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In the last few years, the quest to build so-called Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), an undefined system which seemingly can do any task under any circumstance, has captured the public's imagination. Those whose mission has been to build this system, like the leaders of OpenAI, Anthropic, Deepmind and others, discuss the utopia that will imminently come from building AGI, or the apocalypse that will be caused by it rendering humanity extinct. In this talk, Dr. Gebru discusses the history of the AGI movement, and its link to the 20th century eugenics movement, with those who "christened" the term AGI having the goal of replacing humans with a superior race they call "transhuman AGI." She outlines the harms the quest to build AGI has caused, including labor exploitation, centralization of power and the safety issues associated with building an unscoped system. She closes by giving examples of various movements to resist this trend, including artists' fight to preserve their humanity and dignity with the hashtag #TeamHuman. Dr. Gebru urges the machine learning community to focus on small, constrained, task specific models, and present some of the work from DAIR showing how this approach outperforms the one size fits all trend to building machine learning based models.
Dr. Timnit Gebru founded the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR) in 2021 and is currently its Executive Director. She previously co-led Google’s Ethical AI research team, until co-publishing a journal article that critiqued the company’s AI ethics. DAIR publishes interdisciplinary research that brings a greater diversity of perspectives and lived experiences to envisioning the future of AI. Dr. Gebru also co-founded the nonprofit Black in AI and serves on the board of AddisCoder. Time magazine named Dr. Gebru one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2022 and one of the 100 most influential people in AI in 2023. Her memoir/manifesto The View from Somewhere is scheduled to publish in fall 2026.