Meta, Yet Another Contender in the AI Rush?

Is Meta poised for this too?     Must this be VR oriented? 

Meta, Long an A.I. Leader, Tries Not to Be Left Out of the Boom  By The New York Times, February 8, 2023

Meta has been left out now that Silicon Valley is gripped with excitement by generative A.I., the name for technologies that generate text, images and other media on their own.

Credit: Michael Furler

Two weeks before a chatbot called ChatGPT appeared on the internet in November and wowed the world, Meta, the owner of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, unveiled a chatbot of its own.

Called Galactica, it was designed for scientific research. It could instantly write its own articles, solve math problems, generate computer code and annotate images.

Like ChatGPT, Galactica also played fast and loose with facts, making up mathematical proofs, misstating historical dates and spinning tall tales. One user coaxed the chatbot into talking about the history of bears in space. When asked who runs Silicon Valley, Galactica replied, "Steve Jobs."

But unlike OpenAI, the tiny San Francisco lab that made ChatGPT, Meta encountered an avalanche of complaints about Galactica's mishaps. After just three days, the company, which has faced scrutiny for spreading misinformation and hate speech through its social networking apps, removed Galactica from the internet.

From The New York Times    

OpenAI Has Hired an Army of Contractors to Make Basic Coding Obsolete

 Still premature, depending on definition of 'basic',   still considerable need to check and integrate codes.   Can see the need for labeling for training activity

OpenAI Has Hired an Army of Contractors to Make Basic Coding Obsolete  By Semafor, January 31, 2023

OpenAI has repeatedly noted the importance of outsourced labor in building its technology.

OpenAI, the company behind the chatbot ChatGPT, has ramped up its hiring around the world, bringing on roughly 1,000 remote contractors over the past six months in regions like Latin America and Eastern Europe, sources said.

About 60% were hired to do "data labeling." The other 40% are computer programmers who are creating data for OpenAI's models to learn software engineering tasks.

OpenAI appears to be building a dataset that includes not just lines of code, but also the human explanations behind them written in natural language.

With hundreds of programmers making a concerted effort to "teach" the models how to write basic code, the technology behind ChatGPT might be headed toward a new kind of software development.

From Semafor  

View Full Article