Meta’s Llama 3 appears to be coming our way in July, and there is some interesting information about how they’re thinking differently about it. We’ve gotten some interesting information about Llama 3 in the last couple of months. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has talked about it a little bit more. Some of the things that he mentioned were that they underestimated how important coding was not just to the utility of an LLM for a medical user community but just for the sheer act of reasoning for how smart an LLM was. He also discussed how while Llama 1 and Llama 2 were leaders in the open-source LLM space, they really wanted Llama 3 to be state-of-the-art in general.
LLama 3 LLM Capabilities
Well now, we’ve heard some new things courtesy of the information they recently published. Meta wants Llama-3 LLM to handle contentious questions as Google grapples with Gemini backlash. According to the information, the safeguards that are currently on Llama 2 have made it too “safe” in the perception of Meta’s senior leaders, as well as among researchers who work on the model. By way of describing the difference between a reasonably safe query to block and perhaps a little bit more questionable one, the information pointed out there was a big difference between not answering how to make a bomb versus how a worker could get around coming into the office on a mandatory in-office day.
The information says, of course, as you might expect, that Meta’s conservative approach with Llama 2 was a PR-related strategy; they didn’t want to deal with PR-related issues. They’re now trying to get a little bit smarter about how they handle these things, for example, not just shutting down around certain words but trying to get better context. If someone asks how to kill a vehicle’s engine, Llama 3 should be able to figure out that they’re asking about shutting an engine off, not a type of murder. Of course, the context for all of this is the backlash that we’ve been following around Gemini and its production of historically inaccurate images, such as adding people of color to Nazi uniforms and more historical inaccuracies like that.
LLama vs GPT
I, of course, have no idea how long this perception of Llama 2 being too safe has been going on inside the company. What I do know is that what Zuckerberg has shown when it comes to AI strategy is that he is very comfortable bobbing when others weave. Meta, for example, would not necessarily be the big tech company you most expected to go open source, and yet that is where they planted their generative AI flag. Part of that, I think, had to do with OpenAI and Microsoft going in the opposite direction. Even if it was ideological on some level, it was also opportunistic. Is getting Llama 3 more open to answering tricky questions another example of that? It certainly seems possible.
Whatever the case, the information piece also reinforces that Llama 3 is a very big deal. They wanted to match the performance of GPT-4, although these reports say that they haven’t decided whether it will be multimodal yet. And of course, even if it does match GPT-4, another question will be by the time July rolls around, will we all be using GPT-5? Still, interesting details that show Meta’s continuing evolution in their role in the space and something to watch for sure.
LLama 3 Competitors
Speaking of OpenAI, we shift now to another set of lawsuits around OpenAI and copyright. The Intercept, Raw Story, and Alternet have all filed separate lawsuits against both OpenAI and Microsoft, although they’re all being handled by the same law firm. They claim that ChatGPT, “at least some of the time, reproduces verbatim or nearly verbatim copyright-protected works of journalism without providing author, title, copyright, or terms of use information contained in those works.” The Raw Story and Alternet lawsuit go even further, alleging that OpenAI and Microsoft “had reason to know that ChatGPT would be less popular and generate less revenue if users believed that ChatGPT responses violated third-party copyrights.” These lawsuits are basically saying that OpenAI and Microsoft were aware of potential copyright infringement and point to evidence like OpenAI’s opt-out system that gives website owners the ability to block content from OpenAI web crawlers.
Interestingly, at the same time this is happening, OpenAI has filed to dismiss parts of the New York Times lawsuit. On Monday, they filed an argument that ChatGPT is “not in any way a substitution for a subscription to the New York Times.” The filing said, “In the real world, people do not use ChatGPT or any other OpenAI product for that purpose, nor could they in the ordinary course. One cannot use ChatGPT to serve up Times articles at will.” Indeed, OpenAI alleges that the New York Times went out of their way to “hack” the ChatGPT system to produce evidence that looks worse for OpenAI.
OpenAI
There was also one more lawsuit filed against OpenAI this week. A Florida woman filed a lawsuit in California calling for a shutdown of the site, which basically is a litany of AI safety arguments, including some of the most extreme. Lawyers for the plaintiffs wrote, “Technological safety measures must be added to the products that will prevent the technology from surpassing human intelligence and harming others.” The lawyers argued that the Microsoft $10 billion investment represents a 180-degree shift from OpenAI’s original mission, and OpenAI is “prioritizing short-term financial gains over long-term safety and ethical considerations.”
Meanwhile, OpenAI’s main partner, Microsoft, keeps on pumping out the jams. Their latest offering is that a new customized co-pilot for finance teams is now on offer. Reuters writes, “Microsoft previewed an artificial intelligence tool for customers’ finance departments, part of a strategy tailoring new software to industry professionals, and ultimately individuals.” The new tool is, of course, called Microsoft Co-Pilot for Finance and is specifically optimized for reviewing data sets, producing reports from raw numbers, and other finance department functions like that. This is not the first function-specific co-pilot app we’ve seen. Microsoft has also announced tools for salespeople as well as customer service representatives.
Apple
Over in Apple land, there has been much discussion about their AI strategy in the wake of reports that they had canceled their multi-billion-dollar electric car project and shifted many of those resources over to AI. But a shareholder proposal to require Apple to disclose how it was using AI in its operations and any sort of guidelines that it was creating has been rejected at their annual shareholders meeting. Still, it’s quite clear that the market really wants to know what Apple’s plans with AI are.
CEO Tim Cook, for example, reiterated that they will announce progress on generative AI later this year. It’s widely anticipated that we will start to see generative AI come to the Apple ecosystem in a big way, a little bit at the Worldwide Developer Conference in the summer and a lot around iOS 18 in the fall. Internet denizens, however, like Jason Calacanis, are starting to notice subtle features that are already finding their way into iOS updates that point towards Apple’s AI future.
Between Meta moves, Microsoft, Apple, it is going to be a very competitive year in the world of AI. So, strap in and subscribe to make sure you don’t miss a thing. That’s going to do it for today’s AI Breakdown Brief. Up next, the main AI breakdown.
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