I studied machine learning at NYU, and from interacting with Yann LeCun, I can say he’s actually a nice guy. Yes, his tweet is grumpy. I still feel as if the implication that Galactica should have been taken down was the worse thing happening here.

I read the MIT Technology Review article, and I was asking myself “what is an example of Galactica making a mistake?” The article could easily have quoted a specific prompt, but doesn’t. It says the model makes mistakes in terms of understanding what’s real/correct or not, but the only concrete example I see in the article is that the model will write about the history of bears in space with the implication that it’s making things up (and I believe the model does make such mistakes). I don’t think it’s a good article because it’s heavy on quoting people who don’t like the work and light on concrete details.

Does the imperfection of a language model really mean the model should not exist? This seems to be what some critics are aiming for.