Meredith Whittaker

@meredithmeredith.bsky.social

149488 Followers 1034 Following

President of Signal, Chief Advisor to AI Now Institute

A twitter post from some crypto guy named @mert that says "bro how do i mute all political posts on this app holy hell it has turned into reddit"
Screenshot of a paragraph from the linked book review, which reads: "His central contention is that the Freikorps soldiers were afraid of women. Indeed, not just afraid, they were deeply hostile to them, and their ultimate goal was to murder them. Women, in their view, came in only two varieties: Red and White. The White woman was the nurse, the mother, the sister. She was distinguished above all else by her sexlessness. The Red woman, on the other hand, was a whore and a Communist. She was a kind of distillation of sexuality, threatening to engulf the male in a whirlpool of bodily and emotional ecstasy. This, of course, was the woman the Freikorps soldier wished to kill, because she endangered his identity, his sense of self as a fixed and bounded being. In this manner Mr. Theweleit links the Freikorps soldiers' fantasies of women to their practical life as illegal anti-Communist guerillas: the Republic had to be destroyed because it empowered the lascivious Red woman, while it failed to protect the White woman's sexual purity."
Screenshot of a quote tweet of Tim Cook, from 2024. Tim's tweet says "The era of spatial computing has arrived! Apple Vision Pro is availble in the US on February 2. My quote tweet says, "The thing is,,, no one wants a plastic box on their face"
1980s newscaster with a graphic that says "keyboard design"
A screenshot from a 1980s educational video on Unix that has nested blue, then green, then red cubes, overwritten with the text: "The UNIX System" making computers easier to use"
Screenshot of headline and first two paragraphs of linked article, saying "Griffin Says GenAI Fails to Help Hedge Funds Beat Markets. Generative artificial intelligence isn’t helping hedge funds produce market-beating returns and isn’t meaningfully impacting the industry so far, according to billionaire Ken Griffin. “With GenAI there are clearly ways it enhances productivity, but for uncovering alpha it just falls short,” Griffin, the founder of hedge fund giant Citadel, said Wednesday at the JPMorgan Robin Hood Investors Conference in New York."
Screenshot of an ebay listing that's ended for Encientes Klipsch Cornwall 3 speakers, which cost 2990 Euro and ended Mon, Sept 8. With a photo of one of the speakers.
An illustration of me, and the headline: "AI agents are coming for your privacy, warns Meredith Whittaker The Signal Foundation’s president worries they will also blunt competition and undermine cyber-security"
Business Insider headline saying: "Sam Altman says your ChatGPT therapy session might not stay private in a lawsuit By Robert Scammell"
A screenshot of an excerpt from the interview, which reads: "The world has been pretty chaotic for a while now, but it feels like in the last couple of years it has only sharpened. How important is Signal in this current moment? People want privacy. People are creeped out. People are uneasy. People recognize that the status quo in tech is not safe or savory, and for whatever reason they are trying to find, and in the case of Signal are finding, alternatives that actually give them meaningful privacy. Anyone who does human rights work or investigative journalism understands that in many cases, it is the difference between life and death. We know throughout history that centralized power constitutes such power via information asymmetry. The more they know, the more stable and lasting their power is. This is the type of domination through knowledge that makes or breaks empires. Ultimately, we are in a world in which the power to know us has been ceded to the tech industry. So ensuring [privacy] in a world where the authority to know us has been ceded to private actors who may or may not cooperate with one or another regime, who may choose to use that data to manipulate or to harm us or to exclude us from access to resources, is existentially important. This is the basis on which I claim, without flinching, that Signal is the most important technical infrastructure in the world right now."
Guardian headline saying, "‘It’s terrifying’: WhatsApp AI helper mistakenly shares user’s number Chatbot tries to change subject after serving up unrelated user’s mobile to man asking for rail firm helpline"
Image of a screenshot of news headline, saying, "WhatsApp is getting ads using personal data from Instagram and Facebook Forced Consent & Consent Bypass / 16 June 2025 Meta announced today that it also wants to introduce ads on WhatsApp, which will be based on personal data from Facebook and Instagram. This further integrates WhatsApp into other Meta services - an originally independent app, which initially was available for just $1 per year without ads or data usage. This also means that Meta is consolidating its social networking monopoly. EU law was actually supposed to prevent this."
Picture of me advertising the event
A screenshot of a DM I, Meredith, received that says, "I'm creating a training set for an AI that will determine personal characteristics based on facial images. I'm just missing your relationship status."
What’s a technology that you think is overhyped? I’m going to give a sideways answer to this, which is that the venture capital business model needs to be understood as requiring hype. You can go back to the Netscape IPO, and that was the proof point that made venture capital the financial lifeblood of the tech industry. Venture capital looks at valuations and growth, not necessarily at profit or revenue. So you don’t actually have to invest in technology that works, or that even makes a profit, you simply have to have a narrative that is compelling enough to float those valuations. So you see this repetitive and exhausting hype cycle as a feature in this industry. A couple of years ago, you would have been asking me about the metaverse, then last year, you would have asked me about Web3 and crypto, and for each of these inflection points there’s an Andreessen Horowitz manifesto. It’s not simply that one piece of technology is overhyped, it’s that hype is a necessary ingredient of the current business ecosystem of the tech industry. We should examine how often the financial incentive for hype is rewarded without any real social returns, without any meaningful progress in technology, without these tools and services and worlds ever actually manifesting. That’s key to understanding the growing chasm between the narrative of techno-optimists and the reality of our tech-encumbered world.
Cover of Electronic Civil Disobedience and Other Unpopular Ideas by Critical Art Ensemble.
A photo of a pumpkin pie from above with the Signal logo drawn on it
A screenshot highlighting a quote from Deleuze and Guattari's "Anti-Oedipus" that says, "Desire does not "want" revolution, it is revolutionary in its own right, as though involuntarily, by wanting what it wants. "
Talk description: "Feelings are Facts: Love, Privacy, and the Politics of Intellectual Shame. Meredith Whittaker. A debut of new research and analysis, focused on emotions and the affective register--love! shame! intimacy!"
**Epistemic authority **fungible data The standardized-from-above vs. the living singular particular star
Mind the Gap: Foundation Models and the Covert Proliferation of Military Intelligence, Surveillance, and Targeting Heidy Khlaaf, Sarah Myers West, Meredith Whittaker View PDF HTML (experimental) Discussions regarding the dual use of foundation models and the risks they pose have overwhelmingly focused on a narrow set of use cases and national security directives-in particular, how AI may enable the efficient construction of a class of systems referred to as CBRN: chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons. The overwhelming focus on these hypothetical and narrow themes has occluded a much-needed conversation regarding present uses of AI for military systems, specifically ISTAR: intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition, and reconnaissance. These are the uses most grounded in actual deployments of AI that pose life-or-death stakes for civilians, where misuses and failures pose geopolitical consequences and military escalations. This is particularly underscored by novel proliferation risks specific to the widespread availability of commercial models and the lack of effective approaches that reliably prevent them from contributing to ISTAR capabilities. In this paper, we outline the significant national security concerns emanating from current and envisioned uses of commercial foundation models outside of CBRN contexts, and critique the narrowing of the policy debate that has resulted from a CBRN focus (e.g. compute thresholds, model weight release). We demonstrate that the inability to prevent personally identifiable information from contributing to ISTAR capabilities within commercial foundation models may lead to the use and proliferation of military AI technologies by adversaries. We also show how the usage of foundation models within military settings inherently expands the attack vectors of military systems and the defense infrastructures they interface with. We conclude that in order to secure military systems and limit the proliferation of AI
Tweet that says "Ordinary harms can be outweighed by ordinary benefits. What Hinton is worried about is existential risk.