Does the name Sneha Revanur mean nothing to you? This should soon change. At only 19 years old, the teenager is at the head ofEncode Justice, the main international youth movement fighting for ethical artificial intelligence. The student in political and economic sciences at the prestigious Stanford University (California) was able to impose the voice of zoomers (the generation born between 1997 and 2012) in discussions about artificial intelligence. The young woman thus appears in the list of the 100 most influential personalities in the field of AI in 2023 of the Time Magazine. She is one of the stars announced in the programming of VivaTechalongside Elon Musk, Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio, the two kings of deep learning.
Sneha Revanur fell into the technology pot right from birth. She grew up in Silicon Valley, in San Jose, California, south of the San Francisco Bay Area. Unsurprisingly, both of his parents work in the tech industry. His older sister too. The young woman became aware very early of the impacts of artificial intelligence on our lives.
An unexpected echo
When, at 15, she launched Encode Justice, she sought to mobilize young people against a proposed California law that planned to replace the cash bail system with a risk-based algorithm, known to contain racist bias. This mobilization campaign marked the first victory for Encode Justice, which now counts 1,000 high school and university students in its troops in the United States and in 30 countries around the world.
The explosion of generative artificial intelligence at the end of 2022, driven by the spectacular launch of ChatGPT, highlighted this teenager’s approach. The Anglo-Saxon press goes so far as to nickname her the “Greta Thunberg of AI”. Like the young Swede, she does not lack spirit. Nor eloquence. “I am obviously flattered by the comparison,” she smiles. The journalist who coined the nickname tried to draw an analogy between the emerging Encode Justice movement and the well-known climate movement [Friday for Future] “. Two teenage girls. Two female leaders of youth movements working for the future. But, according to her, the comparison stops there.
An optimistic vision
“Our strategies and the problems that concern us are different,” underlines the young woman who wants to impress people on the importance of legislating on AI. If Big Tech is producing high-performance algorithms at breakneck speed, international legislators are not lagging behind. “We are concerned about misinformation, there have been many reports of the risk of hallucinations [création de fausses informations par l’IA] of these models. People place a lot of trust in systems that produce false, misleading or exaggerated results, she points out. Regarding the next generation of AI, we fear their ability to assist terrorism, use biological weapons or carry out cyberattacks. We want to avoid empowering bad actors to do terrible things.” Not to mention the problem of algorithmic bias, manipulation in the run-up to the American presidential election and, obviously, the risks for the future of jobs.
But, according to Sneha Revanur, AI can accomplish great things. “Technology can help us accelerate the energy transition,” she hopes. Like anything, there are both risks and benefits.” The challenges to overcome are numerous and generative artificial intelligence still promises many surprises, good and bad. “As a young person, my role is to be optimistic, if not us, who will be? I envision a world in which we are able to protect humanity while advancing innovation,” she smiles. Encode Justice launched the platform last week AI 2030which offers 22 policy recommendations to world leaders to secure the technological future.