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Opinion | Why missing women’s voices at AI conferences should spark concern
- Although women make up only 30 per cent of those working in artificial intelligence globally, they are still under-represented at industry conferences
- A good mix of people ought to be included in conversations about AI for the technology to be developed in a responsible way that truly serves people
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At China’s largest AI event, the World Artificial Intelligence Conference, in July, 20 speakers were scheduled to speak. Only one of them, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) CEO Lisa Su, was a woman.
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This is disappointing but not surprising. Women in technology have long been sidelined, despite their significant contributions to the field.
Earlier this month, The New York Times drew flak for an article listing a Who’s Who of AI that mentioned 12 men and zero women.
With ChatGPT still the hottest topic in AI a year after its launch, it made sense that many of those featured in that article were associated with the chatbot’s developer, OpenAI, including CEO Sam Altman and the billionaires who injected funding into the company. Yet, Mira Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer who oversaw the roll-out of ChatGPT and DALL-E, was notably missing.
The list also glaringly omitted Fei-Fei Li, the Stanford scientist often called the “godmother of AI” for creating ImageNet, a large visual database that significantly accelerated the advancement of computer vision applications such as facial recognition, medical imaging and autonomous driving.
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At tech conferences, which are important for knowledge sharing, networking and collaboration, women are also conspicuously missing.
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