Why Meta’s latest large language model survived only three days online • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Meta’s latest large language model survived only three days online

#51

Post by seydor » Sat, Nov 19, 2022, 4:17 PM UTC

nolok wrote: post #34

seydor wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would urge him to put it back online, it is interesting and can be useful. Just don't make a press release about it, journalists ruin everything.

The problem is not journalist, it's about how Meta and LeCun presented it. They presented it as "you should trust what it says and use to write papers", then hid in the small lines "oh actually really don't do that". You can't have your cake and eat it AND complain about being called out on it.

> They presented it as "you should trust what it says

where ?

> The problem is not journalist,

What was the reason for the takedown

> You can't have your cake and eat it AND complain

I will agree to the extent in which Lecun's team , and other research teams need to leave corporates and go back to universities

> @Ylecun: When you have a tool at your disposal, you have to know what to use it for and how. E.g. a CNC machine will help you build a piece of furniture, but it won't design it for you. Galactica will help you write papers, but you still have to come up with the substance of the paper.

How is this unreasonable? Are random voters now reading scientific papers?

I sincerely hope they put it back online. It IS useful. I tried this in my very niche field and it did give me some directions and ideas for some review i am researching.

Re: Why Meta’s latest large language model survived only three days online

#52

Post by thedorkknight » Sat, Nov 19, 2022, 4:17 PM UTC

throwaway9870 wrote: post #4

"A fundamental problem with Galactica is that it is not able to distinguish truth from falsehood," In true science, it is exceptionally hard to distinguish truth from falsehood for many of the interesting subjects. It can take decades of work to reach consensus on what is "truth." Physics in the early 20th century is a great example of this debate.

They give the example of it "thinking" that the soviets sent bears to space. This is something that takes trivial research to see that it is based on nothing

Re: Why Meta’s latest large language model survived only three days online

#53

Post by seydor » Sat, Nov 19, 2022, 4:18 PM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #20

seydor wrote: post #14

Because some idiots can't read the disclaimer on the page telling them that the model is inaccurate It was still a great tool to brainstorm topics that dont exist, and useful as a companion app. Shame that academics can be so cringe now. People like emilymbender deserve to be called out as ethics-nazis That's the problem with Lecun's group working in facebook now: they have to sumbit to all kinds of corporate BS to a…

What was it a great tool for? Definitely not what it was marketed for (access the world's knowledge). To me it seems it was about as significant and useful as IBM Watson playing Jeopardy.

brainstorming for research fields that don't have substantial review papers / wiki pages

How i know: I tried it. It is discovery of citations and ideas you might not be aware of. Also a lot of garbage, but any scientist worth her salt can weed that out. It's the best thing to happen since google scholar and scihub

Re: Why Meta’s latest large language model survived only three days online

#54

Post by iudqnolq » Sat, Nov 19, 2022, 4:18 PM UTC

rossdavidh wrote: post #40

I think these efforts point out something valuable, although probably not in the way the creators intended. Lots of people use "markers" of reliability, like citing your sources or making sentences with a certain kind of structure or tone, to estimate trustworthiness. These articles make it clear that it is entirely possible to have those markers, but be entirely incorrect in your assertions about the topic in questi…

Yes, and the way this is corrected against is with reputation. Do that, and no one will trust you again. Seems to be working here.

Edit: A better way of putting this is that the risk of doing something is a combination of the odds of being caught and the consequences of being caught. It's much harder to catch a deliberately lying paper author than a mistaken one, so we make the punishment much higher to compensate.

Re: Why Meta’s latest large language model survived only three days online

#55

Post by layer8 » Sat, Nov 19, 2022, 4:21 PM UTC

throwaway9870 wrote: post #30

yummypaint wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not being able to difinitively identify truth is different from not attempting to identify it.

Attempting to identify truth is called the scientific method.

The problem is that Galactica spits out obvious nonsense while being completely unaware of that. Okay, the real problem is that it also spits out nonobvious nonsense, where the human reader may also be unaware of it, along with Galactica. The only thing it does reasonably well is to generate text that sounds plausible in tone and form.

Re: Why Meta’s latest large language model survived only three days online

#56

Post by layer8 » Sat, Nov 19, 2022, 4:25 PM UTC

FeepingCreature wrote: post #43

mytydev wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Science can't identify the truth. It can only identify what is NOT true. As our knowledge expands, we get closer to discovering the truth; but we can never be sure we've arrived.

Science can also not identify falsehoods, it can only shift confidence.

There’s still an asymmetry in that a single counterexample can destroy a theory.

Re: Why Meta’s latest large language model survived only three days online

#57

Post by AndrewKemendo » Sat, Nov 19, 2022, 4:29 PM UTC

At the end of the day it didn't blow people away and that's the real reason it failed to land. You can't release something like this on the heels of Stable Diffusion and not expect people to be underwhelmed. This is a user-centric design problem.

It actually takes experimentation and skill to get anything useful out of Galactica and you have to actually have some sense of prompt engineering principles for it to work. Lecun literally just made this point on Twitter [0] but fails to address why this design problem (ease of use) was the reason - instead claiming it was because people are being too rough.

Compare that to all the recent StableDiffusion/Vision Transformer demos where people with literally zero computer literacy can just type in a string of nonsense and get out something interesting. The barrier to entry to a "first meaningful paint" for stable diffusion is being able to speak English and having access to the internet. That's it.

Discussion about AI safety are always present when new FOSS AI tools come out. But when it "just works" and "works like magic" then those voices are drowned out with: "OMG it's the robot apocalypse, but check out this silly picture"

[1]https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1594001407958564864

Re: Why Meta’s latest large language model survived only three days online

#58

Post by tsimionescu » Sat, Nov 19, 2022, 4:29 PM UTC

seydor wrote: post #53

tsimionescu wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was it a great tool for? Definitely not what it was marketed for (access the world's knowledge). To me it seems it was about as significant and useful as IBM Watson playing Jeopardy.

brainstorming for research fields that don't have substantial review papers / wiki pages How i know: I tried it. It is discovery of citations and ideas you might not be aware of. Also a lot of garbage, but any scientist worth her salt can weed that out. It's the best thing to happen since google scholar and scihub

How would a system that generates false information (especially likely for fields that are not well represented in the training set, based on the site) help with brainstorming for practitioners in that field?

Re: Why Meta’s latest large language model survived only three days online

#59

Post by seydor » Sat, Nov 19, 2022, 4:31 PM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #26

seydor wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they would market it as a source of accurate text They did not. IIRC there was a disclaimer in the page that the text is innacurate and that NNs hallucinate. But tweets be tweeting

They did market it as that, and then added a disclaimer amounting to "but it's not fit for purpose". Furthermore, that disclaimer was only present on the Mission page, not the front page or any other. The front page just said this [0]: > Get Started > Galactica is an AI trained on humanity's scientific knowledge. You can use it as a new interface to access and manipulate what we know about the universe. > [bunch of e…

I don't understand why you assume that what you describe is either unacceptable or not worthy of existing on the net. Sounds like a perfectly useful instrument to me

(Also I may be wrong but i think the disclaimer was in articles. I don't recall visiting the mission page ever)

Re: Why Meta’s latest large language model survived only three days online

#60

Post by trompetenaccoun » Sat, Nov 19, 2022, 4:32 PM UTC

fullshark wrote: post #44

rossdavidh wrote: post #40

I think these efforts point out something valuable, although probably not in the way the creators intended. Lots of people use "markers" of reliability, like citing your sources or making sentences with a certain kind of structure or tone, to estimate trustworthiness. These articles make it clear that it is entirely possible to have those markers, but be entirely incorrect in your assertions about the topic in questi…

It took me an embarrassingly long time to understand that the previous marker of authority regarding news: "published in a newspaper" completely lost all its meaning as the blogosphere exploded, and publishing costs on the internet went to near zero. Kind of why I find the pearl clutching over substack hilarious, as if having a third party website sell ads on a writer's blogpost signals they are much more worthy of a…

>Get ready for a lot of "we used AI to write an academic paper and it got published in this journal" stories.

Already happened, and the linked example is far from the only case: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01436-7

As someone who used to work in science, I feel the general public doesn't have much of an idea how flawed the peer-review system is in practice. Low quality journals that simply print anything aside, this was an issue long before such language models became good enough to write papers, because humans are perfectly capable of producing nonsense research without the aid of machines. I'm not sure what philosophies/religions will replace the current cult but ultimately it's probably a good thing that this blind belief in such institutions gets eroded. They should never had had that much power over people's minds to begin with.