Items tagged facebook in 2023
Filters: Year: 2023 × facebook × Sorted by date
Facebook Is Being Overrun With Stolen, AI-Generated Images That People Think Are Real. Excellent investigative piece by Jason Koebler digging into the concerning trend of Facebook engagement farming accounts who take popular aspirational images and use generative AI to recreate hundreds of variants of them, which then gather hundreds of comments from people who have no idea that the images are fake. # 19th December 2023, 2:01 am
Meta/Threads Interoperating in the Fediverse Data Dialogue Meeting yesterday. Johannes Ernst reports from a recent meeting hosted by Meta aimed at bringing together staff from Meta’s Threads social media platform with representatives from the Fediverse.
Meta have previously announced an intention for Threads to join the Fediverse. It sounds like they’re being extremely thoughtful about how to go about this.
Two points that stood out for me:
“Rolling out a large node – like Threads will be – in a complex, distributed system that’s as decentralized and heterogeneous as the Fediverse is not something anybody really has done before.”
And:
“When we think of privacy risks when Meta connects to the Fediverse, we usually think of what happens to data that moves from today’s Fediverse into Meta. I didn’t realize the opposite is also quite a challenge (personal data posted to Threads, making its way into the Fediverse) for an organization as heavily monitored by regulators around the world as is Meta.” # 12th December 2023, 1:05 am
Announcing Purple Llama: Towards open trust and safety in the new world of generative AI (via) New from Meta AI, Purple Llama is “an umbrella project featuring open trust and safety tools and evaluations meant to level the playing field for developers to responsibly deploy generative AI models and experiences”.
There are three components: a 27 page “Responsible Use Guide”, a new open model called Llama Guard and CyberSec Eval, “a set of cybersecurity safety evaluations benchmarks for LLMs”.
Disappointingly, despite this being an initiative around trustworthy LLM development,prompt injection is mentioned exactly once, in the Responsible Use Guide, with an incorrect description describing it as involving “attempts to circumvent content restrictions”!
The Llama Guard model is interesting: it’s a fine-tune of Llama 2 7B designed to help spot “toxic” content in input or output from a model, effectively an openly released alternative to OpenAI’s moderation API endpoint.
The CyberSec Eval benchmarks focus on two concepts: generation of insecure code, and preventing models from assisting attackers from generating new attacks. I don’t think either of those are anywhere near as important as prompt injection mitigation.
My hunch is that the reason prompt injection didn’t get much coverage in this is that, like the rest of us, Meta’s AI research teams have no idea how to fix it yet! # 8th December 2023, 6:36 am
Seamless Communication (via) A new “family of AI research models” from Meta AI for speech and text translation. The live demo is particularly worth trying—you can record a short webcam video of yourself speaking and get back the same video with your speech translated into another language.
The key to it is the new SeamlessM4T v2 model, which supports 101 languages for speech input, 96 Languages for text input/output and 35 languages for speech output. SeamlessM4T-Large v2 is a 9GB file, available on Hugging Face.
Also in this release: SeamlessExpressive, which “captures certain underexplored aspects of prosody such as speech rate and pauses”—effectively maintaining things like expressed enthusiasm across languages.
Plus SeamlessStreaming, “a model that can deliver speech and text translations with around two seconds of latency”. # 1st December 2023, 5:01 pm
[On Meta’s Galactica LLM launch] We did this with a 8 person team which is an order of magnitude fewer people than other LLM teams at the time.
We were overstretched and lost situational awareness at launch by releasing demo of a *base model* without checks. We were aware of what potential criticisms would be, but we lost sight of the obvious in the workload we were under.
One of the considerations for a demo was we wanted to understand the distribution of scientific queries that people would use for LLMs (useful for instruction tuning and RLHF). Obviously this was a free goal we gave to journalists who instead queried it outside its domain. But yes we should have known better.
We had a “good faith” assumption that we’d share the base model, warts and all, with four disclaimers about hallucinations on the demo—so people could see what it could do (openness). Again, obviously this didn’t work.
— Ross Taylor # 15th November 2023, 1:15 am
I’m banned for life from advertising on Meta. Because I teach Python. (via) If accurate, this describes a nightmare scenario of automated decision making.
Reuven recently found he had a permanent ban from advertising on Facebook. They won’t tell him exactly why, and have marked this as a final decision that can never be reviewed.
His best theory (impossible for him to confirm) is that it’s because he tried advertising a course on Python and Pandas a few years ago which was blocked because a dumb algorithm thought he was trading exotic animals!
The worst part? An appeal is no longer possible because relevant data is only retained for 180 days and so all of the related evidence has now been deleted.
Various comments on Hacker News from people familiar with these systems confirm that this story likely holds up. # 19th October 2023, 2:56 pm
Meta in Myanmar, Part I: The Setup. The first in a series by Erin Kissane explaining in detail exactly how things went so incredibly wrong with Facebook in Myanmar, contributing to a genocide ending hundreds of thousands of lives. This is an extremely tough read. # 30th September 2023, 2:27 am
MMS Language Coverage in Datasette Lite. I converted the HTML table of 4,021 languages supported by Meta’s new Massively Multilingual Speech models to newline-delimited JSON and loaded it into Datasette Lite. Faceting by Language Family is particularly interesting—the top five families represented are Niger-Congo with 1,019, Austronesian with 609, Sino-Tibetan with 288, Indo-European with 278 and Afro-Asiatic with 222. # 22nd May 2023, 8:01 pm
Introducing speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and more for 1,100+ languages (via) New from Meta AI: Massively Multilingual Speech. “MMS supports speech-to-text and text-to-speech for 1,107 languages and language identification for over 4,000 languages. [...] Some of these, such as the Tatuyo language, have only a few hundred speakers, and for most of these languages, no prior speech technology exists.”
It’s licensed CC-BY-NC 4.0 though, so it’s not available for commercial use.
“In a like-for-like comparison with OpenAI’s Whisper, we found that models trained on the Massively Multilingual Speech data achieve half the word error rate, but Massively Multilingual Speech covers 11 times more languages.”
The training data was mostly sourced from audio Bible translations. # 22nd May 2023, 7:22 pm
ImageBind. New model release from Facebook/Meta AI research: “An approach to learn a joint embedding across six different modalities—images, text, audio, depth, thermal, and IMU (inertial measurement units) data”. The non-interactive demo shows searching audio starting with an image, searching images starting with audio, using text to retrieve images and audio, using image and audio to retrieve images (e.g. a barking sound and a photo of a beach to get dogs on a beach) and using audio as input to an image generator. # 9th May 2023, 7:04 pm
Large language models are having their Stable Diffusion moment
The open release of the Stable Diffusion image generation model back in August 2022 was a key moment. I wrote how Stable Diffusion is a really big deal at the time.
[... 1810 words]Running LLaMA 7B on a 64GB M2 MacBook Pro with llama.cpp. I got Facebook’s LLaMA 7B to run on my MacBook Pro using llama.cpp (a “port of Facebook’s LLaMA model in C/C++”) by Georgi Gerganov. It works! I’ve been hoping to run a GPT-3 class language model on my own hardware for ages, and now it’s possible to do exactly that. The model itself ends up being just 4GB after applying Georgi’s script to “quantize the model to 4-bits”. # 11th March 2023, 4:19 am
Introducing LLaMA: A foundational, 65-billion-parameter large language model (via) From the paper: “For instance, LLaMA-13B outperforms GPT-3 on most benchmarks, despite being 10× smaller. We believe that this model will help democratize the access and study of LLMs, since it can be run on a single GPU.” # 24th February 2023, 5:34 pm