Timnit Gebru says AI doom talk is 'meant to distract us' from real harms
Grady_Booch · x · 2026-09-12
A WIRED profile of Timnit Gebru amid a week of AI-industry turmoil: OpenAI accused of quietly leveraging other researchers' work on a million-dollar math problem, and an Anthropic researcher publicly quitting over safety concerns, with a colleague claiming a >10% chance AI kills all humans within a decade. Gebru argues the extinction talk is 'meant to distract us' — AI companies stoke doom fears to avoid discussing actual harms like autonomous weapons. She was hired by Google in 2018 to evaluate AI bias, left after the company rejected her paper on LLM dangers, and is publishing a book about it.
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