@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2025-10-02 10:22:21
Day 8 (a bit late): Timnit Gebru
Academic authors are authors too, and there are a bunch of people I deeply respect both in my fields and adjacent.
Gebru is someone I have huge respect for because she stood up for her (mild, completely reasonable) principles to the point of losing her job on Google's AI ethics team (since disbanded entirely), and then went ahead and founded an independent research institute to continue doing AI ethics research.
Why was she fired? Because she insisted on publishing her "Stochastic Parrots" paper after it passed Google internal review only to have extra nonstandard scrutiny applied at the last minute. Why did Google want to suppress her paper (which included an academic co-author)? Because it expressed valid criticisms of the large language models fad, and Google was planning to make money off that fad. Personally, I don't think I'd hire an "AI ethics" team only to then try to suppress their publications, and Google seems to now agree, having scrapped the team (during the initial furor, Timnit's boss also effectively quit to support her).
That "Stochastic Parrots" paper? Indeed, it predicts the core underlying problems with large language models that lead to so many of their user-side harms today. You can read it here: #20AuthorsNoMen
@Techmeme@techhub.social2025-10-02 09:46:34
Source: HR software company Gusto paid ~$600M to acquire Guideline, which offers 401(k) plans to SMBs; Guideline raised $340M and had a $1.15B valuation in 2021 (TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/01/sources-g…
@tinoeberl@mastodon.online2025-12-01 23:00:03
Spanne der Bruttospeicherleistung von #Batteriespeichern pro Inbetriebnahmejahr von Unternehmen in Deutschland mit Stand vom 29.11.2025.
373 Datensätze ohne #Batteriespeichertechnologie herausgefiltert.
Der Datenbestand enthält unplausible Datensätze.
…
@matematico314@social.linux.pizza2026-01-01 05:32:49
Muito atrasado, só agora fui ver meu #recap do #YouTube. Muito engraçado saber que a música que eu mais ouvi foi "A Vaca de Fogo", de #MadreDeus.
@Techmeme@techhub.social2025-12-02 03:10:54
AWS and Google Cloud announce a jointly built multicloud networking solution and a new open interoperability spec; AWS plans a rollout with Azure later in 2026 (Ryan Christoffel/9to5Mac)
https://9to5mac.com/2025/12/01/amazon-googles-new-interco…
@tinoeberl@mastodon.online2025-12-01 22:23:03
Spanne der Bruttospeicherleistung von #Batteriespeichern pro Inbetriebnahmejahr von Privatpersonen in Deutschland mit Stand vom 29.11.2025.
373 Datensätze ohne #Batteriespeichertechnologie herausgefiltert.
Der Datenbestand enthält unplausible Datensätze.
@Techmeme@techhub.social2026-01-01 22:10:43
Brookfield is launching a cloud company called Radiant and a new $10B AI fund, and plans to acquire up to $100B in land, data centers, and power assets for AI (Miles Kruppa/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/brookfield-start-cloud-b…
@tinoeberl@mastodon.online2025-12-30 22:56:04
@Techmeme@techhub.social2025-12-31 17:50:39
Sources: Uber is in talks to acquire the parking space reservation app SpotHero; the parking app was last valued at $290M (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/uber-considers-deal-parking-app-spothero
@Techmeme@techhub.social2025-11-01 06:10:58
Vodafone agrees to acquire Skaylink, a German company specializing in managing cloud deployments on Microsoft Azure and AWS, for €175M from PE firm Waterland (Yamini Kalia/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/vodafone-buy-german-clo…