Meredith Whittaker, Winner of 2024 Helmut Schmidt Future Prize


"And while new frameworks and architectures have emerged in the intervening decade, this paradigm still holds: it’s the data and the compute that determine who “wins” and who loses. 

"What we call AI today grew out of this toxic model – and must be understood primarily as a way of marketing the derivatives of mass surveillance and concentrated platform and computational power. 

"Currently, there are only a small handful of firms – based in the US and China – who have the resources to create and deploy large-scale AI from start to finish. These are the cloud and platform monopolies – those that established themselves early on the backs of the surveillance business model. 

"Everyone else is licensing infrastructure, scrambling for data, and struggling to find market fit without massive cloud infrastructures through which AI can be licensed to customers or massive platforms into which AI can be integrated as a feature or service touching billions of people."  

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