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.
lacey eden. lacey is the only woman to ever win four D1 hockey national titles (all with wisco and three with laila), yet she's suffered more than anyone in the history of the world. one of the last cuts for team USA for the 2022 and 2026 olympics, left out of the patty kaz top three this year, overlooked in favor of her teammates, constantly tormented by laila and kk's antics. that she still loves laila and only occasionally tries to subliminally trick her into liking taylor swift is testament to her strength of character. she's going to play in the PWHL next season.
is she normal about laila? mostly yes, other than that time she posted a tiktok zooming in on the sweat on laila's bare shoulders after they did hot pilates together.
laney potter. one of laila's teammates at the university of wisconsin. laney has gone triple platinum in MY household for never quite being as good as everyone thought she would be, and kind of going psycho on the ice sometimes, and having an elite aux, and being incredibly easily ragebaited about the pittsburgh penguins, and slashing tessa jannecke in the head, and the tone of voice in which she said, "can she even drive right now?" in the background of a tiktok live when lacey drunkenly kept insisting she was going to drive her brother to the airport. she'll be a senior this upcoming season and i very much hope she declares for the PWHL draft next year because i think she would be a delight in pro hockey.
is she normal about laila? no, she's a major offender of nervously asking everyone, "WHERE'S LAILA?" whenever laila is not there, second only to kk. she's also on record as very seriously saying that she thinks laila is the funniest person in the world.
hannah halverson. she plays for the university of wisconsin with laila. she's two years younger and is one of the younger girlies that laila and kk seem to have kind of adopted. laila, hannah, laney, and ava call themselves the stick taping squad and tape their sticks on the bench before every game together.
is she normal about laila? well, she let laila pretend to walk her like a dog. so you tell me.
anna wilgren. anna played for a year with laila on the badgers; she now plays for the seattle torrent. if laila gets drafted to seattle, they'll be reunited and will probably be the top D pairing.
is she normal about laila? one time laila took of all her clothes and starting whipping anna with them while they were wrestling, and not to editorialize, but it seems like it might be kind of hard to be normal about laila after that.
I've already spoken about it on my own "review" of the samisa podcast ep but I wanted to make a separate post for a bit of character analysis.
Now. Do I think sweet Michael Misa is a criminal mastermind? no. But do I think he's more observant and smarter than he seems? and uses this ability in a very selective way? and he's a bit lazy about things? yeah babyyy
See invented the tag "manipulate mansplain michael misa" specifically around the story of the phone in Chicago. Misa did not want to figure out how it worked and was not planning to. And when Sam is like "ok but why do i have to know?" and Misa goes all soft voice and goes "you're a smart guy". And Sam, who notoriously takes care of Misa (see the alarm story and many more) falls for it straight on because he loves praise!
Now I want you to look at Misa's face right after Sam agrees that he's a smart guy. Look at his little self-satisfied smile. That's the face of a guy who has successfully laid down the background dynamic to never figure out anything again when he's with Sam, and he KNOWS IT. He has completed his plan! He can just roll around and be like "Sam?" with his big brown eyes and Sam will take care of it. He will figure it out for Misa.
i genuinely think that caring very deeply about whether a character tops or bottoms as if it's some important moral issue makes you the biggest loser on planet earth
i also think many people don't realize how heteronormative their views on bottoming vs topping are because it usually just boils down to the bottom being the feminine wilting flower and the top being the masculine beast. like maybe question why anyone messing with your favorite gay heteronormativity play upsets you that much lol
i loveee bambi as a pet name and i think willmack are begging for it. just look at himmmm
mack's got the soft brown hair and the doe eyes. talks a lot, fast and excited. affectionate and a lil clumsy. he can be shy and quiet, then loud and laughing. both cuties. soooo expressive. it's perfect.
maybe they're babysitting a teammate's kids who put on the movie. the iconic scene of bambi slipping on the ice and will laughs hey, that's you! and so it begins.
they're playfighting in practice and mack slips, scrambling briefly to find his edge. will smirks at him and calls, careful, bambi.
frustrated tears slipping down his cheeks after a hard loss. will bundles him up, rests mack's heavy head on his chest and pets his hair. it's okay, bambi. let it out.
mack on his knees, staring up at will with huge, sparkling, wanting eyes, fuck, bambi, your eyes.
mack lovesss it. loves having a nickname that's just his and will's. no one else calls him that and will wouldn't call anyone else that. it's theirs.
nothing sexier than that picture with the italian players on top of eachother after the win and the english ones going through the 5 stages of grief in the back
Olympic silver medalist Kristin O'Neill has received an Expansion Foundational Offer and signed a two-year Standard Player Agreement as part of the Expansion Player Distribution Process.
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