US Senators Richard Blumenthal and Josh Hawley are seeking explanations from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg concerning the release of the firm’s large language Model LLaMA. The open-source model was released for download in February. Almost immediately, the entire model was leaked on BitTorrent, leading to concerns about its potential misuse. In a letter to Zuckerberg, Blumenthal and Hawley criticised the lack of protections placed on LLAMA’s release and called for information regarding ways in which the risks of abuse were assessed.
The letter, sent by the Senate Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law, suggests that the “open dissemination of LLaMA represents a significant increase in the sophistication of the AI models available to the general public”. It also calls into question the use of the term “leak” to describe the model’s release.
Meta has been regarded as an especially “open” tech company, thanks partly to the Fundamental AI Research Team led by Yann LeCun. The team had made the model weights of LLaMA available on a case-by-case basis to researchers and academics. However, those weights were eventually leaked on 4chan, allowing developers to fully access a GPT-level LLM for commercial use.
Meta’s vice-president of AI research, Joelle Pineau, has argued that accountability and transparency are essential in AI models. She said that the Alpaca project instituted “gated access”, with Meta allowing the LLaMA weights to be used by academic researchers who fine-tuned the weights to make it slightly different.
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