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Meta AI logo is seen in this illustration taken on Sept. 28, 2023.
How to train your AI — without humans
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has prided itself on releasing innovative open-source models as an alternative to the proprietary — or closed-source — models of OpenAI, Anthropic, and other leading AI developers. Now, it claims one of its newest models can evaluate other AI models. (That really is meta.)
Researchers at Meta’s Fundamental AI Research – yep, they call it their FAIR team – detailed their work on what they’re calling a “self-taught evaluator” in an August white paper ahead of the new model’s launch. The researchers sought to train an AI to evaluate models based not on human preference but on synthetic data. In short, Meta is trying to develop an AI model that can evaluate and improve itself without reliance on humans.
This could push AI to a place where it can sense its own imperfections and improve without being told to do so — a greater level of autonomy. Dystopian? Maybe.
AI needs expert tips
Artificial intelligence systems are trained on massive troves of data — but it could use some expert advice. After all, not all data is created equal.
Take the written word: There’s a difference between training on tweets, New York Times articles, classic literature, Wikipedia entries, and academic journals.
AI companies seem to be missing the good stuff, essentially, the expertise. But expertise is often proprietary, sold by companies or behind tight paywalls, and isn’t easy to scrape up for training. One company called Gretel told Fast Company that its platform can be used to anonymize expert data so it can be sold to AI firms.
We’ve already seen a land grab for high-quality training data with AI firms trying to sign licensing deals with news publishers, though some have opted for copyright litigation rather than taking the money. Could we see an AI company buy up a news publisher, or a social media site, or even a publishing house? Facebook parent company Meta reportedly explored buying the publishing giant Simon & Schuster to train its AI systems. A similar acquisition might not be too far in the future.