Hasnain says:

“And it wasn’t just the fault of Meta’s marketing team. Yann LeCun, a Turing Award winner and Meta’s chief scientist, defended Galactica to the end. On the day the model was released, LeCun tweeted: “Type a text and Galactica will generate a paper with relevant references, formulas, and everything.” Three days later, he tweeted: “Galactica demo is off line for now. It’s no longer possible to have some fun by casually misusing it. Happy?”

It's not quite Meta's Tay moment. Recall that in 2016, Microsoft launched a chatbot called Tay on Twitter—then shut it down 16 hours later when Twitter users turned it into a racist, homophobic sexbot. But Meta’s handling of Galactica smacks of the same naivete.

“Big tech companies keep doing this—and mark my words, they will not stop—because they can,” says Shah. “And they feel like they must—otherwise someone else might. They think that this is the future of information access, even if nobody asked for that future.””

Posted on 2022-11-19T22:39:03+0000