Meta AI System

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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Meta has built a massive new language AI—and it’s giving it away for free

Facebook’s parent company is inviting researchers to pore over and pick apart the flaws in its version of GPT-3

By Will Douglas    May 3, 2022

Meta’s AI lab has created a massive new language model that shares both the remarkable abilities and the harmful flaws of OpenAI’s pioneering neural network GPT-3. And in an unprecedented move for Big Tech, it is giving it away to researchers—together with details about how it was built and trained.

“We strongly believe that the ability for others to scrutinize your work is an important part of research. We really invite that collaboration,” says Joelle Pineau, a longtime advocate for transparency in the development of technology, who is now managing director at Meta AI.

Meta’s move is the first time that a fully trained large language model will be made available to any researcher who wants to study it. The news has been welcomed by many concerned about the way this powerful technology is being built by small teams behind closed doors.

“I applaud the transparency here,” says Emily M. Bender, a computational linguist at the University of Washington and a frequent critic of the way language models are developed and deployed.  

“It’s a great move,” says Thomas Wolf, chief scientist at Hugging Face, the AI startup behind BigScience, a project in which more than 1,000 volunteers around the world are collaborating on an open-source language model. “The more open models the better,” he says.  ...