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A12 TECHNOLOGY
Monday 18 July 2022

As AI language skills grow, so do

scientists’ concerns

calling for a more open ap-
proach as it tries to catch
up to the systems built by
Google and OpenAI, the
company that runs GPT-3.
"We've seen announce-
ment after announcement
after announcement of
people doing this kind of
work, but with very little
transparency, very little
ability for people to really
look under the hood and
peek into how these mod-
els work," said Joelle Pine-
Research engineer Teven Le Scao, who helped create the new au, managing director of
artificial intelligence language model called BLOOM, poses for Meta AI.
a photo, Monday, July 11, 2022, in New York. Competitive pressure to
Associated Press build the most eloquent or
By MATT O'BRIEN ting baked into customer informative system — and
AP Technology Writer service chatbots, Google profit from its applications
The tech industry's latest searches and "auto-com- — is one of the reasons
artificial intelligence con- plete" email features that that most tech companies
structs can be pretty con- finish your sentences for keep a tight lid on them
vincing if you ask them you. But most of the tech and don't collaborate on
what it feels like to be a companies that built them community norms, said
sentient computer, or may- have been secretive about Percy Liang, an associate
be just a dinosaur or squir- their inner workings, mak- computer science profes-
rel. But they're not so good ing it hard for outsiders to sor at Stanford who directs
— and sometimes danger- understand the flaws that its Center for Research on
ously bad — at handling can make them a source Foundation Models.
other seemingly straightfor- of misinformation, racism "For some companies this
ward tasks. and other harms. is their secret sauce," Liang
Take, for instance, GPT-3, a "They're very good at writ- said. But they are often also
Microsoft-controlled system ing text with the proficien- worried that losing control
that can generate para- cy of human beings," said could lead to irresponsible
graphs of human-like text Teven Le Scao, a research uses. As AI systems are in-
based on what it's learned engineer at the AI startup creasingly able to write
from a vast database of Hugging Face. "Something health advice websites,
digital books and online they're not very good at is high school term papers or
writings. It's considered being factual. It looks very political screeds, misinfor-
one of the most advanced coherent. It's almost true. mation can proliferate and
of a new generation of AI But it's often wrong." it will get harder to know
algorithms that can con- That's one reason a coali- what's coming from a hu-
verse, generate readable tion of AI researchers co- man or a computer.
text on demand and even led by Le Scao —- with Meta recently launched
produce novel images and help from the French gov- a new language model
video. ernment — launched a called OPT-175B that uses
Among other things, GPT-3 new large language mod- publicly available data —
can write up most any text el Tuesday that's supposed from heated commentary
you ask for — a cover let- to serve as an antidote to on Reddit forums to the ar-
ter for a zookeeping job, closed systems such as chive of U.S. patent records
say, or a Shakespearean- GPT-3. The group is called and a trove of emails from
style sonnet set on Mars. BigScience and their mod- the Enron corporate scan-
But when Pomona College el is BLOOM, for the Big- dal.
professor Gary Smith asked Science Large Open-sci- Meta says its openness
it a simple but nonsensical ence Open-access Multilin- about the data, code and
question about walking up- gual Language Model. Its research logbooks makes it
stairs, GPT-3 muffed it. main breakthrough is that it easier for outside research-
"Yes, it is safe to walk up- works across 46 languages, ers to help identify and miti-
stairs on your hands if you including Arabic, Spanish gate the bias and toxicity
wash them first," the AI re- and French — unlike most that it picks up by ingesting
plied. systems that are focused how real people write and
These powerful and power- on English or Chinese. communicate.
chugging AI systems, tech- It's not just Le Scao's group "It is hard to do this. We
nically known as "large lan- aiming to open up the are opening ourselves for
guage models" because black box of AI language huge criticism. We know
they've been trained on a models. Big Tech company the model will say things we
huge body of text and oth- Meta, the parent of Face- won't be proud of," Pineau
er media, are already get- book and Instagram, is also said.q