Timnit Gebru

Founder of the Distributed AI Research Institute

Why they matter

Founder of the Distributed AI Research Institute with public evidence across AI business.

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Personal Account Founder: The Distributed AI Research Institute @dairinstitute.bsky.social. Author: The View from Somewhere, a memoir & manifesto arguing for a technological future that serves our communities (to be published by One Signal / Atria

Articles & links

Timnit Gebru reposted
@sven.blacksky.app

One *cannot* just move on from the Anthropic question when the very substance of this encyclical letter was written with the tech industry talking point. One simple example below: 👇 www.vatican.va/content/leo-....

Encyclical Letter of His Holiness Leo XIV Magnifica Humanitas (15 May 2026) vatican.va
AI Weekly's analysis
  • Pope Leo XIV's 42,300-word Magnifica Humanitas, signed May 15 and published May 25, addresses AI as the central challenge to human dignity.
  • The encyclical states AI systems are 'cultivated' not 'built' and explicitly denies they possess experience, a body, or the capacity to feel pain.
  • Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah spoke at the Vatican's May 25 presentation alongside theologians and three cardinals.
Read full analysis →
View on Bluesky →
Timnit Gebru reposted
The Distributed AI Research (DAIR) Institute @dairinstitute.bsky.social

We are so excited about this resource created with @weandai.bsky.social and the Refugee Law Lab. Check it out and submit a resource you're excited about via airesistlist.org#join

The AI Resist List airesistlist.org
AI Weekly's analysis
  • Karen Hao launched the AI Resist List on the one-year anniversary of her book Empire of AI as a publicly accessible, community-contributed database.
  • The database organizes entries by 'Pillars of Support' sustaining AI empires, a framework adapted from Choose Democracy's authoritarianism resistance model.
  • Entries span labor actions, legal challenges, and grassroots campaigns across gig work, healthcare, education, and law enforcement sectors.
Read full analysis →
View on Bluesky →

Weeks ago, @chanda.blacksky.app sent me this declaration, written and signed by a bunch of mathematicians. But I only had time to read it yesterday, which ended up being right on time given a new round of hype falling exactly under the patterns this document notes.🧵 leidendecl…

Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics leidendeclaration.ai
AI Weekly's analysis
  • The Leiden Declaration, released June 2, 2026, warns AI threatens proof integrity, attribution, and peer review in mathematics.
  • Over 2,654 signatories including Fields Medal winner Terence Tao have endorsed the community-initiated declaration.
  • The International Mathematical Union backs the declaration, which makes separate recommendations to researchers, publishers, policymakers, and AI developers.
Read full analysis →
View on Bluesky · ♥ 206 ↻ 81 ↩ 8 · 15 from the directory shared this · 48d ago

Guys, this is Bernie Sanders' guy for all things AI. Max Tegmark of the Future of Life Institute, funded to the tune of $665m by crypto billionaires, that's of course, after all the Muskrat + friends' money. Their "seed funding" was from Musk. 🧵 www.politico.com/news/2024/03...

politico.com
View on Bluesky · ♥ 450 ↻ 208 ↩ 15 · 2 from the directory shared this · 16h ago

Not to prop up doomer ignorant mansplainer Bill, but I used to joke with my former manager Samy Bengio on whether he doesn't get tired of showing that "reasoning claims are bullshit" (my words anyway). machinelearning.apple.com/research/ill...

The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity machinelearning.apple.com
AI Weekly's analysis
  • Apple researchers report frontier reasoning models — including Claude 3.7 Sonnet thinking, DeepSeek-R1, and o3-mini — suffer a complete accuracy collapse past a puzzle-complexity threshold.
  • The paper identifies three regimes: standard LLMs beat reasoning models on easy tasks, reasoning models win in the middle, both fail on the hardest.
  • Models' reasoning effort peaks then declines with rising complexity even when token budget remains, suggesting a scaling ceiling on chain-of-thought.
Read full analysis →
View on Bluesky · ♥ 124 ↻ 21 ↩ 3 · 2 from the directory shared this · 14h ago
Timnit Gebru reposted
Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social

A good rule of thumb: If the press release (or stenographic news reporting masquerading as journalism) says that an "AI" did something, that's deliberate obfuscation. Software doesn't do anything of its own accord, but folks sure like to talk about it as if it does: >>

How to talk about buttondown.com
AI Weekly's analysis
  • The guide covers six language categories: cognition, emotion, communication, agency, human-role analogies, and biological metaphors.
  • Proposed substitutions include 'probabilistic automation' for 'artificial intelligence' and 'conversation simulator' for 'chatbot.'
  • Rephrasing 'ChatGPT assisted students' as 'the students used ChatGPT' is given as an example of restoring human accountability.
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View on Bluesky →

Bless the hearts of people like @eryk.bsky.social but I'm learning that no amount of reasonable voice makes a difference when you have bought out media, academics and politicians + trillion dollar companies pushing Cookie Monster theory 🙄 mail.cyberneticforests.com/models-dont…

Models Don't Go Rogue mail.cyberneticforests.com
View on Bluesky · ♥ 257 ↻ 87 ↩ 8 · 8 from the directory shared this · 3d ago

Tegmark thought there should be an "alliance" to stop the oh so super intelligent devil kind of "AI" from coming to fruition. Who is in this alliance you say? Well none other than Steve Bannon. Any alliance with him has to be "pro human" right? https://t.co/AKZMRyNfpU

The AI political resistance has arrived theverge.com
View on Bluesky · ♥ 0 ↻ 0 ↩ 0 · 2 from the directory shared this · 17h ago

"So in summary: using AI for coding led to depression, apathy, existential dread, and worse software. Not good. Add on top of that the negative environmental, community, and economic impacts of AI, and it became extremely apparent to me that something's gotta change." brettcod…

I'm done using AI brettcodes.com
View on Bluesky · ♥ 689 ↻ 226 ↩ 8 · 6 from the directory shared this · 1d ago

Recent commentary

We're in the era of incompetence & cybercrimes headlined as "unprecedented model capabilities gone rogue." So OpenAI & Anthropic are trying to one up each other with such incompetence because the "press release as a service" performing media & clueless politicians parrot pre IPO CEO talking points.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 536 ↻ 210 ↩ 6 · 38d ago

Bernie hasn't tried this on here yet but here he is doing free marketing for OpenAI. He has been captured by the worst people in AI for a few years now and has been parroting company hype talking points instead of guarding against them. It’s like the public is being assaulted from all sides.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 496 ↻ 138 ↩ 13 · 46d ago

You gotta hand it to OpenAI, billing this as a *partnership* between OpenAI & Hugging Face when what actually happened was Hugging Face finding out that OpenAI was using a bunch of bots to exploit security vulnerabilities. Talk about good marketing or whatever you want to call it, by OpenAI.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 459 ↻ 144 ↩ 9 · 46d ago

Well, with this official Vatican + Anthropic mandate, I guess it was only a matter of time when the religion of effective altruism, worshipping so-called artificial general intelligence, merged with entrenched religious institutions.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 289 ↻ 91 ↩ 13 · 105d ago

The Vatican could have told Anthropic to stop stealing data, exploiting labor, killing the environment, deceiving us with anthropomorphic designs & lying about product "capabilities." Instead they partnered with them, like partnering with Sackler family to discuss harms of oxy.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 252 ↻ 73 ↩ 4 · 105d ago

🗣️🗣️🗣️Announcing that I'll be creating a fully autonomous startup, staffed by AGI. I care deeply about humanity's future and can't wait to work alongside ethical workers to hopefully make a gazillion amount of 💰. Surely I shouldn't be left out of the retirement and oil 💸 flowing into this bubble.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 155 ↻ 14 ↩ 4 · 31d ago

Effective altruist troll paid by billionaires to push disinfo being on the Time 100 AI list tells the state of mainstream media. I don't know if y'all remember the effusive Time cover of EAs a few years ago, by an editor who's now comms director of Open Philanthropy (rebranded Coefficient Giving).

View on Bluesky · ♥ 111 ↻ 29 ↩ 2 · 10d ago

Bernie out here doing the Devil's work on "AI" once again, right on cue. Pushing propaganda. Sigh.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 77 ↻ 15 ↩ 4 · 4d ago

Reminds me of a 2017 headlines describing my friend's paper as CHATBOTS HAVE INVENTED THEIR OWN LANGUAGE & ARE COMMUNICATING WITH EACH OTHER. My friend is like they can't be talking about MY paper.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 80 ↻ 7 ↩ 1 · 42d ago

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