Meta withdraws controversial language model
With Galactica, Facebook’s parent company Meta has developed a new language model that is intended, among other things, to summarize scientific texts. But that doesn’t seem to be working as expected. The company took a demo offline again after just three days.
Many technology companies are currently chasing a trend: artificial intelligence (AI). Because if Google, Meta and Co. have their way, AI systems should make our everyday lives easier in the future. However, Meta has now found that this does not always work as planned.
The in-house language model Galactica was due to technical problems namely just three days online. Similar to other systems, it is based on a large vocabulary, with an algorithm constantly learning new things. Thanks to such models, AI systems have already written books or newspaper articles. .
Meta wants to summarize scientific texts with language model
However, the fact that these systems do not always function smoothly has now also become apparent to Facebook’s parent company, Meta. The company trained its Galactacia language model with over 48 million academic articles, books, lectures, websites and encyclopedias. The aim was to summarize scientific publications.
Among other things, the model can solve math problems, generate Wikipedia articles, map molecules and proteins, and write scientific code. But there was one challenge Galactica didn’t overcome: distinguishing between facts and lies. Because first public tests made it clear that the AI invented adventurous texts about bears in space.
Galactica: Algorithm can’t tell facts from lies
The problem with this is that the system has a hard time distinguishing between truth and lies. People who are not deep into the subject complexes receive scientific papers that contain little truth. At the same time, however, Meta names authors on whom the algorithm is based. For laypeople, this results in legitimate texts without a solid foundation.
Meta then withdrew the public version after just three days and wants to continue working on the many reported problems. In addition to the lies that Galactica spreads, it also fails to generate a synopsis of “problematic” issues for the meta – including racism and AIDS, for example.
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