Former Google AI researcher Timnit Gebru has unveiled an interdisciplinary research group that aims to highlight some of the key data-reliability challenges facing artificial intelligence and how they are treated in the design process.
The Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR) launched yesterday (2 December) with a goal to “encourage a research process that analyses [AI research’s] end goal and potential risks and harms from the start”.
Gebru has become one of the main voices warning about bias embedded in datasets, particularly those claimed to be so big that they dilute the risk. 'On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?', a paper she co-authored and which prompted her controversial departure from Google, provided evidence to suggest that the reverse was true – a position her then employer disputed.
Nevertheless, its observations have since been echoed by model leaders within Big Tech. Notably, the Microsoft-Nvidia...