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. There is a large body of research that highlights the
flaws of this technology, including its tendencies to
reproduce prejudice and assert falsehoods as facts.
Galactica is a large language model for science, trained on 48 million examples of scientific articles, websites, textbooks, lecture notes, and encyclopedias. Meta promoted its model as a shortcut for researchers and students. In the company’s words, Galactica “can summarize academic papers, solve math problems, generate Wiki articles, write scientific code, annotate molecules and proteins, and more.”
But the shiny veneer wore through fast. Like all language models, Galactica is a mindless bot that cannot tell fact from fiction. Within hours, scientists were sharing its biased and incorrect results on social media.
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