solar eclipses than seen from Earth. The featured video is shown in real time â the transit really took about 40 seconds, as shown. The videographer â the robotic rover Perseverance (Percy) â continues to explore Jezero Crater on Mars, searching not only for clues to the watery history of the now dry world, but evidence of ancient microbial life.
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
(in case anyone needs context, since i know there's a bunch of younguns who didn't even know the "It's gonna be May" meme... The song playing is NSync's song "It's Gonna Be Me", the guy in the mint green t-shirt is NSync member Lance Bass, and the guy in the pink hoodie is his husband Michael.)
this shit owns it's just a number go up idle game except the idle mechanic comes from you writing JavaScript to automate tasks it seems like the end goal of the game is to perfectly optimize against this little arbitrary system they've created. There's not any plot to speak of so far but even though nothing is happening people send you messages through the computer telling you to trust no one as they all have ulterior motives. Very relatable.
As much as I want to support ethical farming practices I will be buying the cheapest bag of frozen chicken thighs as much as the next frugal/poor person which is why animal welfare needs to be legislated, not left up to the invisible hand of the free market or some bullshit. Invisible hand of the free market finds itself around a lot of throats.
The legends are true! I will be officially corporeal for the first time in 12 years April 17th at the Portland Liberation Center! If you can make it, RSVP at this link here. Also if youâd like to get a book or two to pick up at the party, you can do so in that same link!
Petrov was on overnight duty in 1983 when computers indicated the U.S. had launched a nuclear strike against his country. He had only a few
RIP to a quiet hero.
A good reminder in these times that even when powerful men act with impunity to do evil, tossing out callous orders left and right, that at the end of the day those powerful men often depend on ordinary, low-level workers to push a button somewhere, to flip a switch, to pull a trigger⊠and that those ordinary individuals have the power to say âno.â You can refuse to push the button, and you might save countless lives in the process.
ALSO a good timely reminder that automated systems can be wrong!!!! Sensors can be tripped incorrectly! Data can get corrupted! Electronics can fail! Machines shouldnât make decisions!!!! There needs to be at least one human (ideally more than one for big decisions!) assessing the machineâs output, weighing it against other sources of information and the potential consequences, and making a rational, moral decision. Not just logical: RATIONAL.
[ ID: image of an illustrated character and this quote:
The world is not divided between East and West. You are American, I am Iranian, we don't know each other, but we talk together and we understand each other perfectly. The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our governments are very much the same.
This was filmed at the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, which rescues, rehabilitates, and releases orphaned elephants in Kenya (among other conservation efforts). Charity Navigator has given it a 4/4 star rating, and you can make donations here or âadoptâ a baby elephant here.
âwhy are you, as someone in their 30s, still on tumblrâ oh so you think youâre gonna be normal when youâre my age? you think youâre gonna be CURED?? you think the witchesâ curse will have been lifted by then?? cmon now
I will never get over how brilliant this comic is. The artist could have just drawn a single image in response, but instead we have this masterpiece. The world doesnât deserve @iguanamouth.
2087
origamiaround
prguitarman
