Marissa Mayer asks AI to describe her 10-year-old daughter

Marissa Mayer, the former Yahoo CEO, told the New York Times she asked her new AI app to name three things she loves about her 10-year-old daughter. The chatbot answered: "your daughter is empathetic, creative and an animal lover."

The anecdote came from a Sunday interview promoting Dazzle, Mayer's new app, which accesses a user's camera roll. In the piece, 404 Media's Samantha Cole pairs that moment with Mayer's long record of dismissing gender as a factor in tech.

In the same interview Mayer said, "To me, gender fades into the background. I talk about passion as a gender neutralizing force." In 2015 she had put it this way: "I never play the gender card. The moment you play into that, it's an issue." Cole sets those lines against her own flat accounting of the industry: "Half of women in tech leave the industry by 35, earn 84 cents to their male counterparts' dollar, and women founders receive half the amount of funding that male founders do."

The piece also notes that the Grace Hopper Celebration has canceled its 2026 event. Organizers said "both individual registrations and sponsorship commitments came in significantly below our expectations and, ultimately, below the level needed to cover critical operating expenses." Kayley Seow, who attended in 2023, told 404 Media she felt "pretty shattered," adding, "GHC is such a pillar of the community that you don't expect to fall."