From Wired, this is Uncanny Valley, The Big Interview.

I'm Katie Drummond.

When Meredith Whitaker was an undergraduate, studying rhetoric, literature, and psychoanalytic theory at UC Berkeley,

she probably wouldn't have predicted her now storied career in tech.

But in 2006, the broke recent grad needed a job, so she uploaded her resume onto

Monster.com. In between interviews with publishing houses, she was contacted by Google for an

entry-level customer support gig. That role evolved into a long and winding upward trajectory before

her dramatic departure after 13 years. Maybe she didn't predict all of that,

but almost a decade before any of us heard about ChatGPT,

Whitaker was predicting something else.

AI was worth taking a closer look at.

Her interest, skepticism, and thoughtful perspective

on the ethics of AI technology produced friends and detractors,

quickly catapulting her into a global thought

leader. And while she started her career at Google, the most Silicon Valley of Silicon

Valley companies, she's now the first ever president of the Signal Foundation, a nonprofit whose

flagship product is an encrypted messaging platform used by millions of people around the world.

Among those people, of course, are the Trump administration officials responsible for Signalgate earlier this year,

which catapulted the foundation and Whitaker to the very forefront of the political and cultural zeitgeist.

Meredith Whitaker, welcome to the big interview. Thank you for being here.

I'm happy to be here. Nice to see you, Katie. Nice to see you too. So brace yourself, because we always start these conversations with a little warm-up. I'm going to ask you some very fast questions. Are you ready? I am. Okay. Mountains or beach? Mountains.

What's the most overhyped AI buzzword right now?

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