Meta (parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and more) announced a new AI advisory council that’s supposed to help guide the company’s decision making around AI and other new tech.
The group’s exact role sounds a little fuzzy — it will meet occasionally and share insights and recommendations. In an internal memo that was obtained by Bloomberg , Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the council is being created at an important time, as the company is looking at opportunities in AI and the metaverse.
This group consists of four business executives, including Stripe co-founder and CEO Patrick Collison and Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke. But, as Dominic-Madori Davis, Amanda Silberling, and Kyle Wiggers point out in a piece for TechCrunch, every single member of the council is a white man .
That’s not to criticize of the individual executives or suggest they don’t belong on the council. But the selection of these four people — and only these four people — does suggest a relatively narrow, blinkered view of who gets to have a say in the direction of AI at one of the biggest and most important tech companies in the world, especially as we’ve seen time and again that AI can reflect the limitations and the biases of the people who create it and the data it’s trained on.
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