> She probably had the epiphany that life is short and she's already rich.

This is a very optimistic take. Most people don’t take this route, so without evidence I don’t think it should be a first guess.

No information does not mean “everything was good”. Usually the opposite.

She made Meta the most serious of all the ad platforms on transparency, then. I work in the industry and Meta led the field then in public ad libraries, political restrictions, mandatory ad disclosures, etc.

> This comes at a time when there is huge pushback against all AI companies due to, in large part, ethical concerns.

I don't think ethics is fueling the outrage. It's people not wanting big noisy data centers close to their communities, driving up utility costs. Nobody would care if these things stood in Africa. Just like people don't want wind turbines close by but have no issue with them being abroad or in $remote_location or uranium mines polluting a far away country.

An aside, but what does "spherically awful" mean?

People say this, like "oh you'll never get a job in this industry again!" but seem to ignore that these incidents count as professional experience. It's possible that she was screened on the Rohingya situation when she was interviewing for the position, or mentioned it when she was asked about challenging or conflicting narratives she received from the executives. It's likely that her response was what qualified her for the job at OpenAI, there were probably hundreds of candidates that had never even come close to that level of damage control.

Again, look at Sam Altman and tell me with a straight face that he's hiring goody-two-shoes to fill these seats. He knows where the puck is headed, OpenAI's use by the state will be ugly and they need "ethicists" to help assuage the PR disaster. Considering that Meta's still afloat, she didn't completely abdicate her responsibility there. She might be just what OpenAI needs to avoid being lambasted for military and surveillance use.

From everything I've read in Careless People, basically everything people like us complained about with Facebook was already known internally, people raised concerns about it, and Zuck brushed them off because he is, ultimately, a petty tyrant who wants nothing more than to be loved, and who has surrounded himself with people who are willing to sell that love for power.

Also, you should read Careless People, if only because Facebook is trying its darnedest to censor the author.

As for OpenAI, I already hated the company pre-Sam Altman takeover because AI safety seemed like an excuse to brush away ethics concerns (e.g. "stealing training data is fine because if we don't withhold model weights the model might do something evil"). Post-Sam, I hate the company because they are now ignoring both the AI safety and ethics concerns.

...if you're wondering what the difference is, AI safety is roughly "making sure the AI doesn't do something bad" and AI ethics is "making sure we don't do something bad making the AI". There's a bit of a rivalry between the two, mainly because the former group managed to present their concerns in more business-palatable ways and thus won all the CxO level arguments. Even the most decelerationist AI safety takes are ultimately criti-hype: OpenAI's model breaking containment and hacking HuggingFace is an awful safety outcome, but it's also good marketing for an industry beleaguered by bubble concerns. You can't turn "AI is trained on stolen data" into hype.

Wow. Someone could be "chief ethicist at Meta" under Zuckerberg for 6 years, but couldn't make it even a single year under Altman.

That's an interesting data point.

Strangely, a few years ago, Facebook hired a rabbi and appointed him "Director of Responsible Innovation."[0]

He did an interview on Search Engine that I thought was interesting,[1] but it definitely seemed like there was more to the story than just, "Facebook needed to be ethical, and this guy was so good at ethics that he decided to help out."

[0] https://chochmat.org/rabbi-zvika-krieger/

[1] https://www.searchengine.show/what-does-it-feel-like-to-beli...

This 100%.

Even in the target-rich environment of late-stage kleptocratic surveillance capitalism, it is hard to pick out a less ethical firm which has done more moral and direct harm, to more people, with as durable a record of defying all attempts and internal and external at harm reduction.

Never use their products. Never partner. Never participate.