Dear New Yorker, NYT, CNN, Washington Post, &c: stop interviewing Sam Altman and Geoffrey Hinton, and start interviewing Timnit Gebru, Meredith Whittaker, Emily Bender, Chris Gilliard, Rua Williams, Ruha Benjamin, Margaret Mitchell, Abeba Birhane, Alex Hanna, Kendra Albert, Jonathan Flowers, Robin Zebrowski, and like a bunch of other, better people to talk to about these things.

…By which i basically mean, "…stop being like you are and start being the kind of news outlets who would even begin to understand why you should stop interviewing [people in group a] and start interviewing [people in group b]."

@Wolven I mean, at the very least try not to ONLY interview people who stand to become BILLIONAIRES via the thing you are interviewing them about. Aren't they bored yet just talking to the same three people over and over?
@Wolven It's always terrifying when MSM has a narrative to push and is relentless about it, especially when we desperately need the truth.

@Wolven

“Whatever a patron desires to get published is advertising; whatever he wants to keep out of the paper is news”

#news #quotes

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/01/20/news-suppress/

Quote Origin: News Is What Somebody Does Not Want You To Print. All the Rest Is Advertising – Quote Investigator®

@Wolven do you like any news sources that are choosing wisely?
@Wolven I don’t understand why you would put Hinton and Altman in the same sentence. Hinton is an incredibly well respected scientist whose research was fundamental in developing the technology, Altman is an “entrepeneur” with a background in tech startups - a field he moved into after dropping out of his undergraduate computer science degree course
@UlrikeHahn @Wolven Hinton has gone down the exact same, unscientific doomer route unfortunately. His expertise in these areas today is... poor
@bwaber @Wolven sorry, I think that’s a stretch. You might not share his speculation on how LLMs will continue to develop, which, however you slice it, is asking someone to make a prediction about a very uncertain future but the notion that “his expertise in these areas is poor” is not a credible statement to me. He left working at Google less than a year ago. Altman, as far as I can tell, has never spent a day actually working on any of this.
@UlrikeHahn @Wolven Social media not the best venue for a discussion about this, but I will say that being one of the folks who developed the math behind deep learning is only loosely related to modern systems. In a similar way, in matters of economics I would trust someone who graduated with a BA in economics in 2024 over Adam Smith.
@bwaber @Wolven Ben, for the period 2022 to now, his google scholar page lists 10 preprints/papers and a whole bunch of patents. I’m just not getting the Adam Smith to 2024 BA graduate analogy.
Researcher Meredith Whittaker says AI’s biggest risk isn’t ‘consciousness’—it’s the corporations that control them

IFA Berlin 2024 - English
@Wolven sorry, Damien, I don’t understand what you think this article is meant to show? Some people disagree with parts of Hinton’s assessment of the future development of the current framework, in particular what can be solved just by continued scaling. I’d count myself among those but that doesn’t change the fact that Hinton was part of a group that revolutionised cognitive science (my own area if research), has received the highest awards in both cog sci and AI, produced a body of 1/2

@Wolven 2/2 published work with almost 800,000 citations and contributed integrally to the development of a technology which, whether we like it or not (and I mostly don’t) represents a leap in performance over what came before that is currently disrupting multiple aspects of human society.

I simply see no way of operationalising scientific achievement that would render him on a par with Altman (or for that matter the other names on your list).

@Wolven they are all important voices who should be heard (and arguably are heard), on that I totally agree. But I’m struggling with what feels like an attempt to reconstruct Hinton as someone without anything to say.
@UlrikeHahn The point is that what he has to say is late in the game and too focused on the "x-risk" of future "AGI" while actively denigrating the people who are and have been working to try to prevent or undo the real immediate harms of "AI" right now, today. That link highlights the perspective that he's ignoring. *[In the same link, you can find direct reference and further links out to] him downplaying the work and concerns of Gebru, Bender, Mitchell, Whittaker, etc. Have a good night.