Timnit Gebru Believes There Is No ‘Existential Threat’ From AI

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Going rogue. Breaking containment. Misalignment. P(doom). As the industry booms, an entirely new vernacular has emerged in the debates over how consequential artificial intelligence really is.

Within that new parlance, two phrases have become focal points: stochastic parrots and existential risk. And at the center of those is one prominent AI researcher who has never stood down from a fight, Timnit Gebru.

Gebru came into the public eye several years ago after sparring with Google over a research paper she coauthored that called out biases in the company’s AI, saying that LLMs basically parroted their training data and risked perpetuating biased viewpoints. The contested paper resulted in Gebru’s departure from the company, and led her to found an institute that investigates harms perpetuated by technology and supports the creation of unbiased tech tools.

She has also authored a new book, Deep Unlearning: The Rise of AI and the Radicalization of a Tech Idealist, expected to ship early next year.

More recently, Gebru has spoken out against a faction of the industry that believes AI is so powerful it could destroy humanity. In turn, some members of that community, including an Anthropic cofounder, have alleged that Gebru’s earlier research about stochastic parrots is no longer relevant, and that AI does have the ability to “think” or reason. (In an interesting twist, or you might say horseshoe, Gebru’s beliefs about the cult-like aspects of AI’s effective altruism community have now aligned her with right-wing entities who have also lambasted these EA groups.)

The AI debate is no longer just about the technology itself, but about ideological groups and strategic narratives, and Gebru believes these narratives are a “harmful distraction” from the real issues with AI. I recently spoke with Gebru about what she believes these arguments are distracting from, and also got her response to critiques that her earlier research underestimates the AI of today.

I'm gonna assume that a lot of people know this already, but for those who don’t, a few weeks ago, a young AI researcher at Anthropic stepped down, and in his resignation post on X he indicated that a lot of people within the company feel that we are facing this major existential risk with AI.

A few people responded, and there was this whole pile-on and discourse about the real threats of AI.

When you and I spoke in the immediate aftermath, you said you felt that that particular narrative was a distraction from the real problems we’re facing with AI. Can you unpack that a little bit?

I would even go farther than that and say that it’s dangerous. It’s not just a distraction, but it’s harmful.

Before I answer your question, I want to give a little brief history of how this narrative has been going for a long time. Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have been saying this is going on since 2013. Prominent people have been saying that AI is an existential risk to humanity. It is exactly the same rhetoric every three years.

The Future of Life Institute is an institute that was founded by Max Tegmark, a physicist at MIT now, and Jaan Tallinn, a billionaire who led Anthropic's Series A funding.

Yes. Jaan Tallinn also funds METR, which is an auditor, a so-called third party, whose report about OpenAI’s so-called rogue agents hacking Hugging Face went viral.

So to the public it might seem that there are so many different entities coming together saying the same thing. But the same billionaires who founded and funded Anthropic, the ones who stand to benefit from its IPO more than anybody else, also founded and funded the institutions warning about the, quotation marks, “existential risk” of AI.

They also founded and funded the third parties that are being heavily cited right now as if they are an independent entity.

Tell us why you thought the “machine-god narrative,” as you put it, is a distraction.

It’s even more than a distraction. It’s harmful. The reason I was telling you all these facts is that these people, the funders, the founders, the investors who stand to benefit and profit the most from these companies IPO-ing are saying this, that they have been the ones seeding this narrative going back multiple decades.

So people should ask why. If I stand to get lots of money from a particular thing, why do I seem to be the person saying this particular company might build something that kills us all? It sounds counterintuitive.

This is why I really have a lot of respect for [former Federal Trade Commission chair] Lina Khan, because one of the things she said is that there’s no exception to the current laws we have for AI companies, and they talk as if there is an exception. You’re saying that whatever you’re building is so powerful that it's beyond anything we’ve seen before.

Right. It’s self-aggrandizing. It’s saying we’re the future-makers here, but the future’s gonna be really scary if we can’t continue to build this.

You have to pay attention to what they say in the news cycles. When they say that AI can cause an existential risk, they also say that AI can stop climate change, bring us world peace, and eradicate poverty.

AI can do all of these things because it’s powerful. It can bring us utopia, but also if the wrong people do it and we don’t have guardrails or whatever, it can also just kill us all. So the same people believe these things. There’s only a few people who might be in one of these camps.

When you’re telling people that you have super powerful machines, what you’re speaking to, first of all, is to your investors. You’re saying, “You wanna get your hands on these super powerful machines.” You’re talking to governments saying, “You don’t want your adversaries to get their hands on these super powerful machines.

You wanna get your hands on these super powerful machines.” And you're also telling any regulating bodies that whatever regulation they’re thinking about should be about these fictional super powerful things.

If I’m talking about potentially eradicating all of humanity, things like pollution, data centers, they sound kinda small potatoes, right? You're talking about copyright protection for artists, actual lawsuits that are going on right now? The government should not waste its time thinking about this stuff. And if you waste your time regulating us on these small topics, you risk China getting its hand on the super powerful machines.

And you don't want that. Trust us, we can build a machine-god that can help us, and we’re telling you we wanna be regulated.

That’s the first one. The second issue is you can always abdicate responsibility.

In our prior conversations, we’ve talked about the use of certain language or phrases to describe this modern era of AI and how you take issue with some of them. So, for example, in our previous conversation, you said something about autonomous weapons. After that was published, you told me you later regretted saying that because you would’ve phrased it differently.

We’ve talked about P(doom). We’ve talked about how when you say that agents have gone rogue, such as in OpenAI scenarios, that you’re essentially removing culpability from the engineers who built those tools.

I wonder if there are groups that are actually more aligned than they realize around safety and transparency, but who are deploying different phrases to describe what is essentially the same thing.

One of the reasons that I regret saying these words is not