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 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.