Timnit Gebru: * For truly ethical AI, its research must be independent from big tech.*

The billionaire "philanthropists" of Big Tech dominate nonprofit fundraising, too, and they use this to shape society according to their ideas. Bill Gates set up much-criticized changes in education in the US, and made almost all leaders and experts in the field reluctant to criticize them because they hoped for funding from the Gates Foundation.

Gebru's point makes sense to me, but that alone won't make AI in the service of companies safe. Letting servers run by others dominate your computing activities is giving those others tyrannical power over you. That moral issue is separate from the one that Gebru raises.

If part of what attracts people to use the servers is AI that "works well", that AI will contribute to dominating people, even if there is nothing wrong about how that AI itself functions.