AI execs may be too out of touch to build for the general public

Tech leaders are flaunting how out of touch they are when they brag about using AI to connect with their families. Former Yahoo CEO and early Google engineer Marissa Mayer is catching a lot of flak for how she uses AI. In an interview about her new app Dazzle, an AI assistant that learns from your camera roll, Mayer poses what she believes is an impressive flex for the product: It helped her come up with three bullet points about her 10-year-old daughter for a birthday presentation at school, describing her as “empathetic, creative, and an animal lover.” It’s a vague description, like a generic horoscope — it could probably describe a lot of 10-year-olds.

Some onlookers, like progressive activist Leah Greenberg, marveled that “the fact that Marissa Mayer would voluntarily disclose this to a reporter is a pretty good demonstration of how deeply the culture of Silicon Valley has diverged from the rest of humanity.” Perhaps Mayer drew so much backlash because we have repeatedly observed sheltered billionaires suggest that we outsource child-rearing — one of life’s greatest tests of patience, humility, and kindness — to a computer that is incapable of understanding human emotion. We’ve been primed for this frustration. Last year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Bored Ape owner and late night host Jimmy Fallon on national