AI’s Drawbacks: Environmental Damage, Bad Benchmarks, Outsourcing Thinking — With Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna
Big Technology Podcast
05/14/25
•62m
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Emily Bender is a computational linguistics professor at the University of Washington. Alex Hanna is the Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute. Bender and Hanna join Big Technology to discuss what their new book, “The AI‐Con," which they describe as the layered ways today’s language‐model boom obscures environmental costs, labor harms, and shaky science. Tune in to hear a lively back‐and‐forth on whether chatbots are useful tools or polished parlor tricks. We also cover benchmark gaming, data‐center water use, doomerism, and more. Hit play for a candid debate that will leave you smarter about where generative AI really stands — and what comes next.
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Previous Episode
Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover: 1) OpenAI has another new top executive structure 2) What is Sam Altman's role now? 3) Who is Fidji Simo, OpenAI's new CEO of Applications 4) OpenAI abandons total for-profit conversion 5) Microsoft's demands on OpenAI 6) Could Apple replace Google as the default search with AI? 7) Is it an either or decision? 8) Could Apple make AI companies bid for the default search position? 9) Everyone is cheating using ChatGPT in college 10) Do people need to change or does the education system need to change?
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Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice.
Want a discount for Big Technology on Substack? Here’s 25% off for the first year: https://www.bigtechnology.com/subscribe?coupon=0843016b
Questions? Feedback? Write to: bigtechnologypodcast@gmail.com
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Next Episode
Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover: 1) ChatGPT ranks No. 5 among all websites worldwide 2) ChatGPT is the only website among the top ranked by SimilarWeb that is growing 3) How do chatbots get information if they replace the web? 4) Grok's 'white genocide' messaging campaign 5) What's in a system prompt, with a look inside Grok's 6) The truth about Timothée Chalamet 7) Filing stories directly into ChatGPT? 8) Meta slams into big problems in its Llama AI program 9) Does it matter if scaling is done? 10) IBM survey shows generative ROI is hard to come by despite interest 11) Cohere's revenue trouble 12) Perplexity integrates with Paypal 13) A look at the event calendar ahead
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Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice.
Want a discount for Big Technology on Substack? Here’s 25% off for the first year: https://www.bigtechnology.com/subscribe?coupon=0843016b
Questions? Feedback? Write to: bigtechnologypodcast@gmail.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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