I was quoted in an article about the French Lucie AI in La Presse. While I love the name for obvious reasons 👀 there were still a lot of problems with the model and how and when it was deployed. Nevertheless seeing new smaller models being developed is an exciting direction for the next years of AI development to come!
Seeing AI develop has been a wild ride, from trying to explain why we'd bother to generate a single sentence with a *neural network* to explaining that AI is not a magic, all-knowing box. The recent weeks and months have been a lot of talking about how AI works; to policy makers, to other developers, but also and mainly friends and family without a technical background.
Yesterday, the first provisions of the EU AI Act came into force, and one of the the key highlights are the AI literacy requirements for organisations deploying AI systems. This isn't just a box-ticking exercise. Ensuring that employees and stakeholders understand AI systems is crucial for fostering responsible and transparent AI development. From recognising biases to understanding model limitations, AI literacy empowers individuals to engage critically with these technologies and make informed decisions.
In the context of Hugging Face, AI literacy has many facets: allowing more people to contribute to AI development, providing courses and documentation to ensuring access is possible, and accessible AI tools that empower users to better understand how AI systems function. This isn't just a regulatory milestone; it’s an opportunity to foster a culture where AI literacy becomes foundational, enabling stakeholders to recognise biases, assess model limitations, and engage critically with technology.
Embedding these principles into daily practice, and eventually extending our learnings in AI literacy to the general public, is essential for building trustworthy AI that aligns with societal values.
Anthropic publishes the ‘system prompts’ that make Claude tick - "In its continued effort to paint itself as a more ethical, transparent AI vendor, Anthropic has published the system prompts for its latest models" - They specify that “Claude cannot open URLs, links, or videos, perform facial recognition or identify or name any humans in photos. - "Anthropic is exerting pressure on competitors to publish the same. We’ll have to see if the gambit works." https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/26/anthropic-publishes-the-system-prompt-that-makes-claude-tick/
China’s tech giants splash out on AI despite US restrictions (paywall) - "Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu had combined capital expenditure of Rmb50bn ($7bn) in the first half, compared with Rmb23bn a year earlier. TikTok parent ByteDance (which is private) has also increased AI-related spending" - Nvidia's H100 and upcoming Blackwell series are under US restrictions, but China’s tech giants can buy H20 - Analysts expect Nvidia to ship more than 1mn of the processors to Chinese tech groups in the coming months. https://www.ft.com/content/31bffc48-2ca7-472b-9d53-3deaad2d86ce
MZ "said it was improper for the Biden administration to have pressured Facebook to censor content in 2021 related to the coronavirus pandemic" - "At the time, Facebook’s publicly stated goal was to push millions of people toward Covid-19 vaccines. In his letter, Zuckerberg didn’t indicate whether he had changed his mind about that goal" https://www.wsj.com/tech/mark-zuckerberg-neutral-politics-letter-election-2024-02b86372
Wikimedia and Hugging Face seem kind of naturally complementary: Both are community-centred, value openness and consent. That's why I'd love to see more Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects' datasets on Hugging Face to advance machine learning with diverse, community-curated data! See my new article on the Hugging Face hub for why and how to create more Wikimedia datasets on Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/blog/frimelle/wikipedias-treasure-trove-ml-data
