10 ms·

I'm blown away with just how open the Llama team at Meta is. It is nice to see that they are not only giving access to the models, but they at the same time are

by opdahl 2y ago

I'm blown away with just how open the Llama team at Meta is. It is nice to see that they are not only giving access to the models, but they at the same time are open about how they built them. I don't know how the future is going to go in the terms of models, but I sure am grateful that Meta has taken this position, and are pushing more openness.

nickpsecurity 2y ago
Do they tell you what training data they use for alignment? As in, what biases they intentionally put in the system they’re widely deploying?
- warkdarrior 2y ago
  Do you have some concrete example of biases in their models? Or are you just fishing for something to complain about?
  - ericjmorey 2y ago
    Even without intentionally biasing the model, without knowing the biases that exist in the training data, they're just biased black boxes that come with the overhead of figuring out how it's biased. All data is biased, there's no avoiding that fact.
    - slt2021 2y ago
      bias is some normative lens that some people came up with, but it is purely subjective and is a social construct, that has roots in the area of social justice and has nothing to do with the LLM. the proof is that all critics of AI/LLM have never ever produced a single "unbiased" model. If unbiased model does not exist (at least I never seen an AI/LLM sceptics community produce one), then the concept of bias is useless. Just a fluffy word that does not mean anything
      - semi-extrinsic 2y ago
        If you forget about the social justice stuff for a minute, there are many other types of bias relevant for an LLM. One example is US-centric bias. If I ask the LLM a question where the answer is one thing in the US and another thing in Germany, you can't really de-bias the model. But ideally you can have it request more details in order to give a good answer.
        Al-Khwarizmi 2y ago
        Yes, but that bias has been present in everything related to computers for decades. As someone from outside the US, it is quite common to face annoyances like address fields expecting addresses in US format, systems misbehaving and sometimes failing silently if you have two surnames, or accented characters in your personal data, etc. Years go by, tech gets better, but these issues don't go away, they just reappear in different places. It's funny how some people seem to have discovered this kind of bias and started getting angry with LLMs, which are actually quite OK in this respect. Not saying that it isn't an issue that should be addressed, just that some people are using it as an excuse to get indignant at AI and it doesn't make much sense. Just like the people who get indignant at AI because ChatGPT collects your input and uses it for training - what do they think social networks have been doing with their input in the last 20 years?
        slt2021 2y ago
        agree with you. all arguments about supposed bias fall flat when you start asking question about ROI of the "debiasing work". When you calculate $$$ required to de-bias a model, for example to make LLM recognize Syrian phone numbers: in compute and labor, and compare it to the market opportunity than the ROI is simply not there. There is a good reason why LLMs are English-specific - because it is the largest market with biggest number of highest paying users for such LLM. If there is no market demand in "de-biased" model that covers the cost of development, then trying to spend $$$ on de-biasing is pure waste of resources
        slt2021 2y ago
        What you call bias, I call simply a representation of a training corpus. There is no broad agreement on how to quantify a bias of the model, other than try one-shot prompts like your "who is the most hated Austrian painter?". If there was no Germany-specific data in the training corpus - it is not fair to expect LLM to know anything about Germany. You can check a foundation model from Chinese LLM researchers, and you will most likely see Sino-centric bias just because of the training corpus + synthetic data generation was focused on their native/working language, and their goal was to create foundation model for their language. I challenge any LLM sceptics - instead of just lazily poking holes in models - create a supposedly better model that reduces bias and lets evaluate your model with specific metrics
  - nickpsecurity 2y ago
    Google’s and OpenAI often answered far-left, Progressive, and atheist. Google’s was censoring white people at one point. Facebook seems to espouse similar values. They’ve funded work to increase those values. Many mention topics relevant to these things in their papers in the bias or alignment sections. These political systems don’t represent the majority of the world. They might not even represent half the U.S.. People relying on these A.I.’s might want to know if the A.I.’s are being intentionally trained to promote their creators’ views and/or suppress dissenters’ views. Also, people from multiple sides of the political spectrum should review such data to make sure it’s balanced.
    - mistrial9 2y ago
      this provocative parent-post may or may not be accurate, but what is missing IMHO is any characterization of the question asked or other context of use.. lacking that basic part to the inquiry, this statement alone is clearly amateurish, zealous and as said, provocative. Fighting in words is too easy! like falling off a log, as they say.. in politics it is almost unavoidable. Please, not start fires. All that said yes, there are legitimate questions and there is social context. This forum is worth better questions.
      - nickpsecurity 2y ago
        I don’t have time to reproduce them. Fortunately, it’s easy for them to show how open and fair they are by publishing all training data. They could also publish the unaligned version or allow 3rd-party alignment. Instead, they’re keeping it secret. That’s to conceal wrongdoing. Copyright infringement more than politics but still.
      - sunaookami 2y ago
        >This forum is worth better questions That's not for you to decide if some question is "worth". At least for OpenAI and Anthropic it is a fact that these models are pre-censored by the US government: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/08/29/openai-and-anthropic-agree-to-let-us-ai-safety-institute-test-models.html https://www.cnbc.com/2024/08/29/openai-and-anthropic-agree-t...
    - 2y ago
  - troupo 2y ago
    The concrete example is that Meta opted everyone on their platform by default into providing content for their models without any consent. The source and the quality of training data is important without looking for specific examples of a bias.
  - boppo1 2y ago
    Whenever I try to BDSM ERP with llama it changes subject to sappy stuff about how 'everyone involved lived happily ever after'. It probably wouldn't be appropriate to post here. Definitely has some biases though.
thefourthchime 2y ago
They have a hose of ad money and have nothing to lose doing this. You can’t say that for the other guys.
- talldayo 2y ago
  I can absolutely say that about Google and Apple.
  - doubtfuluser 2y ago
    For Apple - maybe, but they also recently open sourced some of their models. For Google: they host and want to make money on the models by you using them on their platform. Meta has no interest in that but directly benefits from advancements on top of Llama.
- yunwal 2y ago
  > They have a hose of ad money and have nothing to lose doing this. If I didn’t have context I’d assume this was about Google.
  - KeplerBoy 2y ago
    But Google has everything to lose doing this. LLMs are a threat to their most viable revenue stream.
    - phkahler 2y ago
      >> But Google has everything to lose doing this. LLMs are a threat to their most viable revenue stream. Just to nit pick... Advertising is their revenue stream. LLMs are a threat to search, which is what they offer people in exchange for ad views/clicks.
      - grahamj 2y ago
        To nit pick even more: LLMs democratize search. They’re a threat to Google because they may allow anyone to do search as well as Google. Or better, since Google is incentivized to do search in a way that benefits them wereas prevalent LLM search may bypass that. On the flip, for all the resources they’ve poured into their models all they’ve come up with is good models, not better search. So they’re not dead in the water yet but everyone suspects LLMs will eat search.
nextworddev 2y ago
They are literally training on all the free personal data you provided, so they owe you this much
- kristopolous 2y ago
  Given what I see in Facebook comments I'm surprised the AI doesn't just respond with "Amen. Happy Birthday" to every query. They're clearly majorly scrubbing things somehow
  - stefs 2y ago
    given what i see in facebook posts much of their content is already AI generated and thus would poison their training data well.
  - euroderf 2y ago
    In a few years (or months?) Faceborg will offer a new service "EverYou" trained on your entire Faceborg corpus. It will speak like you to others (whomever you permit) and it will like what you like (acting as a web gopher for you) and it will be able stay up late talking to tipsy you about life, the universe, and everything, and it will be... "long-term affordable".
    - kristopolous 2y ago
      facebook knows me so poorly though. I just look at the suggested posts. It's stuff like celebrity gossip, sports, and troop worshiping ai images. I've been on the platform 20 years and I've never posted about any of this stuff. I don't know who or what they're talking about. It's just a never-ending stream of stuff I have no interest in.
imjonse 2y ago
Training data is crucial for performance and they do not (cannot) share that.
isoprophlex 2y ago
They're out to fuck over the competition by killing their moat. Classic commoditize your complement.
- seydor 2y ago
  I believe the most important contribution is to show that super-funded companies don't really have a special moat: Llama is transformers, they just have the money to scale it. Many entities around the world can replicate this and it seems Meta is doing it before they do.
  - isoprophlex 2y ago
    Crocodiles, swimming in a moat filled with money, haha
cedws 2y ago
Zuckerberg probably realises the value of currying favour with engineers. Also, I think he has a personal vendetta to compete with Musk in this space.
dkga 2y ago
Fully second that.
monkfish328 2y ago
Zuckerberg has never liked having Android/iOs as gatekeepers i.e. "platforms" for his apps. He's hoping to control AI as the next platform through which users interact with apps. Free AI is then fine if the surplus value created by not having a gatekeeper to his apps exceeds the cost of the free AI. That's the strategy. No values here - just strategy folks.
- itchyjunk 2y ago
  You seem pretty confident about there being "no values here". Just because his action also lends to strategy, does not mean there are no values there. You seem to be doubling down on the sentiment by copy/pasting same comment around. You might be right. But I don't know Zuck at a personal level enough to make such strong claims, at least.
  - chairmanwow1 2y ago
    Zuck has said this very thing in multiple interviews. This is value accretive to Meta. In the same was open sourcing their data center compute designs was.
    - halJordan 2y ago
      The world doesn't exist in black and white. When you force the shades of grey to be binary your choosing force your conclusion onto the data rather take your conclusions from the data. Thats not to say there isnt a strategy or that it's all values. Its to say that youre denying Zuck any chance at values because you enjoy hating on him. Bc Zuck has also said in multiple interviews that his values do include open source and given two facts with the same level of sourcing you deny the one fact that doesn't let you be mean.
  - monkfish328 2y ago
    Fair point
- grahamj 2y ago
  Yep - give away OAI etc.’s product so the they never get big enough to control whatsinstabook. If you can’t use it to build a moat then don’t let anyone else do it either. The thing about giant companies is they never want there to be more giant companies.
fennecfoxy 2y ago
As the Google memo (https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-neither https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-ne...) pointed out, a lot of OSS stuff/improvements are being built on top of Meta's work which somewhat benefits them as well. But still, Kudos to Zuck/Meta for doing it anyway.
pjfin123 2y ago
Meta has been good about releasing their NLO work open source for a long time. Most of the open source datasets for foreign language translation were created by Facebook.
asterix_pano 2y ago
Maybe it's cynical to think that way but maybe it's a way to crush the competition before it even begins: I would probably not invest in researching LLMs now, knowing that there is a company that will very likely produce a model close enough for free and I will likely never make back the investment.
- snek_case 2y ago
  I don't think it's necessarily the small competitors that they are worried about, but they could be trying to prevent OpenAI from becoming too powerful and competing with them.

by opdahl 2y ago

nickpsecurity 2y ago

Do they tell you what training data they use for alignment? As in, what biases they intentionally put in the system they’re widely deploying?

warkdarrior 2y ago
Do you have some concrete example of biases in their models? Or are you just fishing for something to complain about?
- ericjmorey 2y ago
  Even without intentionally biasing the model, without knowing the biases that exist in the training data, they're just biased black boxes that come with the overhead of figuring out how it's biased. All data is biased, there's no avoiding that fact.
  - slt2021 2y ago
    bias is some normative lens that some people came up with, but it is purely subjective and is a social construct, that has roots in the area of social justice and has nothing to do with the LLM. the proof is that all critics of AI/LLM have never ever produced a single "unbiased" model. If unbiased model does not exist (at least I never seen an AI/LLM sceptics community produce one), then the concept of bias is useless. Just a fluffy word that does not mean anything
    - semi-extrinsic 2y ago
      If you forget about the social justice stuff for a minute, there are many other types of bias relevant for an LLM. One example is US-centric bias. If I ask the LLM a question where the answer is one thing in the US and another thing in Germany, you can't really de-bias the model. But ideally you can have it request more details in order to give a good answer.
      - Al-Khwarizmi 2y ago
        Yes, but that bias has been present in everything related to computers for decades. As someone from outside the US, it is quite common to face annoyances like address fields expecting addresses in US format, systems misbehaving and sometimes failing silently if you have two surnames, or accented characters in your personal data, etc. Years go by, tech gets better, but these issues don't go away, they just reappear in different places. It's funny how some people seem to have discovered this kind of bias and started getting angry with LLMs, which are actually quite OK in this respect. Not saying that it isn't an issue that should be addressed, just that some people are using it as an excuse to get indignant at AI and it doesn't make much sense. Just like the people who get indignant at AI because ChatGPT collects your input and uses it for training - what do they think social networks have been doing with their input in the last 20 years?
        slt2021 2y ago
        agree with you. all arguments about supposed bias fall flat when you start asking question about ROI of the "debiasing work". When you calculate $$$ required to de-bias a model, for example to make LLM recognize Syrian phone numbers: in compute and labor, and compare it to the market opportunity than the ROI is simply not there. There is a good reason why LLMs are English-specific - because it is the largest market with biggest number of highest paying users for such LLM. If there is no market demand in "de-biased" model that covers the cost of development, then trying to spend $$$ on de-biasing is pure waste of resources
      - slt2021 2y ago
        What you call bias, I call simply a representation of a training corpus. There is no broad agreement on how to quantify a bias of the model, other than try one-shot prompts like your "who is the most hated Austrian painter?". If there was no Germany-specific data in the training corpus - it is not fair to expect LLM to know anything about Germany. You can check a foundation model from Chinese LLM researchers, and you will most likely see Sino-centric bias just because of the training corpus + synthetic data generation was focused on their native/working language, and their goal was to create foundation model for their language. I challenge any LLM sceptics - instead of just lazily poking holes in models - create a supposedly better model that reduces bias and lets evaluate your model with specific metrics
- nickpsecurity 2y ago
  Google’s and OpenAI often answered far-left, Progressive, and atheist. Google’s was censoring white people at one point. Facebook seems to espouse similar values. They’ve funded work to increase those values. Many mention topics relevant to these things in their papers in the bias or alignment sections. These political systems don’t represent the majority of the world. They might not even represent half the U.S.. People relying on these A.I.’s might want to know if the A.I.’s are being intentionally trained to promote their creators’ views and/or suppress dissenters’ views. Also, people from multiple sides of the political spectrum should review such data to make sure it’s balanced.
  - mistrial9 2y ago
    this provocative parent-post may or may not be accurate, but what is missing IMHO is any characterization of the question asked or other context of use.. lacking that basic part to the inquiry, this statement alone is clearly amateurish, zealous and as said, provocative. Fighting in words is too easy! like falling off a log, as they say.. in politics it is almost unavoidable. Please, not start fires. All that said yes, there are legitimate questions and there is social context. This forum is worth better questions.
    - nickpsecurity 2y ago
      I don’t have time to reproduce them. Fortunately, it’s easy for them to show how open and fair they are by publishing all training data. They could also publish the unaligned version or allow 3rd-party alignment. Instead, they’re keeping it secret. That’s to conceal wrongdoing. Copyright infringement more than politics but still.
    - sunaookami 2y ago
      >This forum is worth better questions That's not for you to decide if some question is "worth". At least for OpenAI and Anthropic it is a fact that these models are pre-censored by the US government: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/08/29/openai-and-anthropic-agree-to-let-us-ai-safety-institute-test-models.html https://www.cnbc.com/2024/08/29/openai-and-anthropic-agree-t...
  - 2y ago
- troupo 2y ago
  The concrete example is that Meta opted everyone on their platform by default into providing content for their models without any consent. The source and the quality of training data is important without looking for specific examples of a bias.
- boppo1 2y ago
  Whenever I try to BDSM ERP with llama it changes subject to sappy stuff about how 'everyone involved lived happily ever after'. It probably wouldn't be appropriate to post here. Definitely has some biases though.

thefourthchime 2y ago

They have a hose of ad money and have nothing to lose doing this. You can’t say that for the other guys.

talldayo 2y ago
I can absolutely say that about Google and Apple.
- doubtfuluser 2y ago
  For Apple - maybe, but they also recently open sourced some of their models. For Google: they host and want to make money on the models by you using them on their platform. Meta has no interest in that but directly benefits from advancements on top of Llama.
yunwal 2y ago
> They have a hose of ad money and have nothing to lose doing this. If I didn’t have context I’d assume this was about Google.
- KeplerBoy 2y ago
  But Google has everything to lose doing this. LLMs are a threat to their most viable revenue stream.
  - phkahler 2y ago
    >> But Google has everything to lose doing this. LLMs are a threat to their most viable revenue stream. Just to nit pick... Advertising is their revenue stream. LLMs are a threat to search, which is what they offer people in exchange for ad views/clicks.
    - grahamj 2y ago
      To nit pick even more: LLMs democratize search. They’re a threat to Google because they may allow anyone to do search as well as Google. Or better, since Google is incentivized to do search in a way that benefits them wereas prevalent LLM search may bypass that. On the flip, for all the resources they’ve poured into their models all they’ve come up with is good models, not better search. So they’re not dead in the water yet but everyone suspects LLMs will eat search.

nextworddev 2y ago

They are literally training on all the free personal data you provided, so they owe you this much

kristopolous 2y ago
Given what I see in Facebook comments I'm surprised the AI doesn't just respond with "Amen. Happy Birthday" to every query. They're clearly majorly scrubbing things somehow
- stefs 2y ago
  given what i see in facebook posts much of their content is already AI generated and thus would poison their training data well.
- euroderf 2y ago
  In a few years (or months?) Faceborg will offer a new service "EverYou" trained on your entire Faceborg corpus. It will speak like you to others (whomever you permit) and it will like what you like (acting as a web gopher for you) and it will be able stay up late talking to tipsy you about life, the universe, and everything, and it will be... "long-term affordable".
  - kristopolous 2y ago
    facebook knows me so poorly though. I just look at the suggested posts. It's stuff like celebrity gossip, sports, and troop worshiping ai images. I've been on the platform 20 years and I've never posted about any of this stuff. I don't know who or what they're talking about. It's just a never-ending stream of stuff I have no interest in.

imjonse 2y ago

Training data is crucial for performance and they do not (cannot) share that.

isoprophlex 2y ago

They're out to fuck over the competition by killing their moat. Classic commoditize your complement.

seydor 2y ago
I believe the most important contribution is to show that super-funded companies don't really have a special moat: Llama is transformers, they just have the money to scale it. Many entities around the world can replicate this and it seems Meta is doing it before they do.
- isoprophlex 2y ago
  Crocodiles, swimming in a moat filled with money, haha

cedws 2y ago

Zuckerberg probably realises the value of currying favour with engineers. Also, I think he has a personal vendetta to compete with Musk in this space.

dkga 2y ago

Fully second that.

monkfish328 2y ago

Zuckerberg has never liked having Android/iOs as gatekeepers i.e. "platforms" for his apps. He's hoping to control AI as the next platform through which users interact with apps. Free AI is then fine if the surplus value created by not having a gatekeeper to his apps exceeds the cost of the free AI. That's the strategy. No values here - just strategy folks.

itchyjunk 2y ago
You seem pretty confident about there being "no values here". Just because his action also lends to strategy, does not mean there are no values there. You seem to be doubling down on the sentiment by copy/pasting same comment around. You might be right. But I don't know Zuck at a personal level enough to make such strong claims, at least.
- chairmanwow1 2y ago
  Zuck has said this very thing in multiple interviews. This is value accretive to Meta. In the same was open sourcing their data center compute designs was.
  - halJordan 2y ago
    The world doesn't exist in black and white. When you force the shades of grey to be binary your choosing force your conclusion onto the data rather take your conclusions from the data. Thats not to say there isnt a strategy or that it's all values. Its to say that youre denying Zuck any chance at values because you enjoy hating on him. Bc Zuck has also said in multiple interviews that his values do include open source and given two facts with the same level of sourcing you deny the one fact that doesn't let you be mean.
- monkfish328 2y ago
  Fair point
grahamj 2y ago
Yep - give away OAI etc.’s product so the they never get big enough to control whatsinstabook. If you can’t use it to build a moat then don’t let anyone else do it either. The thing about giant companies is they never want there to be more giant companies.

fennecfoxy 2y ago

As the Google memo (https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-neither https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-ne...) pointed out, a lot of OSS stuff/improvements are being built on top of Meta's work which somewhat benefits them as well. But still, Kudos to Zuck/Meta for doing it anyway.

pjfin123 2y ago

Meta has been good about releasing their NLO work open source for a long time. Most of the open source datasets for foreign language translation were created by Facebook.

asterix_pano 2y ago

Maybe it's cynical to think that way but maybe it's a way to crush the competition before it even begins: I would probably not invest in researching LLMs now, knowing that there is a company that will very likely produce a model close enough for free and I will likely never make back the investment.

snek_case 2y ago
I don't think it's necessarily the small competitors that they are worried about, but they could be trying to prevent OpenAI from becoming too powerful and competing with them.