The Women of AI? Yes.

[ancianita]

My advice to issues advocates on DU: READ. MORE. BOOKS.
Do not depend on corporate media to inform you of anything. They fail us by design.
(Lawrence O'Donnell is saying the same thing right now.)

The Guardian's Luba Kassova does not serve women with numbers below 20% about the tech world, unless her sweeping accusations of the AI world in reaction to two dramatic firings at OpenAI, are to shake up current male awareness in that world. That no one knew Sam Altman's name before the OpenAI firings, either, is beside the point.

AI is new to the world.
It's too soon to assume that women have not played an important part in AI development.

These women have NOT been "peripheral" in AI industry or history:


Meredith Whittaker was employed at Google for 13 years, where she founded Google's Open Research group;
-- was a speaker at the 2018 World Summit on AI;
-- co-founded M-Lab, a globally distributed network measurement system tha) t provides the world’s largest source of open data on Internet performance.
-- advised the White House, the FCC, the FTC, the City of New York, the European Parliament, and many other governments and civil society organizations on artificial intelligence, Internet policy, measurement, privacy, and security.
-- co-founder and former faculty director of the AI Now Institute at NYU, a leading university institute dedicated to researching the social implications of artificial intelligence and related technologies which she started with Kate Crawford in 2017 after a symposium hosted by the White House. AI Now is partnered with the New York University Tandon School of Engineering, New York University Center for Data Science and Partnership on AI. They have produced annual reports that examine the social implications of artificial intelligence, including bias, rights and liberties.
-- joined the United States Federal Trade Commission as a senior advisor on artificial intelligence to the chair.
-- Once announced as Signal's president, at the beginning of September 2022, she reported the ending of her term at the FTC.

Margaret Mitchell and Timnit Gebru both worked at Google as part of a group laying down ethical frameworks for AI technologies. For Mitchell and Gebru, the bias problem was part of the larger issue across the tech industry at large, not just AI tech. Women struggled to exert their influence in all tech fields.
In AI the problem was more pronounced, so they both penned an open letter to Amazon.
In it they refuted the arguments that Amazon executive Matt Wood made against their MIT study on how Amazon Rekognition used by law enforcement agencies in Florida and Oregon had high error rates in recognizing gender and race.
Co-signers of their letter were 25 artificial intelligence researchers across Google, DeepMind, Microsoft, and academia -- including Yoshua Bengio, considered (with the godfather of AI, Geoff Hinton) to be one of the three people most responsible for the advancement of deep learning during the 1990s and 2000s.

Other important women in the history of AI:

Fei-Fei Li

Deborah Raji

Joy Buolamwini

The best book I've read on the history of AI (it reads like a novel page turner) -- but you've never heard of 99% of the men in AI in this book, either.




The best book on how AI works -- along with names we've never heard of.




Women that Forbes thinks should be on the new OpenAI board, names I recognize.
(let me know if there's a paywall and I'll provide an archive link)

https://www.forbes.com/sites/rebekahbastian/2023/11/26/10-women-ai-leaders-who-openai-should-consider-for-their-board/?sh=10b439be3506

1. Dr. Fei-Fei Li is the co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, former chief scientist of AI/ML at GoogleGOOG -1.6% Cloud ​​and co-founder and board chair of AI4ALL. She would bring technical and entrepreneurial expertise and advocacy for diversity and inclusion to OpenAI's board.

2. Dr. Timnit Gebru is the co-founder of Black in AI, former co-lead of the Ethical AI team at Google, and widely respected and accomplished AI researcher who specializes in the ethical and social implications of AI. Her expertise in fairness and ethics would help guide OpenAI in developing responsible AI systems.

3. Alessya Visnjic is the CEO of WhyLabs, an AI monitoring and observability platform. Her technical insights and focus on AI reliability and transparency would bring a valuable perspective to the board.

4. Dr. Latanya Sweeney is the founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of Technology Science, the director of the Public Interest Tech Lab at Harvard, and former chief technologist of the US Federal Trade Commission. Her technical knowledge, expertise in data privacy, and dedication to ethical and responsible AI would be incredibly impactful to the future of OpenAI.

5. Professor Daphne Koller is an AI researcher who co-founded Coursera, Insitro, and Engageli. Prior to that she was a professor at Stanford in the areas of machine learning and probabilistic modeling. Her deep understanding of the technical, ethical, and practical aspects of AI and its real-world applications would help guide the future of OpenAI.

6. Daniela Braga, Ph.D. is the CEO of Defined.AI, the largest marketplace of ethically-sourced training data for AI. She would bring extensive expertise in AI, natural language processing and data curation through an ethical lens to the OpenAI board.

7. Professor Manuela Veloso is the head of J.P. Morgan AI Research and Herbert A. Simon University Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, known for her work in robotics and AI planning. Her expertise in both academia and industry would be instrumental in bridging the gap between research and real-world applications at OpenAI.

8. Lisa Nelson is an investor, independent board member and former co-founder and managing director of Microsoft’sMSFT -1% venture arm, M12. Given her rich background of advising and investing in startups, she would bring valuable experience in strategy, innovation and business development to OpenAI.

9. Rana el Kaliouby, Ph.D. is the co-founder and CEO of Affectiva, an AI platform that bridges the gap between humans and machines. As a pioneer in the field of Emotion AI, her commitment to humanizing technology would be a powerful addition to the board.

10. Kieran Snyder is the co-founder and CEO of Textio, a language analysis platform that uses machine learning and natural language processing to help organizations create more effective and inclusive communications. Her background in computational linguistics combined with her commitment to creating more equitable outcomes through AI would be an impactful addition to OpenAI’s board

.

[Silent Type]

1. Haven't been overly concerned about AI, but I find women tend to be more ethical in these

type things. So the more, the better.

[ancianita]

2. Absolutely. But there's also a story of the ethical men behind London's DeepMind, which Google acquired.

In 2014, Larry Page overheard Peter Thiel and Elon Musk (2/3 of the PayPal mafia) talking about DeepMind on a private jet, and Page decided Google would beat them at acquiring it.

He got Jeff Dean, the godfather of Google's global search engine, to join him and Koray Kavukcuoglu (who oversees Torch AI, contracted with the U.S. military) to go to London to outbid other buyers, since DeepMind's founder/owners -- Demis Hassibis, Mustafa "Moose" Suleyman, and Shane Legg -- had come closer than any AI firm in their mission to develop AGI.

Jeff Dean asked Hassabis if he could take a look at the company's computer code. Hassibis balked, then agreed. Dean sat down with Kavukcuoglu, and after about 15 minutes with the code, Dean knew that DeepMind would fit with Google. At this point, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook had joined Google, Microsoft and Baidu in the race to acquire this talent.

London's DeepMind owners promised employees that part of their mission would remain -- Legg and Suleyman insisted that their contract with Google include two conditions that maintained their ideals:

1. A major contract clause barred Google from using any DeepMind technology for military purposes.
2. Google shall create an independent ethics board that would oversee use of DeepMind's AGI technology, whenever that might arrive.

They were adamant that the sale would not go through without that. Zuckerberg refused those terms.
Google accepted. It was the first time that Google had ever acquired another tech company on any terms but its own. Google bought the 50 person company for $650 million; it was a photo finish, since Facebook had just offered EACH of the 3 founders twice as much as Google bought the whole company for.

The Google/DeepMind contract still stands.