Meta’s new artificial intelligence system and the hidden activities of Chinese social networks
News: Meta is going all in on open source AI. The company introduced LLaMA 2, its first major language model, available to everyone – for free. It’s also releasing a version of the AI model that people can build into ChatGPT-style chatbots.
Why it matters: The idea is that by releasing the model into the wild and letting developers and companies tinker with it, Meta will learn important lessons about how to make their models safer, less biased, and more efficient.
But… Many reservations still remain. Meta does not release information about the data set it used to train LLaMA 2, and it still produces offensive, harmful, and problematic expressions just like competing models. Meta also cannot guarantee that it did not contain copyrighted works or personal data, according to the company’s research paper, which was provided exclusively to MIT Technology Review. Read the story in its entirety.
— by Melissa Haykill
Identifying the social media accounts of Chinese state media is still a challenge
It’s no secret that Chinese state media actively work on Western social platforms. But sometimes they take a stealthy approach and distance themselves from China, perhaps to reach a more unsuspecting audience.
In the past, such operations have been found to target Chinese- and English-speaking users. Now, research published last week has uncovered yet another network of Twitter accounts that appear to be hiding ties to China, and this time it’s made up of Spanish-language news accounts focused on Latin America. Read the story in its entirety.
— Zei Yang
