On November 15 Meta unveiled a new large language model called Galactica, designed to assist scientists. But instead of landing with the big bang Meta hoped for, Galactica has died with a whimper after three days of intense criticism. Yesterday the company took down the public demo that it had encouraged everyone to try out. [...] Meta's misstep -- and its hubris -- show once again that Big Tech has a blind spot about the severe limitations of large language models.
Curated from technologyreview.com · 18 November 2022 →
Galactica was trained on 48 million papers and offered as a way to summarise literature, write scientific code and draft articles. Within hours people were producing papers with citations that do not exist, wiki entries for compounds that do not exist, and a history of bears in space, all in the register of a journal. Meta pulled the public demo on 17 November 2022. ChatGPT was released two weeks later to a very different reception, which is what makes Galactica worth remembering: the failure mode was identical, and what differed was the claim made for it. Galactica was offered as a way to get scientific facts, and a system that is fluent about everything cannot be that.
