Photo Meredith Whittaker

Meredith Whittaker

President

Signal Foundation

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Artificial Intelligence
Cybersecurity

About Me

Meredith Whittaker is Signal's President. She has over 17 years of experience in tech, spanning industry, academia, and government. Prior to joining Signal, she was the Minderoo Research Professor at NYU, and served as the Faculty Director of the AI Now Institute which she co-founded. Prior to NYU, she worked at Google where she founded Google's Open Research Group, and co-founded M-Lab. She also helped lead organizing at Google and was a central organizer of the Google Walkout. She has advised the White House, the FCC, the City of New York, the European Parliament, and many other governments and civil society organizations on privacy, security, artificial intelligence, internet policy, and measurement. And she recently completed a term as Senior Advisor on AI to the Chair at the US Federal Trade Commission

Hear My Insights

Can We Have it “All”: Safe, Profitable, and Ethical AI?

AI is driving a paradigm shift in our use of technology. It harbors the capacity to overhaul entire industries, augment human potential, and address pressing global challenges. But to harness these opportunities, we must strike the optimal balance between innovation and responsibility. What are the main technical obstacles to overcome and major ethical questions to answer? How do we guarantee that AI's deployment benefits a broad spectrum of society, rather than a select few?

Concentrated Power, Surveillance, and AI: How to Build a Liveable Future While Fighting the Hype

Large tech corporations are leaning on AI to solidify their market positions. Their massive data—gathered and scraped via surveillance practices—and significant quantities of scarce compute infrastructures mean that only a few actors—the big tech giants based in the US and China—have the resources, economies of scale, and market access required to create, deploy, and profit from large scale AI systems. All others are swimming against the current. Happily, it doesn’t have to be this way. Here we explore how alternative models, small AI projects, and collaborative initiatives are crucial to a livable and equitable future. And why we won’t be able to create this future without firm pushback against the current US-centric Big Tech AI model.

AI, Trust and Media