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by aww_dang 1303 days ago
I don't understand why they would market it as a source of accurate text or some kind of oracle. Language models are useful for generating text. Believable or entertaining works of fiction.

The extra parts about truthiness and the dangers of misinformation were just too much for me. We have a bigger problem with our premises and status quo if inaccurate scientific papers are a danger.
1 comments
seydor 1303 days ago
> they would market it as a source of accurate text

They did not. IIRC there was a disclaimer in the page that the text is innacurate and that NNs hallucinate. But tweets be tweeting

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tsimionescu 1303 days ago
They did market it as that, and then added a disclaimer amounting to "but it's not fit for purpose". Furthermore, that disclaimer was only present on the Mission page, not the front page or any other.

The front page just said this [0]:

> Get Started

> Galactica is an AI trained on humanity's scientific knowledge. You can use it as a new interface to access and manipulate what we know about the universe.

> [bunch of example prompts, including generating a wiki page or answering a factual question]

The Explore page went into even more detail of how you can use it to access scientific knowledge. Then, if you look on the Mission page, you are again presented with the same haughty notion (Galactica is meant to give easy access to the world's scientific literature), only here you also see the Limitations, which basically amount to "but don't trust the output, especially for more obscure topics".

So we were given a service whose main goal is to summarize and present existing scientific knowledge, with citations and everything, except that we shouldn't trust any of the output to actually reflect the scientific literature. But hey, if it's a popular topic, it'll probably be closer to correct!

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20221115165109mp_/https://galact...

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seydor 1303 days ago
I don't understand why you assume that what you describe is either unacceptable or not worthy of existing on the net. Sounds like a perfectly useful instrument to me

(Also I may be wrong but i think the disclaimer was in articles. I don't recall visiting the mission page ever)

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tsimionescu 1303 days ago
I'm not necessarily saying it should have been taken down. I'm only commenting on how it was marketed, what purposes it was presented to serve. I particularly dislike this trend of creating an interesting LM but then presenting in a way that almost suggests you are getting closer to AGI, which is how I perceive some of the claims around Galactica (and GPT-3 before it).
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