Meta releases beefed-up AI models

CALIFORNIA

Facebook parent Meta Platforms unveiled a new set of artificial intelligence systems on April 18 that are powering what CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls “the most intelligent AI assistant that you can freely use.”

But as Zuckerberg's crew of amped-up Meta AI agents, their bizarre exchanges exposed the ongoing limitations of even the best generative AI technology.

While Meta is saving the most powerful of its AI models, called Llama 3, for later, on April 18 it publicly released two smaller versions of the same Llama 3 system and said it's now baked into the Meta AI assistant feature in Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

AI language models are trained on vast pools of data that help them predict the most plausible next word in a sentence, with newer versions typically smarter and more capable than their predecessors. Meta's newest models were built with 8 billion and 70 billion parameters — a measurement of how much data the system is trained on. A bigger, roughly 400 billion-parameter model is still in training.

“The vast majority of consumers don’t candidly know or care too much about the underlying base model, but the way they will experience it is just as a much more useful, fun and versatile AI assistant,” said Nick Clegg, Meta's president of global affairs, in an interview.

Some people found the earlier Llama 2 model — released less than a year ago — to be “a little stiff and sanctimonious sometimes in not responding to what were often perfectly innocuous or innocent prompts and questions,” he said.

But in loosening up, Meta's AI agents also were spotted this week posing as humans with made-up life experiences. An official Meta AI chatbot inserted itself into a conversation in a private Facebook group for Manhattan moms, claiming that it, too, had a child in the New York City school district. Confronted by group members, it later apologized before the comments disappeared, according to a series of screenshots shown to The Associated Press.

“Apologies for the mistake! I'm just a large language model, I don't have experiences or children,” the chatbot told the group.

One group member, Aleksandra Korolova who also happens to study AI said it was clear that the agent didn't know how to differentiate a helpful response from one that would be seen as insensitive, disrespectful or meaningless.

Meta said in a written statement on April 18 that “this is new technology and it may not always return the response we intend, which is the same for all generative AI systems.” The company said it is constantly working to improve the features.

The tech industry and academia introduced some 149 large AI systems trained on massive datasets, more than double the year before, according to a Stanford University survey.

They may eventually hit a limit, said Nestor Maslej, a research manager for Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.

“I think it’s been clear that if you scale the models on more data, they can become increasingly better," he said. “Yet they still cannot plan well. They’re still making mistakes in reasoning.”

For the flood of businesses trying to adopt generative AI, language models, in particular, have been used to power customer service chatbots, write reports and financial insights and summarize long documents.

Unlike other model developers selling their AI services to other businesses, Meta is largely designing its AI products for consumers — those using its advertising-fueled social networks.