Timnit Gebru

Timnit Gebru was a manager of Google's Ethical AI team until December 2020. After a dispute over a paper she had co-written on large language models, she emailed a list of women and allies in Google Brain about the company's treatment of the paper and of diversity work; Google cut off her corporate account. The head of Google Research, Jeff Dean, told employees that the paper had been submitted before internal review was complete, that a cross-functional team had found it "didn't meet our bar for publication," because it "ignored too much relevant research" on the efficiency of large models and on mitigating bias, and that Gebru had written that she would leave unless certain conditions were met: "We accept and respect her decision to resign from Google." Platformer, which published both emails, reported that Google had terminated her.¹ The paper, "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?," written with the linguist Emily Bender and others, appeared at the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency in 2021.²

DAIR

On December 2, 2021, Gebru launched the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), described as an independent, community-rooted institute "set to counter Big Tech's pervasive influence on the research, development and deployment of AI," with funding from the Ford Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Kapor Center and the Open Society Foundation. "AI needs to be brought back down to earth," she said.³

TESCREAL

With the philosopher Émile P. Torres, who coined the acronym, Gebru developed TESCREAL, a name for the bundle of transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism and longtermism that they argued descends from Anglo-American eugenics. Their paper in First Monday in April 2024 placed Julian Huxley with Francis Galton among its progenitors and applied the label "TESCREALists" to Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen and Sam Bankman-Fried.⁴